“We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”
“Too many books” is one old complaint. Historian Adrien Baillet wrote that in 1685. Plummeting book prices is another…
An interesting segment about books on NPR’s On The Media from late November 2009:
It somehow seems terribly appropriate that I spent the week Apple unveiled the iPad battling with problems with my own PC laptop (*sigh*) and missed a lot of the excitement.
Even at the best of times, I am usually at least a day behind the news cycle, and so not for the first time, I thought I’d write a post as a way to get myself up to speed over the weekend. But, just when I started to think I had a handle on it all, I got sideswiped by the not unrelated kerfuffle between Macmillan and Amazon… (*sigh*)
Needless to say, things are happening at a frightening pace and so this post will probably be out of date even before it is live. It should also go without saying — although I’d better say it anyway — that any opinions expressed here are my own, not those of my employer…
Many in the tech crowd — who were apparently expecting Jesus 2.0 — were, unsurprisingly, a little disappointed by the name and the lack of features such as multitasking, Flash, and a camera.
[E]ven if they couldn’t see that three billion apps would be downloaded in two years… could they not see that this device was gorgeous, beautifully made, very powerful and capable of development into something extraordinary? I see those qualities in the iPad. Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want now and one that will not be matched this year by any company.
Fry believes (and rightly I think) that the big impact of iPad will be on the media and the way we consume it:
[I]t is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic textbooks, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed.
Ivor Tossell makes a similar point in today’s The Globe and Mail. According to Tossell, the iPad will essentially be used to “piss away time on the Internet”:
[S]o now we have a tablet that’s perfect for the couch, and the restaurant table, and the party, and the lecture hall; for reading in the bathroom, for floating in space, and possibly for using in the space-bathroom. Who knows – the future is grand… The question, in the end, isn’t whether you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new tablet computer. It’s about whether you really want the Internet lying around the house like that.
Of course, this is not news to book folk. I think we have always seen e-readers as a new way to read in the bath.
Nevertheless, the iPad’s sleek design, intuitive interface, and startling low starting price of $499 USD, make it welcome alternative to Amazon’s somewhat ‘fugly’ Kindle. Mashable (although they were not alone) were quick to give reasons why the Kindle is Dead (while others have been equally quick explain why it isn’t).
And then there is the iBooks store. Not only does it support e-Pub, but most of major publishing houses — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette (although notably NOT Random House) — have signed up. As Sarah Weiman noted at Daily Finance :
If it wasn’t clear that iPad and iBooks are two shots across the bow of Amazon’s…. Kindle e-reader, Jobs’s left-handed compliments drove the point home: “Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this….We’re going to stand on their shoulders”
It has, of course, been something of an open, if largely misunderstood, secret that publishers are not happy with Amazon pressuring them on prices, discounts, and marketing dollars (although I’m not quite sure anyone expected Steve Jobs to say it aloud) and so it is not surprising that publishers are embracing the iPad. But, with apps for the kindle, better terms for self-published authors, and persistently loud (if vague) announcements about sales, Amazon had clearly been preparing for this moment for some time.
As Cory Doctorow notes at BoingBoing, Macmillan were not blameless, but Amazon — perhaps fearing a PR disaster after Macmillan CEO John Sargent went public — quickly capitulated (albeit grudgingly and, as Fast Company and Moby Lives noted, somewhat disingenuously) and things are beginning to quieten down, at least for now.
Others — notably Andrew Wheeler (a braver soul than me), the indefatigable Sarah Weinman,and author John Scalzi (another brave soul), not to mention the mainstreammedia et al — have done a far better job of unpacking this farrago than I could, especially since I have to be somewhat guarded in what I say. I’m just going to end by saying that this fight was probably inevitable — predictable even — but, if nothing else, this is surely a sign of things to come…
Update:
For more of the industry nitty-gritty and some (estimated) numbers around the Amazon-Macmillan disagreement, Mike Shatzkin’s post on the subject is also worth reading…
Update 2:
Two things:
One, if I was going to rewrite the part of this post about Amazon (heaven help me), I would say — and say early — that despite all of the complaints about Amazon, they are good at selling stuff. Publishers like Amazon’s sales figures and relatively low return rates. If Amazon were just rubbish, this wouldn’t be half as complicated as it is…
Two, I wanted to post this from Bobby Solomon’s blog Kitsune Noir on the iPad:
For those who are disappointed by it, who think it’s a rehash of the iPhone, I honestly feel bad for you. I know it doesn’t cook you toast, and I know you wanted it to have lasers, but you’re completely overlooking the fact that no one else on Earth could make a device anything like this. Please prove me wrong, I would love to see some competition on this device… P.S. They could call it the iDouche for all I care, if it’s amazing who gives a rip?
No industry changes overnight, so it is certain that publishers aren’t going to change their business model tomorrow just because a handful of people demand it… But the anger of the devotees, as few as they may be in number, continues and becomes increasingly strident, with neither side willing to “hear” the other.
Adin goes on to raise some interesting points. I do, however, have problems with his argument that the internet has fostered a sense of entitlement:
The Age of the Internet has birthed a belief among some consumers that they are entitled to everything they want when they want it at a price they want to pay… Entitlement says I have rights that are more valuable than your rights (or that you have no rights)…
There is certainly some grain of truth to this and, to be fair, Adin’s argument is more nuanced than the quotation suggests. But it is also a dangerously seductive argument for publishers who don’t want to take full responsibility for their actions.
On a basic level, blaming the consumer and/or accusing them of being uppity (or worse, criminals) is not a good business strategy. Figuring out what they will pay for is a much better idea.
Customers don’t necessarily want cheap — they want value. Sure, everyone likes cheap stuff in the short term — free is even better — and yet most people know that in the end you get what you pay for. Quality costs.
Consumers will pay for things when they believe they are worth it, and as publishers, we need to recognise we aren’t always providing real value for money. We publish too many books and (shh… whisper it) a lot of them aren’t very good. We can do better. How many books really do need to be released in hardcover a full year before they’re available as paperbacks (or e-books) for example?
I also don’t think you can ignore that consumer attitudes are being led by businesses — that publishers have been all too willing to oblige — who have an interests in devaluing creative content as much as possible. Cheap content gets people in to stores and sells devices and publishers have benefited from this in the short-term. But we need to realise that cheapening our own content is like pissing in the pool. Not cool and not a good idea — even if it feels good at the time…
That all said, I think Adin recognises that it is not a one way street. He argues that publishers and consumers need to compromise:
The ebookers have thrown down the gauntlet, the publishers need to pick it up and accept the challenge. Simply because some ebookers have decided that publishers have no role to play in the future ebook world doesn’t make it so. Publishers need to redefine themselves in 21st century terms, not rehash 20th century concepts.
[T]here is a lot of R&D money being poured into [e-readers] — that’s how technology companies work — and one or more of them may eventually click with consumers, but right now it’s a fledgling market and the hype surrounding it has reached irrational levels in publishing circles… There are many fundamental business issues that need to be addressed related to e-books — rights, royalties, pricing, distribution, marketing — and it’s up to publishers, agents and authors to figure them out together and not be distracted by every new shiny object the technology companies come up with.
Although clearly not a big advocate for e-readers, Guy raises a lot of the question marks that I think still hang over the devices in a fairly balanced way, and the article as a whole expresses a lot of the doubts I hear from other quietly skeptical people in publishing.
Needless to say, the whole thing is worth reading and Guy has more to say on the subject at his blog loudpoet.
I really don’t know why smart people make predictions.
Surely one of thelessons 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?
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:
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?
[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.
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.
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.
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…
Book business faces ‘tectonic’ shift: 2010 and beyond, part oneBook business faces ‘tectonic’ shift: 2010 and beyond, (part one)
In a recent op-ed for The NY Times, ‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’, Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, asked:
Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author’s work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?
This is essentially a more articulate framing of a question I asked here a couple of weeks ago. But unsurprisingly Galassi offers a far more compelling defence of Random House than I could manage:
[S]hould another company be able to issue e-book versions of Random House’s editions without its involvement? An e-book version of Mr. Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” will contain more than the author’s original words. It will also comprise Mr. Loomis’s editing, as well as all the labor of copy editing, designing and producing, not to mention marketing and sales, that went into making it a desirable candidate for e-book distribution. Mr. Styron’s books took the form they have, are what they are today, not only because of his remarkable genius but also, as he himself acknowledged, because of the dedicated work of those at Random House.
I think the point here is that books are often a collaboration between author and publisher, and in this sense publishers add value — or, at least, they did in the past. Galassi’s example is Styron, but we now know that Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish was instrumental in defining the author’s trademark style. No doubt there are other high profile examples…
As Peter Ginna, director of Bloomsbury Press, points out in this post, and in a comment on my post here, there are definitely some issues around royalty payments that Random House need to address. But while e-books are little more than converting the file format of a work, I do have some sympathy for Random House’s argument about rights.
Back in November, the chaps at The National Post asked me and a selection of eminently more qualified Canadian book types what we thought the most important publishing story of the past 10 years was. They ran the results at the weekend and the smart answers ranged from decline of literary magazines to the rise of Google.
I have to admit, I was at a bit of loss as to how answer the question. Decades are such arbitrary periods of time. I read somewhere that the 19th Century didn’t really end until 1914, and in a way I feel like the 21st Century didn’t really start until the day after 9/11 2001. And who is to say that epoch is over? So many things still look the same…
Of course I really have no idea what any of the last 10 years meant for books. I don’t have enough perspective. All I knew is that I wanted to say something positive (nobody likes a whiner) and avoid saying anything too obvious, boring or bullshitty (i.e. definitely no talk about either the “death of publishing” or “teh internetz”).
In the end I equivocated and then gushed about something close to my heart — comics:
“J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and online retailer Amazon dominated the decade, but they have their roots in the previous century (Amazon was founded in 1994, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997). George W. Bush surely has a claim — his crimes and misdemeanours created an industry within an industry and produced many fine books including The Dark Side by Jane Mayer and The Forever War by Dexter Filkins — but the very thought of the 43rd President of U.S. being the publishing story of the decade is simply too horrifying to contemplate seriously. Many people will no doubt say e-books, but I think they will be the story of the next decade. So I’m going to go with the popular success and the critical acceptance of long-form comics (the “graphic novel” if you must) as the big story. With the likes of Asterios Polyp, Black Hole, Bone, Epileptic, Fun Home, George Sprott, The Hunter, Jimmy Corrigan, Louis Riel, Paul Moves Out, Persepolis, Safe Area Gorazde, Scott Pilgrim, Skim and Shortcomings (not to mention the beautiful reprints of Peanuts and translations of Tezuka and Tatsumi) to name just a few, we really have had a wonderful decade.”
Perhaps, not the wisest thing I’ve ever written, but hey…
The Post also asked us to nominate our best books of the decade.
But with all those caveats firmly in place, here is my annotated and abridged list of the best books of the decade compiled for The Post:
Remainder by Tom McCarthy (Metronome 2005, subsequently published by Alma and Vintage)
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was the first book I worked on at Raincoast Books — We briefly distributed the Alma Bookshardcover before Vintage published their own paperback edition (pictured above, cover design by John Gall of course,with the most unlikely of blurbs from Jonathan Lethem) in the US and Canada — so it has a special place on my shelf. Oh and it’s really good.
Here’s what I wrote for The National Post:
“If only for a fleeting moment Remainder, a dark and spare novel about personal authenticity and murderous re-enactment, seemed to offer a creative alternative to the cul-de-sac of overwrought and twee novels emanating from Brooklyn (and creative writing classes everywhere). Sadly the bloated and banal seem to have made a decided comeback (if they ever went away), but even so, the unashamedly intellectual Remainder stands out, perfectly capturing the fears and anxieties of the decade.”
Possibly the polar opposite of Remainder, Chabon’s literary Boy’s Own adventure hit a lot of my buttons: Golden Age Comics, Eisner, Steranko, European folklore, New York, and WWII. Really, what’s not to like? But my affection for this book ebbs with every new effort — including Chabon’s own — to repeat the formula and turn pulp into something politely literary. (And NB the Picador paperback cover design above is by Henry Sene Yee — you can see his sketches here).
Perhaps not my favourite graphic novel favourite of the decade (that slightly dubious honour would probably go to Tekkon Kinkreet — and although the English edition I own was published in 2007, the series itself is actually from the mid-90’s, so I didn’t think it qualified for this list), but Ware’s breakthrough graphic novel began the decade and went on to creatively define it for graphic novels. No Jimmy Corrigan, no McSweeney’s Issue 13.
Like Kavalier and Clay, Ishiguro’s quietly evocative SF novel justifiably appeared on a lot of other Best of the Decade lists. It’s just beautifully, beautifully written and has a silver sliver of ice at its heart.
It’s almost impossible to think about books that are representative of the decade without including at least one on the Bush Presidency, 9/11 and the awful ‘war on terror’. The Dark Side could easily have been the aforementioned Forever War by Dexter Filkins, orGhost Wars by Steve Coll, or Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, or one of the many other excellent books on these topics. But Mayer’s exposé of state-sanctioned torture chillingly underlines the bureaucratic banality of evil and the horror lived long in the mind after I finished reading it.
And, you know what? TheDark Side reminded me that books are important. They can and should be more than vehicles of self-promotion. Research — real research — requires more than Wikipedia. And — fuck it — we need to keep paying writers to write.
I suspect Louis Riel is now a creative and stylistic albatross for poor ol’ Chester Brown, but it was my joint first choice for the Canadian book the decade. This is what I wrote for The National Post:
“Not only is Louis Riel a uniquely Canadian story, it was published by Drawn + Quarterly (surely the most interesting Canadian publisher of the decade) and it epitomizes their success at unearthing and supporting creative talent. It isn’t a coincidence that Daniel Clowes—author of Ghost World and one the cartoonists of his generation—has decided to publish his new book with them.”
Although Pattern Recognition did not receive good reviews when it was first published and I bought the hardcover out of a reminder bin, it was my other pick for Canadian book of the decade. The book’s obsession with the fringes of pop culture and the dislocation and horror of the globalized world seemed to me (in some small way) to make it the first novel genuinely about the 21st Century. Even if it dates horribly (which many critics seemed to think it would), I think it’s a something of a cult classic. This is what I said to The National Post:
“A prescient post-September 11th novel about viral media, [Pattern Recognition is] the antithesis of the clunking, insular, parochial Canadian novel so beloved of literary prizes. The book is not without its flaws – it was not well received by the critics when it was published in 2003 – but it just fizzes with ideas, oddness, and energy. I can’t think of another Canadian novel that I refer to quite as often in everyday conversation. Give me flawed and brilliant over dull and worthy any decade of the century.”
OK — I love Pattern Recognition and I do talk about it a lot — but I was being a bit of a shit disturber here (which is probably why The Post ignored it). That said, Pattern Recognitionis better than several other books (that shall remain nameless) that did make the cut that’s for sure.
So, that’s my list. You can read the Post’s selections here. What did we miss out?
Unlike indomitable, indefatigable Sarah Weinman, I didn’t read over 462 books this year (think about it — that’s a book-and-a-quarter a day people!), so I couldn’t possibly post a best of the year list and keep a straight face. Still, I thought it might be nice to post an unscientific list of my 10 favourite new books of 2009 on the very last day of the year.
I also realised that — try as I might — it would be impossible to leave out books that I had worked on in some capacity. Apparently I need to get out more, but it I think this is a more universal symptom of work-life, digital-life, and “real” unplugged-life blurring (sometimes uncomfortably) for a lot of people in publishing (or is it just me?).
Anyway, with this in mind, all the books on this list distributed in Canada by Raincoast are identified with an asterisk. They’re here because I genuinely like them, but you’re an adult so you can make up your own mind about their merit.
And one last note: All the title links are to the Book Depository in the UK because they readily ship books worldwide. However, I have also linked to all the respective publishers, and added an IndieBound widget to the left sidebar (with links to all the listed titles) for anyone in the US who would like to support their local independent bookstore (Canadians: You can find your local indie via the CBA website).
My Advent Books recommendation for 2009, Asterios Polyp made it on to so many best of 2009 lists that Mazzuccelli’s beautifully understated and deceptively nuanced book almost feels over-hyped at this point. But you know what? It couldn’t possibly leave it off this list. I loved it. It’s a elegantly balanced combination of show and tell, and like Maus,Palestine, and, hell, even Watchmen before it, Asterios Polyp feel likes it expands the possibilities of the medium. Oh and Polyp reminds me of my art teacher at school — right down to the way he holds his cigarette — which, to be honest, is more than enough reason to be on this list.
A wonderful visual shopping list for any design-minded book collector, each of 100 classic graphic design books in this “ideal library” is shown with its cover and a number of spreads. It’s gorgeous and inspiring.
(NB: I’m hoping to have an interview with Jason in the New Year. Fingers crossed).
Zuckerman’s crisp hyper-real photographs (also see Creature, Wisdom) retain a warmth and genuineness that so often goes AWOL in contemporary digital photography. I mean god knows how much — or how little — work was actually done in Photoshop after the fact, but somehow the grace and natural beauty of the birds comes through. There is nothing clever, or even particularly gimmicky about this book, it is just really, really well done. The perfect coffee table book.
I’d been coveting the oversize and limited editions of this unashamedly beautiful collection of Harper’s paintings and illustrations for a while before Ammo released an affordable hardcover edition this year. This is simply a wonderful, inspiring book, and now there is no excuse not to own it.
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s lovingly rendered 856 page manga portrait of an artist as a young man in post-war Japan was criminally overlooked in the best of the year lists in my humble opinion. It apparently took Tatsumi a decade to complete. “Epic” is just about the only word that covers it.
The subtitle — “A Collection of Letterpress Examples with Specimens of Type, Ornament, Corner Fills, Borders, Twisters, Wrinklers, and other Freaks of Fancy” — probably sums up this lovely book best. It is, admittedly, slightly bonkers, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that will eventually go out of print and then you’ll wish you’d bought one when you had the chance (and no, I won’t sell you mine).
THE HUNTERBY RICHARD STARK, ADAPTED & ILLUSTRATED BY DARWYN COOKE IDW, ISBN 9781600104930
Bleak, snappy, and fabulously illustrated, Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s hardboiled Parker novel is pretty much pitch perfect. I only hope more Parker adaptations are on the way. Pretty, pretty please.
I deliberated over whether to include Philip Hoare’s charming book about whales in this list. Not that it isn’t worthy — it certainly is (it won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction earlier this year) — but because it was first published in the UK 2008 and it is not available in North America until 2010 (HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint are releasing it under the title The Whale in February). So does it count as a 2009 title? In the end I decided it was eligible because it was published in paperback in 2009 and, ultimately, this is the year I read it (admittedly in hardcover) and it was too good to leave out. And Philip Hoare is from my home town. But that has nothing to do with it. Honestly.
The privileged offspring of Harry Potter and The Secret History (and/or Whit Stillman) invade Narnia and shoot things. It’s almost as good as it sounds, although it’s a shame the protagonist is, to be quite frank, a simpering cock. Nice villain though.
A tidy collection of contemporary graphic design inspired by the classic mid-century modern of Saul Bass, Lucienne Day, Alexander Girard, Charley Harper, and others. There are a few too many music posters perhaps, but Naïve is still neato coolsville.
So there you go, that’s my 10 favourite books of the year. What were yours?
Leaving the specifics of Covey aside (because I just don’t think you can generalize from his position), Peter Ginna doesn’t seem to think Random House has much of a leg to stand on. Nor, for that matter, does Richard Curtis, or the Author’s Guild. And agents are understandably unhappy…
But my question (to someone who does know something about rights) is if e-books remain essentially shovelware and aren’t substantially transforming the original book as edited and designed by the publisher, don’t Random House kind of have a point?
While TheWall Street Journal recently suggested that e-readers are more eight-track than iPod and Forrester Research predicted that B&N will steal market share from Amazon and Sony in 2010, Joe Wikert, General Manager & Publisher at O’Reilly Media, made the even bolder prediction that Amazon — in the face of stiff competition from other e-readers and multi-use devices like the iPhone — “will completely exit the Kindle hardware space within the next 3 years”.
Although predicting the future is a mug’s game (and Amazon are particularly adept at being at least 2 or 3 steps ahead of the pundits), I think that Joe — an early Kindle advocate — might actually be onto something and Amazon really might be prepared to let the device, if not the format or apps, die quietly.
Does this mean that Amazon made a mistake in launching their own e-reader?
I don’t think so.
If publishers had rushed to embrace the Kindle, Amazon would have completely pwned the distribution of e-books (and had publishers even further over the proverbial barrel).
But even though this hasn’t quite worked out, Amazon are still sitting pretty. The Kindle has undoubtedly increased the popularity of e-books and Amazon — the best known and largest online bookstore — is the natural beneficiary. Even if manufacturing the hardware becomes too much like hard work, Amazon will still sell a lot of e-books and the Kindle will surely have served its purpose as a beachhead…
Kindle and Shortcovers
And on the subject of the Kindle, it’s been interesting to see Indigo, Canada’s biggest book retailer, respond to Amazon launching their e-reader north of the border.
Joel Silver, President of Indigo, — who apparently reads on his Blackberry — discussed e-readers and e-books on Business News Network last week (there’s also an interesting follow up interview with the estimable Jason Epstein) and Michael Serbinis, President of Indigo’s e-book initiative Shortcovers, took a few (slightly uncharitable) pot-shots at the Kindle in a recent interview with The National Post.
But, as Shortcovers clearly demonstrates, Indigo have been preparing for the arrival of the Kindle for a while, and — if you have a spare hour — it worth listening to Michael Tamblyn, their VP of Content, Sales & Merchandising, re-enact his Tools of Change presentation Your Reading Life, Always With You to see where they are going…
So what do you think is the future of e-readers? Any thoughts?
