Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
I don’t know about you, but I devote 1/4 to 1/3 of every week trying to keep up with publishing trends. Note the word “trying.” Despite the commitment of time, I find it hard not to feel breathless by the events unfolding before us. This week I want to take a look at what’s rocking my publishing world–and therefore yours.
By the way, this is a good week for me to consider these new realities because I’m taking a couple of days away from the office to plot strategies for the future of our agency, which must be fleet of foot if it is to stay relevant.
So just what trends do I see rocking our world?
e-Books Will Prevail
Both prognosticators and publishers agree that e-book sales will outpace physical books. But the two groups disagree about how long it will take before the scale tips. Most publishers are looking at five to seven years. Some trend watchers say it will be less.
Studies show that price is the biggest reason consumers aren’t buying dedicated e-readers (despite the readers who vociferously proclaim using an electronic device is an inferior reading experience). In July, in the face of less expensive, competing e-readers, Amazon has significantly dropped the Kindle’s price. That means the trend is on to make e-readers more affordable. That, in turn, will result in more e-reader ownership, causing the move toward e-reading to accelerate.
Those who study these things also have found that, once an individual buys an e-reader, he or she generally is satisfied with the quality of the device and the reading experience.
What Does This Mean for the Publisher?
In preparation for this move toward e-reading, publishers are adjusting their contracts to sew up every right imaginable and even unimaginable. They want the option of creating adaptations of a book with video, with audio, in conjunction with other books, etc. They aren’t quite sure what they will do to enhance the reading experience, but they do know they can’t experiment if they haven’t obtained the rights necessary to do so. There are many other ways the publishers are rethinking what they bring to the publishing table, but for this post, let’s concentrate on this one aspect.
What Does This Mean for Writers?
In the past, a few nonfiction writers who created material with lots of references and a complex exploration of a topic, were asked to create an index. Some writers had charts or illustrations that helped to depict the subject, and the author was responsible to submit those to the publisher. (e.g., A book on war ships in the 1800s would likely have illustrations and diagrams of various ships.)
In the near future, someone (the author?) will need to create searchable links throughout a manuscript. I can envision this being true for fiction as well as nonfiction. So, if you’re a Patrick O’Brian fan, you could look up all those words you’re encountering for the first time in one of his novels. (My husband, an inveterate vocabulary builder, stuck note cards full of words to look up as he read O’Brian’s Aubry/Maturin series.) O’Brian also had such a vast understanding of medicine, music, food, naval terminology and flora and fauna that, in an e-book format, the publisher could create a veritable encyclopedia of links for the reader to drink as deeply from on any one subject as he wanted.
But that’s just the beginning: What about adding video to show what the ship in the novel looked like? We could walk around it, just as we can “drive” down a street by typing in the destination on Google.
And adding audio can create a whole new dimension. Imagine “mood” music, such as we experience when we watch a movie, tipping us off to just how dangerous a situation the unaware protagonist is in. Or, going back to Patrick O’Brian, we could hear Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin playing their musical instruments after dinner on the ship.
Is your mind boggled? Rightly so. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, our world is being rocked.
For writers, the creators of the written word, the ways to present your material are expanding. Sure, we aren’t doing any of things I’ve listed in this blog right now, but if e-readers dominate the reading scene in five years, and it takes two years for a book to move from contract to “printed” version, we would be wise to start thinking about ways to enhance the medium we use to communicate with.
Wow. If the creative folks in the e-book industry want some “rocking” new ideas, all they need to do is come right here. You had enough possibilities to keep them busy for years.
I do enjoy my Kindle on trips, but at home I still pick up real books most of the time. I do enjoy the large print feature on the Kindle–it works great for my treadmill reading.
Some of this is the extension of the I-Pad, enabling readers to enhance their experience with further information. I don’t know how many times I’ve finished a book and then looked up the author’s website to glean further information.
I’m working on a novel right now that features a bunch of oboists. I’ve been listening to oboe music as I write, but I can see/hear that simply referencing a specific piece of music could enhance the story if the reader could click on it and hear the difference.
In some ways that makes it easier for the writer–you don’t have to search out ways to describe the music–while also making it harder; will the link take the reader away from your story?
Interesting times require nimble creative people.
I love my Sony e-reader but after our latest experience with an audio book, I’m not so sure I want audio added to the reading of a book. We listened to a James Patterson book on CD that was enhanced with mood music and gunshots that startled you. Imagine driving down the highway listening to the story and suddenly hearing gun shots. It took a few minutes to realize it wasn’t a blown tire or a sniper along the way. Okay, background music to read by might be nice but sound effects? I’m not sure.
Janet, you are really forward thinking. I know you will come up with some great plans for your agency.
Maybe my recent book, The Mormon Mirage, was transitional in this process. It appeared last year first as a print book, then was recorded as audiobook, and then as an e-book with “clickable” footnotes.
But Zondervan said it was the first book they had ever published whose e-book version had an additional chapter which was not in the print book — a sort of enhanced digital version. You’d think that just adding an additional chapter would not be difficult, but apparently it was a challenging process for editorial and production alike.
All of which makes me think that adding such things as music and other elements will really be complicated.
Latayne C Scott
http://www.latayne.com
Great post. I’m a recent convert. I went with the Nook, and I’m absolutely glad I went to e-reading. I’ll still buy my favorite books in print so I can have the set. . . but for the most part, I’m loving the e-book concept.
Never thought I’d see myself type that. . . LOL.
Thanks for this insight. It’s interesting to see what’ll happen over the coming years!
Thanks for the comments. Michelle and Karen, you both make good points. All these add-on features could take the reader right out of the story–or scare you out of the story, as you experienced, Karen. I bet the audio people never thought about what it would be like to drive along and hear gunshots.
And, as Latayne said, these shifts are complicated technically and creatively. But then, who said change was easy?
Digital is the stream where all other waters will converge. At some point in the future we will look like lunatics for cutting down forests to print books.
My concern would be the inevitable links away from the books to which you refer. It’s an open barn door allowing a breeze to ruin the quiet intimacy of reading. A printed book provides escape without interruption. No one reads anything for long on the Internet and attention spans are shrinking. We are developing an attention deficit society.
This could lead to a resurgence of the novella and short story and could spell doom to longer works.
The possibilities you mentioned excite me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a book and gotten engrossed on a subtopic mentioned. Many trips to the library and much trolling of the Internet then ensue. It would be cool to have all that information contained within an e-reader. Great ideas!
Michael, speaking of rocking our world, I hadn’t thought about how novellas and short stories could experience a resurgence as a result of e-readers and our culture’s growing attention deficit.
My grandmother always used an index card as a bookmark on which she could write new words. I learned the trick from her.
When I chose to publish my state history curriculum on CD-ROM, I used hyperlinks to help students do the same. I also incorporated links at the end of each segment so that interested readers could learn more about the discussion topics. This format allowed me to include full-color illustrations on each page, print-out worksheets, You-Tube videos of historical reenactments, virtual field trips to excellent museums and historical sites, as well as an audio track. In short, it’s not at all the dull history text you might remember from the days before digital.
Far from being a distraction, these additions enhance and extend the learning experience much like additional scenes and background material add to the enjoyment of a movie on DVD. Kids love it!
E-books open a whole new range of exciting possibilities. It will take time to refine features with real value from those that are simply novelties, but in terms of marketing the opportunities are as limitless as imagination.
As a preteen, I loved the biographies by Clara Ingram Judson (1878-1960), as well as a fiction series about immigrants from various countries and a fiction series of “Mary Jane” books. The Mary Jane books are now available as Kindle Books, with the reader’s choice of foreign language embedded so that by placing the cursor over a word, the Spanish, Italian, German, French, Bulgarian, Polish, Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Ukrainian, Czech, Thai, or Urdu translation will appear. These are designed for teaching English as a second language, and have been available for at least a couple of years. This was adapting a series written 60 years ago. Starting from scratch offers all kinds of possibilities.
I professed my disdain for e-books in a previous blog. I’ll always be a fan of traditional books. But I respect the fact that as a literary agency, you must keep up with the times. I think your agency is doing right by doing lots of research. I wouldn’t suggest mood music or video attached to the e-book. Much of the joy of reading is to use your imagination to envision what the writer is describing. If you tell them what they should be seeing or hearing, it steals from the experience.
Well, Ms. Grant, you’ve definitely given me something to think about. I’m harnessing technology to market my book (Facebook, Twitter, webpage in process, etc) and then once I’m well along on that journey, THEN I’ll tackle the many facets of e-book-dom.
It’ll be like watching a movie. Still, I like reading my paper books and letting my imagination do its part. Not discounting the amazing technology that will improve the reading experience, but I think some things can’t be replaced like a person’s own imagination.