Feb

11

Books and the Web

February 11, 2008 |

Tomorrow is going to be a pretty big day for books and the web. HarperCollins is going to start giving away a number of free books online and RandomHouse is going to start selling books by the chapter - or at least the chapters of one book, for now.

All of this also comes after a lively discussion about the current state and future of reading this weekend (a question, by the way, that is about as old as the net).

There can’t be any doubt that traditional publishing houses are only slowly coming to grips with what the Internet might one day do to their business. Unlike the music industry, pirated books are really not a big deal yet and e-books are still in their infancy. But there is a larger culturally issue at hand that has kept us from moving from ‘analog’ books to e-books. I would argue that this mainly has to do with the fact that books, unlike music, are still a medium that we tend to associate completely with a physical object.

We always got our music through a large variety of sources - radio, TV, LPs, CDs, cassettes, mp3s etc. When we went from an analog copy to a physical copy, we lost nothing (ok - maybe some of that
high-fidelity”, but most people never noticed).

With books, though, going from a physical copy to a digital copy is, in many way, still a step backwards. We lose the flexibility of flipping pages effortlessly, we can’t quickly underline something or annotate a certain passage. A digital copy of most books is even today, with the Sony Reader and the Kindle, a step backwards.

Electronic readers are meant to allow us to carry a whole library in our backpack. The thing is - how many people do you know who ever complained that they couldn’t carry a library with them?

Both RandomHouse’s and HarperCollins’ move make a lot of sense in this respect.

Given today’s reading patterns, most books sold tend to be practical how-tos and self-help books. Often we end up buying a copy only for one chapter (this is even more true for academic books, by the way). A chapter is short enough to make reading it on a screen not too much of an issue. A whole books, though (and HarperCollins is only making some fiction books available), isn’t going to attract a lot of people.

On the other hand HC says they are mostly interested in whetting people’s appetite for more, and given the frustrations of reading online, few people are going to read their books completely on a screen, especially if they are not compatible with the Kindle or the Reader (the NYTimes article says you can’t download them to laptops either, but that sounds like BS - how, after all, could you distinguish whether a computer is a laptop or a desktop?).

In the end, though, the market for books isn’t so much under pressure to go online (unlike academic journals) - until somebody, finally, comes up with a really, really good e-book reader.


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