Ding Dong the Book Is Dead or The Audience Migrates
April 2nd, 2008 | by Brad King |The book is dead.
We know this because Steve Jobs told us this a few months back. Now, the Society of Authors concurs, according the London Times.
Rampant piracy, unauthorized electronic books and a shrinking return on investment for publishers is going to send authors scurrying for the hills. To do what, I have no idea, but it sure won’t be writing. There’s no longer a financial incentive to work in this field — at least, there won’t be for writers who publish small-ish, niche-oriented books such as poetry or cook books.
In other words, read up now. Start memorizing large numbers of stories. The digital firemen are on their way.
Hooey, I say.
I had the benefit of covering the music file-trading phenomenon almost from the start. I wrote my first piece about Shawn Fanning and Napster in 1999. Soon after, the recording industry was crying foul on file traders, trying to convince the general public that if people swapped music illegally online, musicians would soon stop making music because they wouldn’t get paid.
Which, of course, was quite a bold lie.
I sat in court rooms, on Capital Hill, in record executives offices as the same tale was told repeatedly: sharing ends art.
I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment. If nobody is buying anything, there will be no financial incentive to create anything new. The problem: the underlying logic to that argument is flawed.
The problem was file sharing; the problem was the music industry’s inability to develop a comprehensive business model that allowed people to get whatever music they wanted, in whatever form they wanted, whenever they wanted.
File sharing solved that everywhere-anytime issue.
The movie industry freaked out as well, although compression technologies hadn’t quite progressed to the point that sharing a movie was that simple. Those days are gone. Yet, we’re still going to movies and buying DVDs.
It’s the television folks who have gotten this most right. They stream their shows online. They offer them through iTunes. They offer them through Hulu.com. They have started tracking views across multiple mediums.
The audience isn’t shrinking (and if I read one more report that says the audience for television — or any media — is shrinking, I’m going to pass out), it’s migrating.
And if your business model doesn’t keep pace with that migration, you’re obviously going to believe that you’ve lost your audience. So you cry foul. You fight for restrictive technologies to hold tight to your copyrights. You battle your consumers tooth-and-nail over pennies, while dollars float away.
The book is not dead. People are not reading less. It’s the business model stupid.
You’re business model is dead.
Long live the book.
