Jodi Picoult:
I think that we are going to see the continued rise of the eBook as publishing finally wraps its head around pleasing the consumer and providing reading material in multiple formats. Your typical eBook reader is a valued customer who wants a book NOW, and is willing to pay for it. To this end, publishers will eventually understand that price wars with Amazon, etc. which end up with the eBook being withheld and the customer being the loser are going to cost them readers. Ultimately I hope we will see book ‘packages’—where for a premium a reader can purchase one book in three formats: hard copy, audio, and eBook—which allows the reader to enjoy the experience of the book multiple ways, at multiple times of the day, depending on where he/she is and what he/ she is doing.
MJ Rose:
So the big news in publishing is there are no game changers anymore. We must bury the words. The game changer was the internet way back more than 12 years ago. Now anything and everything is possible. And anything that can happen will happen. Not all of it is good and not all of it is bad. But one thing is for sure—no one knows what is going to happen.
Print is not going to disappear. Ebooks will proliferate. There will be way more books published than will sell well or even ever have a hope of attracting a serious readership. I think the most important word in publishing for the future is the word curators. With more than a million titles a year flooding the net and at least 30% of them showing up in stores—we need human curators to help us find what’s worth reading. We need curators to point out the gems and shine a light on the treasures.
There is no one solution. Everything is a solution. That means writers can’t jump on every bandwagon thinking this one is going to change my life. But whatever we do we have to remember one thing—the most important to me—the thing so many writers seem to shrug their shoulders about when it comes up is that we have to work hard and take our time and learn our craft. If we want to keep readers—not just get them once, but keep them—we have to do everything we can to write good books. And there are no short cuts to that.
There are no game changers there. Michael Marshall Smith:
I guess my take on eBooks and the future of publishing is that yes, eBooks are the future of publishing. I’ve fought it for years, as an inveterate fan of books-as-object. It also goes without saying that the physical book is a pretty extraordinary piece of technology: needs no power, can’t crash, and can be slung in the attic and picked up and used a hundred years later. It’s also impossible to upload a paper book onto a torrent site and give away free copies to thousands of your bozo freeloading mates, which is kind of an important feature for those of us who support our families through our work. The iPad has finally taken me into the foothills of consuming books on screen, however—and so I suppose that’s that. It makes me a little sad, I’ll admit, as reading is only a portion of the pleasure that comes from books—bookstores are part of it too, both the big ones and also the tiny ones filled with abstruse little works that you never knew existed, an extraordinary wealth of serendipity and chance. Online searching will never be the same experience, and so I’m glad to have been born at a time when I can both take advantage of the new technology, and enjoy the lingering pleasures of the old.
* From his essay, “Most Widely Read Ebook in the World,” originally posted on his blog on June 14, 2010, reprinted with permission of the author:
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/most_widely_ read_ebook_in_the_world/ ** From the introduction to Everything’s Eventual, reprinted with the permission of the author and his publisher.
INTERVIEW WITH RAY BRADBURY: “WE HAVE TOO MANY INVENTIONS!” by Jonathan R. Eller
J
onathan R.Eller,the co-founder of The Center
for Ray Bradbury Studies, conducted this interview in March 2010.
Jonathan R. Eller: Are E-books the future of reading? Ray Bradbury: Absolutely not. Three different groups have called me during the last three weeks. I had another offer last week from a big company back East. But my response was, “Prick up your ears, and go to hell.” That was my response.
JE: So they will not replace the book?
RB: They don’t smell good. Books have two smells—a new book smell is very good, but an old book smell is even better. It smells like ancient Egyptian dust. That’s why I think the book is important.
JE: It’s a link to history, isn’t it?
RB: You’re damn right, yeah. JE: But you can carry hundreds of books in your pocket on a little disk. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?
RB: If you are doing research, it could be very important. If you want to look at a lot of books in a single day, yes, it could work very well.
JE: Do you think E-books will affect censorship and the banning of controversial books? Do you think they’ll try to censor E-books, or do you think E-books will help do away with censorship?
AN INTERVIEW WITH RAY BRADBURY
RB: There is no censorship. There’s no censorship in this country. In China, yes.
JE: That’s right, and that goes way back to the Cultural Revolution?
RB: And in Russia too. And in Germany, until we won.
JE: So censorship is not the problem in America anymore. RB: It never has been. We’ve never had it. When Hitler burned the books, when I was fifteen, it killed my heart, because I was, at heart, a librarian. To see the books burn, burned my heart.
JE: So you think that E-books have a place, but they won’t take over. RB: You can’t be definite about that. The future is too indefinite. We’re being dominated by machines today. The cell phone is a terrible invention. If I had my way, I’d burn cell phones, because people are always calling on them—unnecessary calls to people who don’t want to have them. Sometimes you see people talking to each other in the street, they’re only ten feet apart.
JE: Oh yes, I know; it’s insanity. And E-books are just more of the same? RB: We have too many inventions. Too many radios, and too many TVs with bad programs. That’s why I keep the Turner channel on, because it’s a time machine. It takes me back to when I was three, I was ten, when I was twenty, when I was forty. So I go back in time, and it’s a valuable stimulator of my past. So that’s the only station I keep on.
Jonathan R. Eller, Professor of English, Co-founder, The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, Co-editor, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, Textual Editor, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Textual Editor, The Works of George Santayana, Senior Textual Editor, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts.
thank you again!
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