Since the introduction of the Kindle, the topic of eBooks and digital content has dominated the publishing world. As it should, because our livelihood depends on getting the big decisions right. The key question everyone is wrestling with is the when of the shift, because the if is now a foregone conclusion. It’s already happening.
I’ve been in a lot of discussions about this and, frankly, I think a good many people are looking at it sideways. They’re narrowly focused on today’s book consumer (primarily middle-aged females, statistically) and how to get them to migrate to a digital format either via the Kindle or iPad (or any of the bazillion other devices coming soon to a store near you). I think there will be a lot of migration, especially from the Millenials and Gen Xer’s, but we won’t be the tipping point.
My daughter’s kindergarten class will be.
You see, adoption of eBooks and digital content by the masses is really a matter of demographics. Actually, most disruptive societal shifts are due to demographic changes. It will be the same this time around. Publisher’s Weekly just reported that ebooks accounted for 3.3% of trade sales in 2009. That’s up from 1.2% in’08, or a 176% jump. Wanna guess what the biggest growth segment in the mix was? Higher education. Students. We hear a lot about the competition for the fiction space, but there’s another battle that’s well underway for the textbook business. Several campuses, elementary through college, are testing ebooks as an alternative to traditional books. It’s a smart business move. Train a child up in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it. Right?
In 5-7 years, we won’t be talking numbers in the 3-5% range. It will likely be in the 33%-50% range as digital content becomes more embraced across three groups of people that I want you to keep in mind as you read about the shift in publishing. (In all fairness, I stole the first two from a great book called Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media)
- Digital Tourists. Digital Tourists are those who grew up pre-Internet and primarily use it as an informational tool. They may buy a Kindle or iPad, but the majority will never fully “get” the idea of enhanced eBooks or digital content. Some Gen Xer’s fit in this category with the Boomers.
- Digital Citizens. The Millennials and some Xer’s are here. They speak digi-language fluently, though with an accent. They consume digital content and also create it on their blogs, Facebook, Youtube, etc. It’s a part of their life, though they can remember a time when it wasn’t always like it is now.
- Digital Natives. This is where my daughter comes in. She’s never known a life without digital content. She games on my iPhone, plays on PBSkid.org, and watches the old Pippi Longstocking movie on Netflix streaming. When she is college age, she will not be lugging a thirty pound backpack crammed with books. It’s this group of people, this demographic, that will be the tipping point for how eBooks converge with other media to change publishing.
A colleague of mine who survived the music industry implosion keeps saying that the changes to publishing will be different because we see it coming. We have time to prepare. I gently remind him that we’ve seen the Social Security crisis coming, too, for thirty years. The good news is that publishers aren’t standing around making plans. They’re experimenting, trying new stuff. Most of the experiments will fail, but we’ll all learn from it. Innovations will accelerate and new ideas find traction much faster than any of us think possible at the moment.
But that’s the adventure of it.
I published my apparently unpublishable novel on Kindle, have sold a few copies and gotten some neat feedback from strangers that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. I just discovered last week that I can make marginal notes on just about anything I’m reading. I love the thing.
23.02.2010, 7:37 pmI’m a middle age female Kindle user. My husband bought the first edition Kindle when it first came out for me. I love it! As a writer, I like the idea that once my book(s) become published my readers can carry them wherever they go.
My 8 year old son and I read chapter books together from it almost every night. He loves the technology, too!
24.02.2010, 5:49 am