But what about literature and classics and mid-list stuff. You've noted elsewhere that books like Biography, History, Self-help, that's that's about 20, 25% of the e-book market. People want them to be tactile, and they usually have lots of beautiful pictures that look better on paper. I've done a lot of cooking, bringing something up on an iPad, but it's nice to have a book. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, there are certain kinds of books like cookbooks and travel books and children's books that never took off in e-book format at all.īROOKE GLADSTONE It really surprises me that travel books did not because you'd want to take them on the road. And e-books are often priced more cheaply than print books. And thirdly, of course, you want it as cheaply as you can get it. So there is no desire for many people to have a collection of genre fiction. Once you've finished it, you finished it and you want to move on to the next one. Moreover, you don't necessarily want to keep your romance novel on a shelf. THOMPSON Because the narrative structure of genre fiction is such that it's quite easy to read on a digital device. THOMPSON Romance erotica have sold very strongly in e-book, but also other genre fiction categories such as sci-fi, thriller, mystery and so on and so forth.īROOKE GLADSTONE Because the fans consume them like chocolates in a box? It was a self-published book, but we'll get to that in a moment. THOMPSON For example, genre fiction has sold very, very well in e-book format, most notably romance novels.īROOKE GLADSTONE Hence 50 Shades of Gray, which is interesting for a lot of reasons. When you drill down a bit deeper and you look at how different types of books have performed as e-books, you find that some times have actually sold really well as e-books and continue to sell really well as e-books while other types of books never took off at all. You get saturation in the market and the growth stops. You see this pattern in other adoption of new technologies where you get rapid growth. THOMPSON And then from 2013 on, it actually began to decline. And then what caught everybody completely by surprise is what happened in 20, which is the sales stopped burgeoning. The sales of e-books absolutely took off between 20. So the Kindle, just to put some dates on it, was released in 2007. There was a funny New Yorker cartoon that said, What I really love about vinyl is its expense and inconvenience. And if you were to go back to the early 2000, senior executives in the book publishing industry were looking over their shoulders at what was happening in the music industry and wondering if that was their future, too.īROOKE GLADSTONE There's much to be said about the similarity of vinyl to the fall and rise of the paper book. And this coincided with the shift away from vinyl LPs and CDs to digital downloads in the music industry. Between 20, revenues in the music industry collapsed. In the early 2000, the digital revolution was beginning to cause chaos throughout the media industries, especially with the music industry. The assumption was that e-books would end up taking over the book market, right? But at the time, Amazon started bringing out e-books.
Michael Hart at the University of Illinois typed the Declaration of Independence into plain text back in 1971. You say that Amazon didn't invent the e-book. No one knew what was going to happen and how it was going to develop, but of course it became a major player within the retail space of publishing and then began to have an influence on other sectors of publishing as well.īROOKE GLADSTONE Speaking of other sectors of publishing, let's talk about the rise of e-books. THOMPSON Amazon began in the mid late 1990s as a new start up in the retail side of the publishing business. And at the intersection of leather and papyrus and paper and cloth emerged the stunning new dance of digital bits across glowing screens and a new kind of business was born. But then it was overtaken by an even more powerful, irresistible force: the digital revolution. In America anyway, the difference between 19 for books was stark. And finally, the conglomeration of publishers from scattered individual operations into the powerhouses we know today.
Brokers the deals between publishers and authors who now fiercely prioritize the writers and their advances. First, the invention of the chain bookstores, initially in malls, and then as standalone literary oases. But according to Cambridge University sociology professor John Thompson, author of book Wars The Digital Revolution in Publishing, it was transformed by three key developments in the mid-twentieth century. The book is an old market and for centuries a relatively steady one. BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.