再The future of the book, October 11th 2014 P46 (本の将来)
Almost as constant as the appeal of the book has been the worry that that appeal is about to come to an end. The rise of digital technology - and especially Amazon, a bookshop unlike any seen before - underlined those fears. In the past decade people have been falling over themselves to predict the death of books, of publishers, of authors and of bookshops, even reading itself. Of all those believed at risk, only the bookshops have actually suffered serious damage. Historically books were a luxury item. Having become cheap enough for the masses in the 20th century, in the 21st century digital technology and global markets have made them more accessible still. In 2013 around 1.4m International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNS) were issued, according to Bowker, a research firm, up from around 8,100 in 1960. Those figures do not capture the many e-book that are being self-published without an ISBN. Many of those self-published books are ones in which traditional publishers would have no interest, but which almost-free distribution makes worthwhile：do you feel like checking out some Amish fiction? The size of the text, as well as the size of the niche, becomes less of an issue, too；short stories and novellas are making a comeback. “Before there used to be too-big-to-carry and too-short-to-print,” says Michael Tamblyn, the boss of Kobo, an e-reading company. “Now all those barriers are gone.” Even the most gloomy predictors of the book's demise have softened their forecasts. Nicholas Carr, whose book “The Shallows” predicted in 2011 that the internet would leave its ever-more-eager users dumb and distracted, admits people have hung onto their books unexpectedly, because they crave immersive experiences. Books may face more competition for audiences' time, rather as the radio had to rethink what it could do best when films and television came along；the habit of reading for pleasure has fallen slightly in the past few years. But it has not dropped off steeply, as many predicted. The length and ambition of a bestseller such as Donna Tartt's “The Goldfinch” - 864 pages in paperback - shows that people still tackle big books. And they are willing to cart them around, too. The much ballyhooed decline of the physical book has been far from fatal. “I thought everything was going to change so much more quickly and so much more radically,” says Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer at Simon & Schuster, a big publisher, who had predicted in 2010 that half of all book sales would be e-books by 2013. Instead, last year e-books accounted for around 30% of consumer book sales (not including professional and educational books) in America, the largest book market in the world and the country where e-books took off most quickly. In Germany, the world's third-largest, e-books were around 5% of consumer book sales last year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy. The growth rate of e-books has recently slowed in many markets, including America and Britain. Publishers now expect most of their sales to remain in print books for decades to come - some say for ever. There are a number of reasons. One is that, as Russel Grandinetti, who oversees Amazon's Kindle business, puts it, the print book is “a really competitive technology”：it is portable, hard to break, has high-resolution pages and a “long battery life”. Technology companies that are used to consumers flocking to snazzy features and updates have found it surprisingly challenging to compete with a format of such simplicity, and consumers are uninterested in their attempts to do so. All most want is the ability to change font size, which is attractive to older eyes. Experiments with reinventing the presentation of books - by embedding sound and video inside e-books, for example - have fallen flat. Sales of e-readers, the most popular of which is the Kindle, are in decline. “In a few years' time,” a recent report by Enders Analysis, a research firm, predicts, “we will look back at e-readers and remember then as one of the shortest- lived of all consumer media devices.” You do not need a dedicated e-reader to read an electronic book. The multipurpose tablet devices which are replacing e-readers let you read books and - crucially - buy them whenever you like. Some forms of book benefit a lot. Heavy readers of genre fiction - romance, thrillers and science fiction - were early converts to the cheaper, more portable alternative. Other sorts of book have remained more stubbornly in print form, for various reasons. Physical books make better gifts；many people still want bookshelves in their homes. Parents who feel that their children are spending too much time with screens go for printed books as alternative, which means a new generation is growing up in contact with print. Perhaps more unexpected than the flourishing of the book is the health of some publishers. When the music and newspaper industries were ravaged by the internet over a decado ago people feared the same fate would befall publishing. “I thought I would say to people, ‘I' m what used to be called publisher,’,” says Dominique Raccah, the boss of Sourcebooks, an independent publisher. But the volume of book sales has stayed steady, and publishers are still, for the most part, the people producing the books that sell. Revenues are down slightly because e-books are a significant part of the market and their prices are lower；but costs have fallen, and thus profits are still there to be made. Publishers used to guess how many books to print and ship and then pay for unsold copies to be returned to them - sometimes as much as 40% of the print run. Print-on-demand systems - digital technology at the service of physical books - reduce risks by enabling publishers to print smaller batches and then fire off more copies quickly if a book sells well. This has proved especially helpful for smaller publishers, such as university presses, says John Ingram of Ingram Content Group, a book distributor. Analogies with the music and newspaper businesses have proved flawed. The music business collapsed in part because the bundle it was peddling fell apart：people wanted the right to buy one song, not the whole album. Books are not so easily picked apart. The music business also suffered because piracy was so easy：anyone who buys a CD can extract the music it contains in digital format in seconds, and can then share it online. Creating a digital file from a printed book by scanning each page, by contrast, is a nightmare. The fate of newspapers has been driven by the decline of advertising - a business publishers (which sell books to readers, not readers to advertisers) were never in. Where the publishers do their selling, though, is changing a lot. The biggest change of the past decade is the decline of physical bookshops, which is good neither for publishers nor the booksellers whose doors have closed. Borders, a chain of American bookshops, and Weltbild, a German one, have gone under. The change affects which books have a chance of breaking out：bestsellers flourish, but midlist books that might have been discovered while browsing in a bookstore are worse off, because consumers cannot easily stumble upon them while shopping the internet. To continue to bring in customers bookshops have changed their look, and increased the space they assign to nonbook products, like stationery, cards and other gifts. “A bookstore is defending a very specific lifestyle, where you want to take out of your day and write or think or read,” says Sarah McNally, owner of a bustling independent bookshop in Manhattan. There have been two casts of villain. First came the large chain stores in the 1980s that wounded independent booksellers and put many out of business. More recently Amazon, an online retailer that started with books in 1999 and now claims to sell “everything”, has ensured an ongoing wave of closures.
