Can books survive iPublishing?

Brian Till

Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Book publishers thought they had dodged the fiber-optic bullet. While newspapers and magazines have twisted and withered in the digital winter, book sales — though by no means skyrocketing — have fared much better. But that might end come September. In 2010 the e-book may finally hit stride.

In 2008 publishers sold about 3.08 billion volumes, down from 3.13 billion in 2007. Nonetheless, even in a recessionary year, revenues rose from $39.9 billion to $40.03 billion. E-books, for their part, generated $113 million in 2008, up from $105 million the previous years.

In the past week, though, Web junkies and CNET nerds have gone wild with speculation about Apple’s newest conquest. So far, Amazon has been the only company to wade somewhat successfully into the swamp of the e-book devices. But the Kindle, a flat silver panel slightly smaller than a legal pad, hasn’t mustered the revolution some thought it might.

The Kindle was nerve-racking for publishers, but never cool enough to pose a serious threat. The technology was weak and the device somewhat chintzy; I laid my hands on one only long enough to push it away. The Sony Reader was similarly disappointing in price and features. Thank you, no, I’ll stick with the ink and page any day of the week.

But the pair showed the tech industry what it needed to see: that people are willing to read entire volumes on a digital screen, provided the screen isn’t so bright, the page has the right size and look, and they can curl up with it in all the various ways they love to while reading.

The technology to do away with paper and spine has existed for years, but nobody’s been able to build something cool enough to usurp the stage.

Enter Apple Inc. The company already killed the CD player and the handheld organizer. And Apple revolutionized the cell phone and made computers more stylish than anyone imagined possible. But its greatest slaying might still be a few months away.

The Netbook tablet is believed to be similar to a larger iPhone or iPod Touch, purportedly with a 10-inch screen. It will remain a touch-screen surface, and it will be able to do far more than a Kindle or any other competitor. It’s expected to interface with the iTunes system, making it a full-fledged music device, and will likely carry more features than either of its little brothers, meaning: calendar, Wi-Fi capability, Web browser, game downloads and more than 15,000 other applications that can be downloaded from the apps store for iPhones.

And, of course, it’s expected to serve as a mobile reading device, to which one can download dozens of books and any number of newspapers.

The larger issue at hand involves cash rather than the medium. Though publishers — like many of us — will have a nostalgic yearning for the look and feel of hardcover copy, the bigger concern is what it will mean for revenue.

In the digital era, creative content has dashed toward free. Newspapers are available free; music is nearly free; most magazines put the entirety of their content on the Web for ... free. Books remain the last vestige of paying public literacy.

E-books tend to cost roughly a third of what a hardcover edition would run, meaning digitizing more than simply offsets printing expenses, and cuts into other costs of production. The great fear is that books, once digitized, will be too difficult to control and will move about the Web as music now does, with a fraction of consumers paying for content.

ITunes has managed to recover some of the lost revenue created by the music-downloading revolution. As of January, the store had sold more than 6 billion songs, most of them at 99 cents apiece. But authors and novelists, unlike artists who make the bulk of their money touring, have only book sales to fill their pockets — most can’t afford a fractional share of what they’ve earned.

I don’t propose that books will vanish, only that they’ll become a much more academic endeavor. Books will become a far more enchanted, classic medium. Self-help texts and sultry novels — the ones readers usually strip the covers off anyhow — will be the fodder of the digital-book era.

But there is one other piece of good news for the publishing world: If they survive this siege, then they know they’re as good as golden for decades to come. For once, I think I’ll be lined up to defend against the Apple siege.

Brian Till, a columnist for Creators Syndicate, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.