Books are the last bastion of an old media business model. With all the hullabaloo over the upcoming Kindle release, I’ve been inspired to look for thoughts and examples of how it might look in the near future.
When McKenzie Wark wrote Gamer Theory – an analysis of why people enjoy playing videogames – Harvard University Press published it as a convential hardcover. But Wark also put it online using CommentPress. The free blog theme blew the book open into a series of conversations; every paragraph could spawn its own discussion forum for readers.
Sure enough, hundreds dove in, and pretty soon Gamer Theory had sparked erudite exchanges on everything from Plato’s cave to Schopenhauer’s ideas on boredom. It felt as much like a rangy, excited Twitter conversation as it did a book. “It was all because we opened it up and gave readers a way to interact with each other,” Wark says. “It changed the way they read the book.“
Every other form of media that’s gone digital has been transformed by its audience. Whenever a newspaper story or TV clip or blog post or white paper goes online, readers and viewers begin commenting about it on blogs, snipping their favorite sections, passing them along. The only reason the same thing doesn’t happen to books is that they’re locked into ink on paper.
Stein believes that if books were set free digitally, it could produce a class of “professional readers” – people so insightful that you’d pay to download their footnotes. Sound unlikely? It already exists in the real world: Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall has found that university students carefully study used textbooks before buying them. because they want to acquire the smartest notes.
You’re far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple of brilliant sentences in a Facebook update – and if you hear about it, you’re far more likely to buy it in print. Yes in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.
All the above from Clive Thompson’s column in the June 2009 issue of Wired
Stories about the publishing world have a much darker tone to them, a bit like the “Woe is the Auto Industry” stream of late. New York Magazine’s state of the industry piece, titled simply “The End” is representative of the gloom. It’s a good read for us datarati, as it is filled with all kinds of usable numbers and not just the usual conclusions .
But overspending isn’t going away, even with a rotten economy. Last month, Harvard economist Anita Elberse wrote a piece debunking the hypothesis of Chris Anderson’s anti-blockbuster blockbuster, The Long Tail (which Bob Miller acquired at Hyperion for a mere $550,000). Elberse led off with a tidbit from a study of Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing. Of 61 books on its 2006 list, each title averaged a profit of almost $100,000. But without the top seller, which earned $5 million, that average drops to $18,000. “A blockbuster strategy still makes the most sense,” she concludes.
Born Curious 
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