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When will printed books die out for good? (pg. 5)
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| Marcus Summers |
| the kindle is actually surprisingly easy on the eyes. I get less eye strain than from real books |
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| Adamo |
| it will die...our childrens children will only see screens and holographic images. |
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| Marcus Summers |
| meals in pill form |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Marcus Summers
meals in pill form |
People eat for the taste, too, so unless the pills are tasty, I doubt that will happen. |
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| leph555 |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
People eat for the taste, too, so unless the pills are tasty, I doubt that will happen. |
Pills won't replace the texture of some food :o |
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| Marcus Summers |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
People eat for the taste, too, so unless the pills are tasty, I doubt that will happen. |
dude i was totally joking lol |
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| lücid |
people are still producing vinyl, CDs, newspapers, magazines, greeting cards, postage stamps, etc.
the internet isn't going to take over the world. it's just going to force people to think about how to market their product more competitively and creatively.
i'd say printed books will die out for good around the same time that humans start procreating with robots. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| Newspapers are dying out even quicker than books. :p |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | The End of an Era in Publishing
By GARRISON KEILLOR
Published: May 26, 2010
I ran into my daughter’s favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, in New York the other night, whose Magic Tree House books I’ve read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.
I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I’m not one of them — I’m a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I’m sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.
Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.
And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.
Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And the New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, will vanish (POOF) whose imprimatur you covet for your book (“brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light” — NY Times). And editors will vanish.
The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.
Self-publishing will destroy the aura of martyrdom that writers have enjoyed for centuries. Tortured geniuses, rejected by publishers, etc., etc. If you publish yourself, this doesn’t work anymore, alas.
Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/o...=rssnyt&emc=rss |
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| SYSTEM-J |
I have actually been wondering about this as I try and get a story published. It looks like it'll be published online, and yet I've been hoping it'll make a print anthology because it feels more "official", more of an achievement to get it into print.
The trouble is authors don't play gigs. You can't set up a website and give your away for free because you can never make any profit from live performances. If literary piracy becomes widespread, it'll probably kill the industry. |
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| get nyce |
I know you're all going to be surprised about what I'm going to say so before any actual thought process goes into formulating a response to this thread, i'll just get this out of the way now...
i stay street true story son
ok so now that the ghetto vernacular is out of the way I'll drop a dime on the whole book publishing industry, why? because i work in it as an analyst.
There are many 'arms' of the business, traditional print, ebook, POD, online access. I believe the publishing industry like all things will be cyclical, so traditional print will never die out. We look at ebook, pod, and online access as digital assets of the print product. Digital assets in its entirety is a growing business with ebooks showing over 500% growth YOY. A part of the business that simply can not be ignored. However, to manage it, we still need the actual print product. Now there goes something to say about retail sales of print products and the ebook society that's been cultivated, that both customers are very much different and very much the same. The buying patterns at the retail level show a very steady (flat) sell through with a strong growing digital market. So as our print product flat lines at a sustainable rate to pay for production, a large portion of revenue is gained from digital products. We lose the 'long tail' because a digital product is everlasting, where a longtail analysis weighs in on managing inventory levels.
So instead of creating a long tail for palpable product, we bucket a top line revenue stream to digital product so we can appropriate necessary royalties. However, in order to create a top line for a digital product, it needs to compliment a physical product (the actual book). So we bill royalties and forecast a product in different revenue streams.
POD and Online Access falls into a subscription bucket, it's like paying to subscribe to have access to content. Think engineering code book or medical reference, no longer do we have medical reference books on a shelf for you to look up, simply search right? Easier in that fashion but not in the form of fiction. So here we breed two different customers that we can classify and market directly to, one being the engineer or medical student and two the leisurely fictional romance novelist. Both 'reading' a book, but using it differently due to the medium it's on.
Fast forward a bit, instead of searching your ebook, type into dictionary.com the term you're looking for and out pops the definition. Online access is big, so big that it's dominated the medical field completely. So there's a comfortable place between searching for a quick term and reading fiction, we classify our reader as POD. So POD means you are printing from a digital asset, meaning you have a file and you want to print it to read it. That means the casual user is on the go, they know they own it as a product (not a ebook not an actual print book) but as a digital product so online subscription. Like a digital bookshelf where they can print out a chapter of a book because that's where they are at in that book. That's POD, that's the customer we focus in on and it's offered up as that. We find small cases where users are printing out an entire book, but rather printing out chapters at a time to read at their pace. What this brings is a very strong pricing strategy because users don't want to pay for the whole book, they don't want to pay for the whole ebook, they only want to pay ala carte for the amount they read for the topics they need. Technical books make a great example of this, think tutorials. Do I need a gigantic Cisco book to tell me how to setup my router? Probably not!
So as you can see there's a bunch of approached the publishing industry is after, and to think it's the end of print product is quite foolish and shortsighted. In it's existence, digital assets would never be there without the actual print. It will always be the bench mark, it will always be the conception, but it won't always be the revenue gainer. It will exist as the premature medium to advanced product life cycle. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
The trouble is authors don't play gigs. You can't set up a website and give your away for free because you can never make any profit from live performances. If literary piracy becomes widespread, it'll probably kill the industry. |
John Updike had a bit of a rant about this a while ago. An excerpt:
| quote: | As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the "basis of wealth" shifts to "relationships, links, connection and sharing." Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the 'discovery tool' that markets these other intangible valuables."
This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author's works, be they one volume or 50, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace. |
It was written in response to this article by Kevin Kelly of WIRED magazine:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/m...agewanted=print |
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