As a writer, blogger, and marketing guy, I’m finding the ebook topic highly interesting (the comments below the original post were illuminating), so indulge me while I post a quick followup to the results (so far) from our “plan to buy an ebook reader?” poll:

Already Have One: 22 (15% of all votes)
Never: 65 (43% of all votes)
Thinking About It: 58 (38% of all votes)
Buying One For Sure: 7 (5% of all votes)

I’m willing to guess that the groups above divide along a pair of fault lines:

  • Age
  • How much reading you do outside of fly fishing

In other words, younger folks are more likely to accept digital versions of print vehicles. Also, those who read a lot outside a particular niche – novels, nonfiction, etc – are far more likely to accept digital books.

I’d also suggest that quite a few of the “Never” folks may eventually come around, especially if e-book readers ultimately become cheaper. In fact, I strongly suspect we’ll see the digital equivalent of “give away the razors and sell the blades for a monster profit” mentality emerging in just a few years.

Or not. I’m not an oracle.

The False Choice

Most of the discussions surrounding ebooks have taken place in the context of “traditional” publishing versus writer-as-publisher markets.

In other words, people (and many pundits) seem to be assuming two possible choices.

Which – given what’s happened in other industries when technology overthrows the status quo, is probably wrong.

For example, when online marketing was clearly becoming The Next Big Thing for us marketing writers, we made similar assumptions – with so much online real estate needing filling, we initially assumed demand would rise, we’d find our fees and demands for our skills skyrocketing.

Which isn’t at all what happened.

Instead, the Internet allowed every part-timer and unemployed person with a PC and a copy of Strunk & White to become a “freelance copywriter.”

While that was happening, search engines (like Google) re-prioritized online marketing, which in many cases became less about selling and more about convincing Google this was a good place to send people.

The result was a wholesale devaluation of a big, big chunk of the online copywriting market, and eventually, the implosion of the bottom half (after low-budget SEO jobs replaced formerly living-wage print jobs).

Is it possible digital book publishing will have a similar – or other largely unforeseen effect – on the book market?

What’s Already In The Works

Several authors are making good money ($100K) selling cookie cutter thriller/romance novels exclusively as ebooks, and for $3-$4 apiece.

They’ve bypassed the publisher entirely (several had books rejected by publishers – books which are selling briskly), and are making a living around what used to be termed “the margin” of the market.

That’s only possible in large markets (and fly fishing isn’t a “large” anything), but it does suggest that traditional publishers may lose control of the bottom half of the market (sound familiar)?

It also suggests markets may emerge for new kinds of publications – shorter, more targeted works that wouldn’t have been published before because the economics of printing, production and distribution worked against them.

We’ll see. No matter how it flies, I think it’s going to be a very, very interesting decade for publishing.

See you at the keyboard, Tom Chandler.

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