SeanDareOnline.com

I just read a synopsis of the Book Retail Sector in Canada Report about the book market in Canada. It contains some depressing news for an aspiring writer like me. Specifically this line caught my attention:

- Of the 675,000 titles available in Canada in 2006, 45% did not sell a single copy.

And this one:

- 10,000 titles (2.7%) accounted for 64% of the unit sales.

And this one:

- 500 titles (2.7%) accounted for 22% of unit sales.

Although these numbers are for the Canadian market, they reflect the American trend of heavily marketing fewer and fewer titles in larger and larger stores. Hence the advent of book selling megastore/coffee houses such as Barnes and Noble. Small specialty book stores that catered to a specific genre have been replaced by a shelf or two in a store at the mall. Sure the megastore/coffee house has more titles over all, but the selection within each genre is limited compared to what the small stores carried. Because of this trend the variety of books being published has dwindled, along with the number of new authors being sold. This vicious cycle is leading to the death of the traditional publishing market.

Why? Why would a business actively destroy the market they sell to? The answer? They wouldn’t. Businesses like Barnes and Noble do what they do in response to the market, not in spite of it. The appearance of book selling megastore/coffee houses is directly related to the number of books being purchased in the market today. Here is another startling statistic:

- Average household expenditure on books: $106.

The average buyer spends the same amount of money to watch TV for a month as they do on books for an entire year! I have often sat and pondered what it would take to reverse the direction of our society from one that ignores books to one that cherishes them. This is no easy task. Can I take our society back to a time when books were the preferred method of story telling? No I cannot. To change the way our society views books we can’t push people back to the past. We must entice them to join the next new thing publishing has to offer. Right now the next new thing seems to be e-books on the Internet.

If there is one thing I have learned from watching this technological age we live in it is to never underestimate human ingenuity. The needs of the Internet users are many and varied and new Internet companies pop up all the time striving to fill those user’s needs. Napster was a great example. Napster allowed any user anywhere to share music with any number of other users. It was like a giant swap meet before the worlds largest concert. You could exchange a little Jimi Hendrix for some Destiny’s Child, or a little Metallica for some Madonna, or even a little bluegrass for some classic Brahms, all for free! Napster was a hit because it catered to a market of users who wanted to do something, exchange music, but didn’t have the network available. Napster provided the network. Before long it was the place to exchange music.

Here is another example. Ten years ago I told people I wanted to see an Internet where a television show could be downloaded anytime after it’s release date. In this way a television show could be watched whenever the viewer wanted instead of on the network’s time table. At the time such a thing was unheard of, and yet everyone who overheard me talking about this idea started asking me where they could get such a service. If I had the programming know how I could have started a service that offered television episodes for download and made millions. Some years later Apple came along with iTunes and did just that. Now television studios are putting episodes online for free after their release date. Technology has even advanced to the point where you can watch TV right from your cell phone. Was I foreseeing the future? No. I was telling other people what I wanted the Internet to do for me. It turns out many people wanted the same thing, which created a market. Wherever there is a market there is a company willing to sell.

So what is the current market for the written word? How do people want to read as we move further into the Internet age. Does the e-publishing model make sense? Will readers ever embrace the electronic written word like they do the printed variety? Many will tell you that unless you publish your work in paper you are not successful. I don’t know if I agree with that. There are a number of authors who have sold their work online and been successful.

Take VW Vagabonds for example. Amanda and Richard Ligato decided to chuck the safe and sanitary world offered by the USA and live out their dream of driving overland through Central and South America in an old VW Camper Bus. To do this incredible journey they had to sell almost everything they owned. As a result of living within the confines of the VW Camper for so long they determined that you don’t really need stuff to be happy. When they decided to publish a book about their journey they ran into a quandary. Should they really sell a book, a.k.a. a possession, now that they firmly believed in the “less is more” philosophy? Wouldn’t an e-book be a better option from the “less is more” side of the argument? Of course the problem with e-books was no one knew for sure if they would sell, whereas a printed book has a multiple thousand year track record. They decided on a compromise. You can purchase either a printed book or you can purchase an e-book from the Ligato’s. The e-book is sold for substantially less ($2.50) than the printed book ($18.95). Yet I will bet, knowing how the printing business structures it’s prices, Amanda and Richard probably make more per sale off each e-book than they do on each printed book.

Results like this are encouraging. The Ligato’s have sold many copies of their book Wide Eyed Wanderers, with many of the purchases coming in the form of e-book sales. As a matter of fact Wide Eyed Wanderers was successful enough to fund another epic journey. This time a bicycle trek across Asia, with a route that takes them through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

The Ligato’s are not the only ones who see e-books as the format of the future. Publishers and book sellers realize the end of the printed word may soon become reality. To combat this publishers, sellers and electronics manufacturers are teaming up to develop electronic devices that make reading an electronic book easier. Take the Kindle from Amazon.com as an example. The Kindle is a portable e-book reader that can be taken anywhere. It is about the size of a thin hard back book and has a special screen that allows you to read text comfortably even in direct sunlight. The take rate on the Kindle is low, due in large part to it’s high price, but it demonstrates something important. Publishers and distributors are actively seeking a way to increase e-book readership. In other words they are looking for a new market in which to sell their books.

This isn’t the only avenue in which electronic books are being developed. Many software programmers are getting in on the e-book market. As a matter of fact, I have written about one of the best e-book programs before. yBook allows you to take any text file and read it as if it were an electronic paperback book right on your computer. It is available for free from Space Jock Software. If you haven’t checked it out I encourage you to do so.

These devices and programs have helped, and on the surface moves like this seem like exciting news, but in my mind they are still not fixing the underlying problem. Reading isn’t cool. Reading isn’t sexy. Movies are cool, online video’s are cool, music is cool, but reading is not. Sure, the average Internet user will read online, but not if a video is available with the same content. If you don’t believe me just look at the news web sites nowadays. Where you used to find paragraph after paragraph of text you now find a quick blurb and a streaming video in it’s place.

So what is to become of print? Am I trying to break into a dying medium? Should I chuck it all and learn how to make really cool Youtube videos? To be honest I am a little scared and intimidated by this report. I fear I may be wasting my time learning to be a writer. If the e-book revolution takes off then all my worry will be for nothing, but there is a part of me deep inside that feels like the push to e-books is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It all looks pretty, and it feels like we are doing something, but the reality is the ship is still sinking.

Even though I am intimidated I will press on, I have to, I am a writer at heart. It is just discouraging to see the medium in which I love to create being destroyed by the very people it is supposed to entertain.

- Sean