KNOW THIS: 2010: The Year of the E-Book
December 22, 2010
Other articles in this Know Something Project series:
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Scribd (May 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Apple, Inc. (June 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Amazon.com (June 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Barnes & Noble, Inc. (June 2010)
Industry Players and the Future of E-Books: Sony, Google...and Wattpad? (July 2010)
Booksellers to Benefit from Google eBooks (December 2010)
Though digital books have been around for a while now, 2010 developments have finally brought e-books into the mainstream. Apple’s April launch of the iPad highlighted the device’s ability to store and vividly display a user’s personal library of digital bestsellers, making the idea of downloading e-books more enticing and inviting to a wider audience. The release of more mobile apps for reading e-books on the go has also broadened the appeal of—and the general public’s interest in—buying and reading digital books.
While the iPad’s release added a new dimension to the legion of e-book readers now available, its colorful capabilities were also matched this year by the Barnes & Noble Nook Color. As The New York Times noted recently, growing demand for digital picture books, cookbooks, and photography books has led more publishers to search for ways to sell such illustrated e-works, leading to speculation that more manufacturers will soon follow Apple and B&N with new or enhanced color e-readers.
But the biggest news of the past year may be the return of old-fashioned browser-based e-reading. Google’s high-profile launch of its eBookstore a few weeks ago gave consumers access to millions of free public domain e-titles as well as thousands of current digital books via its dedicated store…and the ability to download their choices on practically every gadget with a browser, except the Kindle.
Amazon followed by announcing e-books purchased from the Kindle Store soon will be available for download onto multiple devices through the use of a free “Kindle for the Web” app. As noted on The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, “Kindle for the Web is part of a wider effort by Amazon to offer free apps that let customers read its e-books on devices beyond its own Kindle e-reader—including the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android devices, Windows Phone 7 devices, PCs and Macs. These apps are necessary because Amazon uses a proprietary format and digital rights management system for its e-books that keep users from transferring e-book purchases to rival devices such as a Barnes & Noble Nook. Now Kindle books will be readable on anything with a browser.”
Self-publishing and social media expert Carla King explains the importance of the browser to e-books, noting that web browsers do not “constrain text inside a container.” “With proper formatting,” she states, “HTML can provide a beautiful reading experience on a 19-inch flat-screen or a three-inch mobile device. The browser even gracefully delivers transmedia [or enhanced] books with embedded audio, video, images, and graphics—something today’s e-book readers are hard pressed to do.
“Even if a book is enclosed in a container (providing discovery, sales, and downloads),” King continues, “the browser delivery system lets book buyers access their downloads…using any device they happen to be near that has an Internet connection [and] an HTML5-compatible browser.”
While King clarifies that computers and smart phones can take advantage of books in browsers, she notes that “many dedicated e-readers can’t.” Later she adds that e-book buyers can, however, access the books they purchase on an e-reader such as the Sony Reader or the Barnes & Noble Nook that’s based on an open platform.
Thing is, most e-book consumers don’t want to be bothered with what platform their reading gadget employs. They just want to read. Those who opt to purchase rather than pirate digital texts also may be inclined to have a conscience that prompts them to support local booksellers rather than a huge, faceless corporation such as Google or Amazon.
The widely publicized ability of independent booksellers to sell e-books to such engaged clientele via the Google eBookstore is also offered by Amazon through its associates program. While Amazon has a bit more experience in the retail sector than its search-engine competitor, Google has partnered with the American Bookseller Association to make the process of signing on with the Google eBookstore as seamless and painless as possible for indie booksellers.
Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store, a leading independent recognized nationwide for its varied successes, currently highlights Google eBookstore selections on the front page of its website, and—without mentioning the K word—impresses upon its customers the fact that their purchasing decisions do matter. “It’s all about the choice,” a headline above a Google eBooks video reads, “And now you can choose Tattered Cover for your eBook needs…”
As Mendocino CA bookseller Christie Olson Day states recently in the ABA’s Bookselling This Week newsletter, all the publicity surrounding the launch of Google eBooks failed to fully communicate one important message: “Customers have heard the fact that Google eBooks are good for the indies,” she said, “but they’ve missed the fact that they need to buy [Google eBooks] from us.” Like Tattered Cover, Olson Day’s store is doing whatever it can to get the word out that e-book consumers concerned about the plight of independent booksellers must actually buy e-books from their booksellers’ sites to make Google eBookstore sales profitable on a local level.
Will Google’s eBookstore (and, even more ironically, Kindle on the Web) ultimately help indie booksellers survive as we posited in our last post? Will 2010 be remembered not only as the year of the e-book, but the year in which techie e-reading consumers helped breathe life into a currently endangered retail niche? Industry watchers like Mike Shatzkin insist every e-book sold equates to a bookstore’s loss…and ultimate demise. The anonymous administrator of the entertaining Internet E Club blog puts it this way: “Love ‘em or hate ‘em, bookstores are to ebooks what travel agents are to online travel; unnecessary and irrelevant.”
Ouch, and I’m not even a bookseller…or a travel agent. But I love bookstores and have many fond memories of attending events and browsing and spending time in various indie bookstores, some of which no longer exist. So perhaps in addition to the resurrection of e-books browser power, it’s the e-book buyers—many of whom still love, and read, and buy, and own significant numbers of printed books...and greatly appreciate independent booksellers—with their collective, contagious enthusiasm for this year’s e-book developments and those that will surely follow, who will continue to fuel the e-book revolution regardless of the formats in which their digital favorites are created or the tools on which they opt to read them. Maybe Tattered Cover Book Store is right and it really is all about choice. And when the dust settles from the busy e-book year that has been 2010, maybe we’ll find those publishers, booksellers, gadget manufacturers, and app developers who give us the most choices are the ones who ultimately win us over…for good.
—Karen DeGroot Carter
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