What Happened to E-Books?

Circa 2008, when the Kindle was hitting the market, the hype about e-books was enormous. Some years on, however, there was a turnabout, and expectations these days seem greatly deflated. Yes, e-books are part of the scene, and expected to remain so--but the growth in their share of the market plateaued far below what some hoped, and pretty much "everyone" expected.

What happened? A good place to start would seem to be the respective advantages of the two formats. The most obvious attraction of an e-book is the near-zero cost of producing and distributing them, permitting them to be very inexpensive indeed for the consumer--while permitting access to a great deal of entirely legal "free" content, as with samples, promotional giveaways, and anything public domain content that someone cared to put up online (for instance, all of the classics, down to the early years of the twentieth century). There is also the fact that one can download them immediately rather than await the delivery of a physical copy, while there are great advantages from the standpoint of storage and portability. If your house-room is limited, if you like to read "on the go," e-readers can be helpful that way.

Still, such readers make for more awkward reading than a printed book. The screens are smaller than a hardcover or trade paperback page, and thus carry less content, chopping up a text into smaller pieces. The reader also has a harder time searching through and backtracking using the device than they do a printed book with pages they can physically turn (the more in as, again, the text is chopped up into smaller bits). And the screen, if far superior to a computer screen here, is still harder on the eyes than paper, making it that much less conducive to prolonged reading. The result of all of the above is that people seem to absorb and retain less of what they read when reading it on a Kindle at any given level of skill--and while I think some of the disadvantage may be overcome with familiarity and judicious usage, I have to admit that even as a longtime user of e-readers I still prefer a printed book when available.

There is also the aesthetic pleasure offered by a handsomely printed physical book--how it looks on the shelf or the coffee table, with all that means for those who like to "show off." It is not exactly high-minded--but as we are talking about sales above all, this matters.

That said, all this affects some books more than others. Short, casual reads suffer less from the disadvantages of e-readers--big and demanding books more so. Those who buy books for the sake of showing off--and it is big and demanding books that people like to show off (not the page-turning pulpy potboiler but War and Peace)--also have reason to favor printed books. Moreover, given the cost of an e-reader one cannot enjoy any monetary advantage from buying e-books unless they buy a lot of the books, or enjoy a lot of free content.

The result is that one would expect e-readers to appeal to heavy readers, and especially to heavy readers who get in a lot of light, casual reading, perhaps while on the go--like someone who reads light fiction during their workday commute. I suspect, however, that the number of really heavy readers, period, is in decline; that the number of people who casually consume lots and lots of lighter fiction specifically is declining even more sharply (certainly to go by what seems to be happening with authors in many genre); and that most of those who carry a device with them, even if they would not be wholly unwilling to read, more easily incline to carry their smart phone instead, which allows and in fact privileges other activities (like gaming). I would also have expected the young to be more open to e-readers than their more print-accustomed elders, but I suspect leisure reading to be much, much less common among those born into the world of the smart phone, such that they are that much less a source of support for the technology.

And of course, there is how Big Publishing handled the phenomenon. Yes, the great virtue of the e-book is that it can cut marginal costs to nothing, and permit books to be sold very, very cheaply to the reader--but the publishers controlled pricing and used it to protect their print business, keeping e-book prices much higher than they have to be to all but eliminate the price advantage. (Indeed, e-books, ridiculously, cost more than the paperback editions of books.) At the same time there is their attitude toward "ownership" of the content. Buy a printed book and you own it. "Buy" an e-book, at that high price, and you have "access" to it akin to your access to a streaming service--with what you paid for potentially disappearing at any time. (Thus has it gone with Microsoft's Nook.)

"Innovation!" the buzzword-repeaters love to say. "Disruption!" Well, Big Business doesn't like being "disrupted," and much more often than not it keeps that from happening--the imperatives of quarterly profits triumphing over technological advance in that manner which proves the techno-libertarian pieties hollow and meaningless time and time again, all as the buzzword-repeaters remind us that they repeat because they cannot think.