Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

from the public domain or commissioned their own or outright stole and retranslated works by other publishers, they functioned as authors for the first hundred years of publishing as we know it.
    Over time, the situation grew more complex with the establishment of a class of people who functioned as full-time authors and the establishment of retailers. So although in the early days publishers held all the power, we’re in a situation with the printed book now where these three functions are split.
    With ebooks, we’re seeing the three functions come together again. All the power is being centralized. But the publishers don’t have it. The retailers do.
    Some innovative publishers like HarperCollins and O’Reilly Media have built retail websites where you can buy and download ebooks directly from the publisher, and Harlequin does a great job with its own retail website. But those are the exceptions.
    What has publishers worried most is that retailers like Amazon are getting into the publishing space. Amazon does this in print with its CreateSpace and BookSurge self-publishing businesses, which allow authors who aren’t represented by agents or publishers to get their books into print. And it has its own ebook publishing program.
    Because publishers go after titles they think will sell well, they usually ignore self-published authors. Publishers have a nose for money as well as talent. Even if they guess wrong occasionally, they’re more discerning than not. And their discernment prevents the market from being flooded by books that nobody’s likely to read. Otherwise, there’d be nothing to stop everyone from writing their memoirs or books about their cats.
    But Amazon turned this practice on its head by encouraging authors who would otherwise be ignored by publishers to join with them, giving the retailer an exclusive on this content. So if one of these self-published books actually does well, Amazon alone has it and can prevent Barnes & Noble or Apple or anyone else from selling that book.
    This is especially true for digital books, where Kindle’s exclusive file format prevents others from selling the content. Authors are flocking to self-publishing at places like Amazon because they can be assured of greater royalties—often up to 70 percent of the book’s list price, for digital anyway. That is pretty good when you consider that for print books, publishers often only pay an author back 10 percent of the book’s list price.
    As the museum curators of our imaginations, book publishers don’t like the undiscerning attitude that retailers are taking, how retailer-publishers like Amazon are just as happy to publish a potential bestseller as they are a book of bad cat poetry. (And believe me, there’s a lot of self-published cat poetry. In my opinion, only T. S. Eliot is allowed to write cat poetry.)
    Now, retailers have a lot to learn about being book-content curators, but you can see them starting. For example, Amazon has a team that buys rights to popular books and then republishes and repromotes them. And publishers have a lot to learn about retail, but you can see them starting too. Now that they’re in charge of their own prices, they have to learn about competitive pricing and how to price content for special times of the year like “dads and grads” sales events.
    The book industry is topsy-turvy now, but you can see how retailers might take over publishing, and it’s only natural to wonder if retailers will take over the role of authors, as well. You could imagine Apple commissioning authors to write books or hiring in-house talent to create them. You could imagine Barnes & Noble hiring MFA graduates to crank out novels or coming up with a loose affiliate network of independent writers under contract to write content in the way that the popular Dummies series of books does. You could imagine authorship becoming a corporate commodity. And with that, all three functions in the book triad could come together under retailers instead of under publishers, which is where they started in Gutenberg’s time.
    Regardless of where the book industry ends up, what’s clear is that power is shifting. And it’s going to shift toward those who understand technology best.
    The centripetal force of technology emboldens innovation, increases complexity, and gives readers more options. Regardless of who dominates the triad, readers win. We’re in a tremendous time now when content for ebooks is being sought