I visited Borders on Monday, and bought a D&D Dungeon Master’s screen.
It is probably the last thing I will ever buy there.
Not because Borders itself sucks; it’s not great but not that bad, either. (I’m starting to like Barnes and Noble better, but I prefer Borders’s discount program.)
No, the reason why I’m not likely to buy anything at Borders again is because there is almost nothing there that I want.
I’m not talking about the content of the books and discs they sell; yes, 90% of it is crap, but that’s a universal law.
I’m talking about the books and discs themselves.
Fiction books? I’ll probably read it once and never again, after which point having the physical copy is a waste of space. My other options are to donate it to a library or donate it to Goodwill, but then I wouldn’t be able to read it again if I do want to.
Textbooks (such as programming books)? The big failure of these is in keeping the book open. Most books don’t lie open easily; O’Reilly’s do, in the middle, but you still have problems at the start and end of the book.
Music CDs? iTunes and Amazon.
Movies and TV shows? Netflix and Hulu.
Paper books—and other physical containers of informational and/or entertainment content—are dinosaurs. They are artifacts of a dying age.
I don’t think I need to go into the numerous advantages of electronic media. You’ve all used ebooks and online music stores and streaming video by now, I’m sure. You know what the future looks like.
I’m talking more about the requirements of physical space to store and sell and of physical materials—including fuels—to produce and ship. On the scale of the stocks of national bookstore chains in multiple countries, this is a tremendous waste.
There’s also all the effort expended on these physical objects. Printers, handlers, drivers, stockers. Necessary only because of the physical objects themselves; a transition from physical media to electronic media means we’ll no longer need people doing these things (for these things).
Not everybody in a publishing company will be obsolete. A forward-thinking publishing company will offer editing and proofing and maybe design services without requiring the production of paper books or metal-and-plastic discs. There will probably also be sales staff to get the content into (electronic) book/music/video stores and libraries, and get their products onto the front and category pages that replace the promotional shelves.
Those concerned with the production and distribution of the content will remain. Those concerned with the production and distribution of media will go away.
The hard part will be convincing publishers of this. When your company is founded on a specific business model, you naturally reject any attempt to take it away.
Publishers will fight to keep the paper book alive. They’ll try to sell you romantic notions of sitting by a fireplace (do you even have one?) with a pipe in your mouth, Scotch in one hand, and a paper book in the other.
They’ll also work the other direction, which is to (lightly) punish buying ebooks, to make paper books seem more attractive by comparison. We see this today: It’s called DRM. They’ll (they already do) restrict your ebooks; prevent you from selecting, copying, annotating, quoting. They’ll do the same things and say the same things as the RIAA and its member labels.
The publishers are what could fuck this up.
The publishers will work to screw us out of our future by trying to force DRM on us. Get stores (like Amazon) to enforce it; maybe even try via advertising to cast aspersions on DRM-free ebooks.
Our best hope is for new publishers to arise. Modern “publishers” in name only, or with a new name, that do as I said above: all the jobs related to the content, with none related to the media. No printing on paper, and no attacks or restrictions on ebooks; purely an editing and distribution service to make the book saleable and get it sold.
Competition. Short of legislating that business model out of the picture (certainly a possibility), there’s nothing the established publishers can do about it.
Well, there is one thing. Milk their cash cows. Their name authors, and whomever the publishers hire to write sequels after they die (think “Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne ________ by Eric Van Lustbader”). That could go on indefinitely, and in a world with greatly-reduced distribution costs (bandwidth instead of shipping; no more waste of physical space or materials), there’ll be room for it.
There’ll also be room for stores, but not like we see today. Same for libraries. As the paper book becomes obsolete, so will the shelves full of them.
The replacement would be stores/libraries built on the assumption that you have a book reader (iPad, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, whatever). You walk in and load up a web page on the local network. If it’s a library, you read the book from that web page. No download; there’s no need for it. If it’s a store, you preview it there in the store and buy it “online” there in the store, and download it there. Either way, you have a place to sit and read, and to ask staff for opinions and suggestions and help.
You could do this with music and movies, too, given a sufficiently smart music/movie player. (iTunes in the Apple Store?)
Again, the publishers can fuck this up. To a large extent, it’d require their cooperation, not only to supply the content but also to not interfere with the restriction-free reading and selling of it.
It won’t be easy, but it’s possible, and I really want to see someone do it.
