The Book Industry is Fine

by Josh Reinders

This article originally appeared on Cardus Blog.

Much has been made about the death of print media, from newspapers losing print readership to bookstores struggling with book sales. The rhetoric has slowly turned to doom and gloom as publishers and newspaper giants talk of a coming print media apocalypse. Recent news stories have only strengthened the argument: e-book sales have risen more than 115 percent compared to a year prior; the Association of American Publishers reported that their February 2011 format numbers show e-books as the number 1 format among all categories of trade publishing; and Amazon reported their top 10 bestsellers were being sold on Kindle at a ratio of 2 to 1 for print copies. A print publisher might start to fear for her future.

So is the print industry slowly dying and transitioning towards the internet? When one looks into the numbers a little deeper, a different story emerges. While overall print sales fell, the numbers were skewed towards those pesky paperbacks. Adult mass market paperback sales fell 30 percent compared to a fall for hardcovers of only 11 percent. Children’s hardcovers fell only two percent, compared to children’s paperbacks falling 17.7 percent. Consumers are moving from disposable paperbacks to online books. Is that really a bad thing? Hardcovers are more elegant, paperbacks more portable. Those who appreciate the value of a book will still buy the one that will last longer, the hardcover. Consumers accustomed to paperbacks now want the portability and ease of e-book, something they tried to get before with the paperback.

In our technological society, this change could be a boon for the industry, much the way the internet was for music. The shift to the internet brought along the rise of indie music, and smaller bands producing high-quality music. Would that be a bad thing for book industry? One could look at Amazon’s self publishing feature on the Kindle as but a first step towards that innovation of the industry. Author John Locke (real name? I think not), recently became the first self-published author to hit 1 million sales, joining other acclaimed authors as Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, and Suzanne Collins.

The move to e-books, via the iPhone, iPad, or Kindle, could even increase book reading across the world. And the desire to have a tangible book wouldn’t disappear. I think it would be hard to deny that having a book on your shelf provides aesthetic pleasure and a feeling that e-books just can’t convey. Losing that would be tragic. Much like vinyl records however, hardcover sales would still likely thrive, if only as a niche market for the enthusiast.

So ignore all the talk of the book industry dying. Think of it merely as a necessary change in an ever-evolving society. A caterpillar waiting to blossom into a butterfly, if you will, or a Phoenix rising from ashes, more brilliant than ever before.

The printing press is often seen as the most important invention in human history since farming. Are we losing more than paperbacks in this transition to e-books?
Do you think hard back books are durable enough to survive this transition

Editor's note: This piece was originally published on Cardus blog. The artwork above was done entirely on an iPad by a Flickr user.

Comments

Justin Lawrence

As a bookseller that's had rising sales every year during the great recession, I want to heartily endorse Reinders' piece.

The demise of large chains has more to do with the credit markets and the dynamics of managing a big chain than books per se.

When Borders and B&N began to expand the cry from the indie stores was that books were different, that it did make a difference to have someone in the store who both read avidly and bought for the store. Of course, there was much scoffing at the time.

But product knowledge does make a difference. Would the Apple Store be the envy of the industry if the Geniuses were only Mediocres?

JPL

Michael Maudlin

Josh Reinders is right to counsel people to ignore talk of the demise of publishing. As someone who has worked in publishing for thirty years, I get asked a lot about the future of books. Two simulataneous trends are at work that are causing the confusion. First, the business of book publishing is going through apocalyptic change where all the settled structures are up in the air (who and what gets published, how authors are paid, what books are worth, how books get distributed, how we discover new books, etc.). This will be in flux for several more years. Against this chaos and doom, though, there is a second trend: a technical revolution that allows access to more voices, more books, and new ways of creating, digesting, and experiencing literary content. The bottom line is that people are reading more today than they ever have. This trend will likely continue as well. So unless you depend on books to feed your 401K (like me), you don't have to worry and try to enjoy the wonderful new world that is unfolding.

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