TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Print is Dead book: Must-read for the New York publishing establishment from Holtzbrinck Internet marketer Jeff Gomez

By David Rothman

Ghostbusters had just opened its Manhattan office, in the 1984 movie, when a secretary asked a nerd if he liked to read.

“Print is dead,” same the reply, a line meant to be as risible back then as the scientist’s hobby of collecting molds, spores and fungi.

But is the dialogue such a hoot today?

Not quite, says Jeff Gomez, who uses this wonderful scene in the introduction of Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age, excerpted online.

Good prose will live on in e-books and other media if writers, editors, publishers and others adjust, Gomez believes. But he isn’t so confident about the lasting popularity of books as physical objects.

Jeff, whom I know from his ever-readable Print Is Dead blog—same name, different medium—is hardly the first to feel this way.

Significantly, however, Jeff has worked as director of Internet marketing for Holtzbrinck Publishers and on October 29 will start as senior director of online consumer sales and marketing for the Penguin Group USA. Jeff will help refine the company’s Web site as a means to strengthen author-reader connections. And I hope that in other respects, too, Penguin will let him test many of his opinions in Print Is Dead.

Well worth industry’s serious attention

I have not read the entire book, but it’s on the way to me and will be formally published in P and E on the (ghost-friendly?) date of November 13. Meanwhile Jeff has wisely put online a third of his text. It’s enough for to me say the book is well-worth the industry’s serious attention even if I don’t agree with absolutely everything found there.

Himself well aware of the business issues as an novelist, not just a publishing pro, Jeff makes these points among many others:

–The old e-book devices of the late 1990s failed due to such obstacles as a shortages of titles and warring formats. Many people didn’t want expensive gadgets just for book reading.

–But that does not mean that digital reading is dead. Today’s young people are digital natives favoring screens over paper, and books must compete with E in many forms. “The biggest change in the past fifty years,” Jeff writes, “in terms of life on Earth, has been the introduction of the Internet and the abundance of gadgets that have arrived along with it: iPods, laptops, Blackberries, PDAs, eBook devices, not to mention cell phones, video cameras and portable video games.”

–While the fate of books as words is far from certain, many new opportunities are opening up online—especially for Net-savvy niche writers such as Cory Doctorow and Chuck Palahniuk. Publishers will favor authors with Web expertise; it’s a rare novelist who can follow Philip Roth’s example and just write away, oblivious to the need for promo. Lest the literary doubt the wisdom of a little commerce, Jeff cites the memorable New Grub Street and the fate of the unfortunate Edwin Reardon. How little, alas, life has changed!

–Publishers should experiment with eliminating DRM, one way to be able to charge higher prices than otherwise for e-books. Yes! DRM, as my friend Roger Sperberg, a Random House alum, loves to point out, “subtracts” value. You won’t be able to enjoy your book on your cellphone or PDA if it’s locked up on your Sony Reader and you can’t legally convert Sony’s DRMed BBeB to Mobipocket or HTML or whatever. Still, however much DRM harms the enjoyment of E, Jeff is far too optimistic in saying that shoppers might “pay comparable if not premium prices for digital downloads” of nonencrypted books.

Remedies

So how can publishers still turn a profit via e-books and related technologies such as print on demand? Jeff’s book is more diagnostic than prescriptive. However, I actually see an upside in his accurate observation that few Americans are serious readers or heavy book buyers; that’s all the more opportunity for our industry to grow. As an example of gaps begging to be filled, check out my thoughts on Wal-Mart’s disgraceful book-DVD ratio and the dearth of bookstores in small-town America. I offer some specifics on how the chain could merchandise p-books better, to the advantage of shareholders.

Well-stocked national digital library systems in the States and abroad, integrated carefully with local libraries and schools, also could help keep books on the minds of digital natives and boost publishers’ profits with fair compensation arrangements in place. But that wouldn’t eliminate the need for a thriving private side to assure a wide variety of books and freedom from Washington’s inevitable attempts at censorship.

I’ll be exploring such issues in future posts. Meanwhile I’d urge you to catch up with Jeff’s book—to understand the need for publishers to plan carefully for a transition to E.

Related: Podcast feed, with Jeff’s readings from the book. The site itself also offers some audio.

Technorati Tags: Print Is Dead , Jeff Gomez , publishing , publishing industry , Holtzbrinck , Holtzbrinck Publishers , Penguin Group USA , Ghostbusters