I really don’t know why smart people make predictions.

Surely one of the lessons of the last couple of years is that experts are actually very, very bad at making predictions — or rather, they are good at making predictions, just not very good at making accurate ones, which is, perhaps, even worse.

And didn’t we learn that experience doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the future?

In fact, someone even wrote a bestselling (if very irritating) book about it.

Nevertheless, it seems the smart book people — like moths to a flame — are undeterred. Here are some predictions from people in and around the industry:

Book Business Faces ‘Tectonic’ Shift: 2010 and Beyond (Part One) — Gail Roebuck (Random House), Peter Field (Penguin) and Victoria Barnsley (HarperCollins) in The Bookseller. Victoria Barnsley:

I think 50% of books will be read online by 2020. There will be far more variety for consumers across different formats with enhanced e-books for example. The business model will become much more complicated. The day when we sold only hardbacks and paperbacks will be looked backed at with wonder.

‘Decade of the people’: 2010 and Beyond (Part Two) — Tim Godfray (Booksellers Association), Michael Neil (Bertrams), Tim Coates (library campaigner), Roy Clare (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council), George Walkley (Hachette) in The Bookseller. Tim Godfray:

The big booksellers will develop online presence and independent booksellers will get increased offers of support from publishers, but as ever it will be consumer led and the winners will be the ones that please the consumer…

$64,000 question—where will the book be purchased and on which platform will it lie?

Predictions 2010: Cloudy with a Chance of Alarm — Michael Cairns, Information Media Partners and Personanondata:

[T]here have been few bright spots… during 2009, and after having taken the pulse of views on the near-term future in publishing by speaking to a number of senior publishing executives, my belief is we will not see any appreciable improvements during 2010. While some of their collective views can be attributed to ‘hedging,’ external trends support the lack of optimism whether they be reductions in education funding and library budgets or the increasing reliance on “blockbuster” authors or pricing issues.

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times — Bob Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio:

[F]or every trend there will be a counter trend

Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future — Richard Nash, former publisher, at GalleyCat:

In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

A baker’s dozen predictions for 2010 — Mike Shatzkin, The Idea Logical Company:

By the end of 2010, the experiment with “windowing” ebooks — withholding them from release when the hardcover comes out — will end as increasing evidence persuades publishers and agents that ebook sales (at any price) spur print book sales (at any price), not cannibalize or discourage them and, furthermore, that this withholding effort does nothing to restrain Amazon’s proclivity for discounting.

2010 Predictions — Joe Wikert, general manager and publisher at O’Reilly Media:

Let’s face it. The e-future of this industry is not quick-and-dirty p-to-e conversions.  Pricing pressures and  value propositions mean these will be nothing more than revenue rounding errors for the foreseeable future.  2010 will be the year where we’ll see more investment in richer e-content products.

Ten Things You Can Comfortably Ignore in 2010 — David Worlock, publishing analyst and advisor, Thoughts from the bottom of my garden…:

Anyone who proclaims the arrival of a new age and names it web 3.0 , 4.2 or X marks the spot.  We are working within a new continuum, every technology we will use in the next 15 years has already been invented and patented, and what remains to be seen is only the way in which consumers react to which combinations of hardware/software/content to solve which problems in what contexts. And nothing is lost by experimentation.

OK, for the record, I do genuinely believe these are all smart people who should have some idea what they’re talking about. But I do think it’s important to ask the following questions:

• Who is writing the prediction?
• Why are they making predictions about the book industry?
• What do they have to gain (or lose) from their predictions coming to pass?

And, remember kids, while predictions are fun, they’re really no more reliable than tea leaves…

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