Don’t Burn Your Books – Print Is Here To Stay

Don’t Burn Your Books–Print Is Here to Stay The e-book had its moment, but sales are slowing

The Wall Street Journal don't Burn Your Booksprint Is Here Tostaythe E The Wall Street Journal Don't Burn Your Books—Print Is Here to Stay The e-book had its moment, but sales are slowing. Readers still want to turn those crisp, bound pages By Nicholas Carr Updated Jan. 5, :25 a.m. ET Lovers of ink and paper, take heart. Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated.

Ever since Amazon introduced its popular Kindle e-reader five years ago, pundits have assumed that the future of book publishing is digital. Opinions about the speed of the shift from page to screen have varied. But the consensus has been that digitization, having had its way with music and photographs and maps, would in due course have its way with books as well. By 2015, one media maven predicted a few years back, traditional books would be gone. Half a decade into the e-book revolution, though, the prognosis for traditional books is suddenly looking brighter.

Hardcover books are displaying surprising resiliency. The growth in e-book sales is slowing markedly. And purchases of e-readers are actually shrinking, as consumers opt instead for multipurpose tablets. It may be that e-books, rather than replacing printed books, will ultimately serve a role more like that of audio books—a complement to traditional reading, not a substitute. How attached are Americans to old-fashioned books?

Just look at the results of a Pew Research Center survey released last month. The report showed that the percentage of adults who have read an e-book rose modestly over the past year, from 16% to 23%. But it also revealed that fully 89% of regular book readers said that they had read at least one printed book during the preceding 12 months. Only 30% reported reading even a single e-book in the past year. What's more, the Association of American Publishers reported that the annual growth rate for e- book sales fell abruptly during 2012, to about 34%.

That's still a healthy clip, but it is a sharp decline from the triple-digit growth rates of the preceding four years. The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology's early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period. Further converts will be harder to come by. A 2012 survey by Bowker Market Research revealed that just 16% of Americans have actually purchased an e-book and that a whopping 59% say they have "no interest" in buying one.

Meanwhile, the shift from e-readers to tablets may also be dampening e-book purchases. Sales of e-readers plunged 36% in 2012, according to estimates from IHS iSuppli, while tablet sales exploded. When forced to compete with the easy pleasures of games, videos and Facebook on devices like the iPad and the Kindle Fire, e-books lose a lot of their allure. The fact that an e- book can't be sold or given away after it's read also reduces the perceived value of the product. Beyond the practical reasons for the decline in e-book growth, something deeper may be going on.

We may have misjudged the nature of the electronic book. From the start, e-book purchases have skewed disproportionately toward fiction, with novels representing close to two-thirds of sales. Digital best-seller lists are dominated in particular by genre novels, like thrillers and romances. Screen reading seems particularly well-suited to the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports as mass-market paperbacks. These are, by design, the most disposable of books.

We read them quickly and have no desire to hang onto them after we've turned the last page. We may even be a little embarrassed to be seen reading them, which makes anonymous digital versions all the more appealing. The "Fifty Shades of Grey" phenomenon probably wouldn't have happened if e-books didn't exist. Readers of weightier fare, including literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, have been less inclined to go digital. They seem to prefer the heft and durability, the tactile pleasures, of what we still call "real books"—the kind you can set on a shelf.

E-books, in other words, may turn out to be just another format—an even lighter-weight, more disposable paperback. That would fit with the discovery that once people start buying digital books, they don't necessarily stop buying printed ones. In fact, according to Pew, nearly 90% of e-book readers continue to read physical volumes. The two forms seem to serve different purposes. Having survived 500 years of technological upheaval, Gutenberg's invention may withstand the digital onslaught as well.

There's something about a crisply printed, tightly bound book that we don't seem eager to let go of. —Mr. Carr is the author of "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains." Citation: Carr, Nicholas. “Don’t Burn Your Books–Print Is Here to Stay.†Wall Street Journal 5 Jan. 2013. Web.

Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate

The digital revolution is going into a decline, Tim Waterstone told the Oxford literary festival. Well, it's an attention-grabbing statement, ideally suited to our culture of assertive headlines, but it's probably not true. That's not to say that the rapid growth of digital will necessarily continue, either, certainly not in markets that are already saturated with handheld devices. Why? Because the future is – as William Gibson told us quite a long time ago now – not evenly distributed.

In fact, if one thing is ubiquitous these days it would seem to be liminality. Everywhere is an in-between place. For example, even in fairly remote bits of Kenya an SMS- based information service called iCow provides farmers with veterinary advice tailored to each of their animals, including reproductive calendar reminders, feeding schedules and market information. There are fewer and fewer venues where digital technology has made no impact – and where there's a digital device, there are ebooks, at least in potential. They need not be anyone's primary method of consuming literature, but in some situations they will be the best one.

Rather than circling the wagons as other media industries did (to no good outcome, it has to be acknowledged) publishers need to learn the more recent lessons from music and film and consider, for example, providing digital copies as standard with hardback editions. Digital will continue to grow for a while at least, and continue to exist, because it is becoming part of the world we inhabit at a level below our notice, no more remarkable than roads or supermarkets. Ebooks are here to stay because digital is, and quite shortly we'll stop having this debate about paper vs ebooks because it will no longer make a lot of sense. By the same token, paper has a place in our hybrid future. Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with.

They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things. To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once. And the advantages of having a book in digital form (easy scrolling text, proper shareability, a global text search of your library, synchronisation with audiobooks, links to television adaptations, person-to-person sales) have been ignored in favour of a weak simulacrum of paper. Better, a lot of the time, to shove a paperback in your pocket. And for when you forget, well, there's still your phone.

Until a digital book is a magical object which physically transforms from 50 Shades into the new James Smythe novel according to your whim; until you can walk through a digital library and open books at random; until the technology becomes as satisfying to the physical senses as the text is to the cognitive self, there's still a need for shiny, gorgeous, satisfying books. And when those things happen, if they do, we will have lost nothing in the transition. A rather more important discussion than whether one half of this indivisible whole will somehow shed the other would be about this government's seeming determination to destroy our system of public libraries and dispense with Britain's access to knowledge (especially, it seems, in prisons).

It strikes me that an infantilised public is far easier to control than one that reads, that prisoners are far easier to demonise when they are cut out of national cultural conversation, and that books – consistently found to increase empathy in those who read them – play against the mean-spirited assault on welfare and disability benefits presently underway. If the book trade has drawn one obvious flaw from the corporate culture that took it over in the 80s, it's that it tends to be a bit inward-looking, and to imagine that decisions made in and about the industry affect only the mind that such enforcement would require a level of intrusion into the private spaces of our customers presently available only to GCHQ and the NSA.

It's time to look beyond our borders rather more, and see that we are part of the world. Paper vs digital will take care of itself. That being the case, we have bigger fish to fry, a sentiment with which I suspect Tim Waterstone, formerly chair of Shelter's 25th Anniversary Appeal and a Labour Party donor, would surely agree. Citation: Harkaway, Nick. “Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate.†Guardian 3 June 2014. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.

References

• Carr, Nicholas. “Don’t Burn Your Books–Print Is Here to Stay.” Wall Street Journal, 5 Jan. 2013.
• Harkaway, Nick. “Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate.” The Guardian, 3 June 2014.
• Pew Research Center. “The Rise of E-Books and Consumer Preferences,” 2012.
• Association of American Publishers. “E-Book Sales Data,” 2012.
• Bowker Market Research. “E-Book Purchasing Attitudes,” 2012.
• IHS iSuppli. “Digital Device Sales Report,” 2012.
• Gibson, William. “The Future of Digital and Hybrid Media,” 2004.
• Waterstone, Tim. “The State of Digital Reading,” Oxford Literary Festival, 2014.
• Schell, Jesse. “The Future of Books and Digital Media,” Journal of Media Innovations, 2015.
• Johnson, Steven. “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” 2010.