Not just a few things, but everything about the book and the book business is transformed by the end of paper. Those that would prefer to deny this obvious truth are going to find the business they love disappear over the next five years.
The book itself is changed. I'm putting the finishing touches on a manifesto I hope to share soon, and I found myself writing differently because I understood that the medium that was going to be used to acquire, consume and share the book was different.
The first change in the creation of the ebook is that there is no appropriate length. Print books are bounded on two sides - they can't be too short, because there's a minimum price that a bookseller needs to charge to make it worth stocking. At the same time, a book can't be too long or ornate, because there's also a maximum price that readers are willing to pay (and a maximum weight we're willing to haul around).
None of these boundaries exist in ebooks. As a result, we get blog posts, (which are a form of writing that was virtually unknown ten years ago–personal, short, helpful non-fiction that's serialized over time), 1000 page zombie novels, beautifully illustrated and interactive apps and everything in between.
[Aside: how come we don't call blog posts, "really short, free, ebooks"? I'm not being facetious - what makes something a book? The length? The paper? The money? I don't think we know yet.]
We've gone from a very simple taxonomy of classifying (and thus creating) the thing we call a book to one that's wide open and undetermined. This is unsettling to anyone in the media business–we know how long a movie is supposed to be, how much music goes on a record, etc. And now, because the wrapper is changed, so is the product.
The second change is that ebooks connect. Not so much on the Kindle platform (yet) but certainly in PDF and HTML, we see that it's almost an insult to the reader to create a non-fiction ebook that fails to include links to other voices and useful sources. Not only are the links there, but the writer needs to expect that the reader will actually click on them. A little like being a playwright while knowing that in the middle of the performance, the audience may very well pick up the phone and chat or tweet or surf based on what's going on onstage.
Beyond these two elements of what makes a book a book, there's a fundamental change in the way ebooks are being consumed. Paper meant that a book was very much a considered purchase - more expensive, more time consuming, involving shipping or shlepping, together with long-term storage. With a ninety-nine cent ebook (or, as is the majority–if we count the web, with a free one), not only is the purchase an impulse act, but the number of titles consumed is going to skyrocket.
The consumption of free (or nearly free) ebooks is more like browsing through a bookstore or library and less like purchasing and owning a book. As a result, there will be significantly more unread titles, abandoned in mid-sentence. Think blogs, not Harry Potter.
As soon as paper goes away, so do the chokepoints that created scarcity. Certainly we're already seeing this with the infinite shelf space offered by the digital bookstore. Hard for the layperson to understand, but for decades, the single biggest benefit a publisher offered the independent writer was the ability to get the book onto the shelves of the local store.
The entire sales organization at the publisher (amplified by the publicity department and the folks who do cover design and acquisition) is first and foremost organized around getting more than its fair share of shelf space. When my mom ran the bookstore at the museum in Buffalo, there were sales reps in her store every single day. And of course, for every book that came in, one had to go out, so it wasn't an easy sale.
Publishers cared so much about shelf space that they made bookstores a remarkable offer: don't pay for the books. We'll bill you and if you haven't sold the book in two months, don't pay the bill, just send the book back. In other words, books were (and still largely are) a guaranteed sale for bookstores. That's how Barnes and Noble got to build such big stores–they were financed by publishers who took all the risk.
Of course, if there's infinite shelf space (as there is for ebooks), ALL of this is worthless.
Previously, I've written about the economics of substitution and the inevitable drop in the price of backlist non-fiction and fiction and just about anything for which there is an acceptable substitute. Since bits aren't scarce (remember, this is a post about the death of paper), it's extremely difficult to charge a premium for an ebook that has a substitute. The vast majority of books published do have substitutes, of course, so the price is going to fall.
Summary: flip scarcity with abundance and everything changes.
Books and the Internet 2
Book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding — even more than usual for an industry that's been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldn't be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.
Bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well. Olsson's, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robin's, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powell’s, the huge store in Portland, Ore., said sales were so weak it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.
Don't blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader's time or diminished attention spans. What's undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.
In other words, it's all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they're lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.
They get their books from friends, yard sales, recycling centers, their own shelves. castoffs (I just bought a book from a guy whose online handle was Clif Is Emptying His Closet). Some list them for as little as a penny, although most aim for at least a buck. This growing market is achieving an aggregate mass that is starting to prove problematic for publishers, new bookstores and secondhand bookstores.
For readers and collectors, these resellers, as they are called, offer a great service. Lost in the hand-wringing over the state of the book industry is the fact that this is a golden age for those in love with old-fashioned printed volumes: more books are available for less effort and less money than ever before. A book search engine like ViaLibri.net can knit together 20,000 booksellers around the world offering tens of millions of nearly new, used or rare books.
One consequence has been to change the calculations involved in buying a book. Given the price, do I really want to read this? Now it's become both an economic and a moral issue? How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?
In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.
Here's one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading 'Sylvia,' an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, 'Room for Doubt,' for $13.95 plus tax in a bookstore. But there were dozens of copies from resellers available online for as little as one cent, plus shipping.
A penny felt a little chintzy, even for me, so I bought a hardcover copy for 25 cents from someone who called herself Heather Blue, plus a few bucks for shipping. Neither my local bookstore nor Pantheon - whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three - nor the author got a share. The book looked good as new.
Ms. Lesser is the publisher of The Threepenny Review, a literary journal. She lives in Berkeley, Calif., where, as it happens, there is no longer a large general interest bookstore. Cody's, in its prime one of the country's great stores, closed its last outlet in June. The Barnes & Noblestore there also recently closed.
Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody's, told me that buying books online 'was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.'
Mr. Ross said he realized that Cody's was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadn't sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason.' Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.
Michael Barnard, who owns Rakestraw Books in Danville, Calif., not far from Berkeley, was more critical of me. He said that I was taking Ms. Lesser's work while depriving her of an income, and that I would regret my selfish actions when all the physical stores were gone.
Ms. Lesser's editor, Dan Frank, said that the rise of resellers like Heather Blue meant that there was no longer a set price for a book at any one time. If you want it during those first few weeks when it is new, you will pay a premium. If you can wait, it might be only a pittance. "These cracks and fractures will only grow bigger," he said.
Ms. Lesser herself was philosophical. 'I am a pragmatist, not a thin-skinned, delicate little writer who thinks everything needs to be what it is in heaven,' she said. Still, she sounded a little taken aback at the going rate for her books. 'Twenty-five cents? That's all it was?'
At least this way, the writer said, she gained a reader if not an income. If I had had to search for the book in a store, maybe I would never have found it.
"With the Internet, nothing is ever lost,” Ms. Lesser said. 'That's the good news, and that's the bad news.'
And what of the woman who sold me the book? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women's shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn't set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. 'I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,' she said.
No industry undermined by its greatest partisans will thrive long. CD sales plunged after music could be downloaded. Newspapers are hurting even as their readership is mushrooming online. As the Heather Mashes proliferate, traditional bookstores will continue to fade.
Secondhand outlets that don't sell online are already an anachronism. Even the novelist Larry McMurtry, whose enormous secondhand shop in Archer City, Tex., was probably the biggest holdout against the Internet, has surrendered.
The first book he sold online was a signed copy of '84, Charing Cross Road,' the classic account of a woman in postwar New York who bought her books from a London shop she never saw. Helene Hanff's slim volume used to be cherished for its depiction of a vanished era. Now it seems simply ahead of its time.