Book publishers fighting the digital future
Posted by Jacque on December 15th, 2009
Some book publishers fear of how e-books might change their bottom line is causing them to try to punish the consumer by delaying the publication of the electronic format of new books.
Nick Bilton, writing for the New York Times, believes that people don’t invest several hundred dollars in an e-reader in order to save money by not purchasing hard bound books. Instead, they are avid readers who like to have a library of books in one neat portable package.
If they can’t purchase the e-book format of a new book (because of publisher delays), they will just find another available e-book to purchase immediately — they won’t automatically rush off to the bookstore to buy the hard cover. The consumer understands that digital means immediate and infinite, and the limits imposed by paper no longer exist, he says. Bilton owns both an Amazon Kindle and a Sony Reader.
Some publishers, understandably wary about digital formats, are burying their heads in the sand, trying to pretend that the old business model isn’t changing. But “the next generation of book buyers won’t understand why they can’t access any information they want in a digital format. They have grown up in a world where everything, from movies to magazines, is basically just a collection of digital bytes,” warns Bilton.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to take as long as “the next generation of book buyers” to disprove the old model.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/srharris/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
