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CQR Future of Books

CQR Future of Books

Researcher Published by CQ Press, A Division of SAGE CQ www.cqresearcher.com Future of Will traditional print books disappear?

he migration of books to electronic screens has been accelerating with the introduction of mobile on Kindles, iPhones and Sony Readers and the growing power of ’s Search Tengine. Even the book’s form is mutating as innovators experiment with adding video, sound and computer graphics to text. Some fear a loss of literary writing and reading, others of the world’s storehouse of knowledge if it all goes digital. A recent settlement among Google, and publishers would make more out-of- ’s Kindle 2 digital book reader can store print books accessible online, but some worry about putting such hundreds of books and read text aloud. Like the electronic Sony Reader, the Kindle features glare-free a vast trove of literature into the hands of a private company. text easier on the eyes than a computer screen. So far, barely 1 percent of books sold in the United States are electronic. Still, the economically strapped industry is I under pressure to do more marketing and publishing online as N THIS REPORT S younger, screen-oriented readers replace today’s core buyers — THE ISSUES ...... 475 I middle-aged women. BACKGROUND ...... 484 D CHRONOLOGY ...... 485 E CURRENT SITUATION ...... 488 CQ Researcher • May 29, 2009 • www.cqresearcher.com AT ISSUE ...... 493 19, Number 20 • Pages 473-500 OUTLOOK ...... 495 RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE ◆ AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD ...... 498 THE NEXT STEP ...... 499 FUTURE OF BOOKS CQ Researcher

May 29, 2009 THE ISSUES OUTLOOK Volume 19, Number 20 MANAGING EDITOR: Thomas J. Colin • Will the Google Book The iPod of Books? [email protected] 475 Search settlement restrict 495 It hasn’t been invented yet, most say. ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Kathy Koch public access to digital [email protected] books? ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Kenneth Jost • Will traditional print SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS books disappear from the STAFF WRITERS: Thomas J. Billitteri, Marcia Clemmitt, Peter Katel marketplace? Wholesale E-Book Revenue • Will literary reading and 476 Tops $50 Million CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Rachel Cox, writing survive online? U.S. electronic book sales Sarah Glazer, Alan Greenblatt, have risen steadily since 2002. Barbara Mantel, Patrick Marshall, BACKGROUND Tom Price, Jennifer Weeks Digital Era Arrives at DESIGN/PRODUCTION EDITOR: Olu B. Davis In the Beginning 478 Book Fair 484 Socrates lamented changing Publishers urged to maximize ASSISTANT EDITOR: Darrell Dela Rosa methods of communication. digital content. FACT-CHECKING: Eugene J. Gabler, Michelle Harris Golden Age 480 Is This the Future of Book 487 Many big publishers were Publishing? “Espresso” machine produces launched in the 1920s. books in five minutes. Decline of the Backlist The Long Tail Phenomenon 488 By the mid 1970s, urban 483 How “low-sellers” revolution- A Division of SAGE bookstores had begun ized . PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER: disappearing. John A. Jenkins Chronology 485 Key events since 1450. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, REFERENCE INFORMATION GROUP: CURRENT SITUATION Alix B. Vance 486 Print-on-Demand Flips Publishing Woes Traditional Publishing Model Copyright © 2009 CQ Press, A Division of SAGE. 488 Traditional ways of selling ‘Sell first, then print’ is pub- SAGE reserves all copyright and other rights herein, books are changing. lisher’s new motto. unless previously specified in writing. No part of this publication may be reproduced electronically or oth- Writing a Tale With Help erwise, without prior written permission. Unautho- Revolutionary Changes 490 From Your Readers 490 The e-books market is rized reproduction or transmission of SAGE copyright- Readers collaborate with a ed material is a violation of federal law carrying civil small but growing. British novelist. fines of up to $100,000. Appealing to Youths At Issue CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional 492 Publishers are using Web 493 Will the Google Book Search Quarterly Inc. content to entice young settlement expand access to CQ Researcher (ISSN 1056-2036) is printed on acid- digital books? readers. free paper. Published weekly, except; (Jan. wk. 1) (May wk. 4) (July wks. 1, 2) (Aug. wks. 3, 4) (Nov. Settlement Fallout FOR FURTHER RESEARCH wk. 4) and (Dec. wk. 4), by CQ Press, a division of 492 The Justice Department is SAGE Publications. Annual full-service subscriptions probing the Google Book For More Information start at $803. For pricing, call 1-800-834-9020, ext. 1906. Search settlement. 497 Organizations to contact. To purchase a CQ Researcher report in print or elec- tronic format (PDF), visit www. cqpress.com or call Bypassing Publishers Bibliography 866-427-7737. Single reports start at $15. Bulk pur- 494 Scribd, the popular Web 498 Selected sources used. chase discounts and electronic-rights licensing are also available. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., site, launches an online and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send and book- The Next Step 499 Additional articles. address changes to CQ Researcher, 2300 N St., N.W., store. Suite 800, Washington, DC 20037. Citing CQ Researcher Cover: Reuters/Mike Segar 499 Sample bibliography formats.

474 CQ Researcher Future of Books BY SARAH GLAZER

den popularity of reading on Apple’s iPhone took many THE ISSUES by surprise. Over 1.7 million he university book- users have downloaded Stan- store ran out of the za software, which permits T assigned them to read a book on their for your course? No prob- phone from a selection lem. The young woman be- of more than 100,000 titles. hind the counter can print The announcements in Feb- one out in the time it takes ruary that both Amazon and to make an espresso. Google were making their ti- Don’t like the way the lat- tles available on the iPhone est episode of the only added to the buzz. 4 you’re reading online has “Suddenly there was a turned out? Write in a plot sense in 2008 that an e-book development of your own. program was something a (But be forewarned: Anoth- publisher couldn’t be with- er reader may edit you out.) out,” says Michael Bhaskar, Forgot to bring a book digital editor at publisher Pan with you on the subway? MacMillan in Britain. And if You’ve got President Barack 2008 was about e-books, Obama’s Dreams from My “this year is about smart- Father on your cell phone, phones,” says Bhaskar. His right at the place you stopped company was one of the first reading last night on your major publishers to make its Kindle. 1 The recent Google Book Search settlement among titles available on the iPhone Google, authors and publishers promises to make The world of reading is millions of out-of-print books available online that were and the BlackBerry and now changing before our eyes. once limited to the New York Public and great plans to bring most new titles More books are becoming university collections. But many librarians worry that out in electronic as well as available than ever before, digital access to the world’s great books will be print format. and in many more formats. in the hands of a private company. The fact that today’s new It remains to be seen whether read- new manuscript acceptances and books start out from the writer’s desk ers will flock to these or even more tough times for bookstores, digital as digital files has contributed to the futuristic ways of reading. But already books have entered publishing’s main- growth of another way of producing the innovations have caused anxiety stream for the first time. In this piv- books — print-on-demand. Theoreti- in the troubled publishing industry be- otal year for e-books, Amazon.com cally, books can remain digital files cause they suggest radical changes in introduced the Kindle 2.0 and the until they’re ordered by the customer, how books are supplied to readers, larger-format Kindle DX — which both at which point they are printed on laser much as technological changes are permit the wireless download of a printers, order by order. Increasingly threatening the very existence of the book in less than a minute — and publishers are using this method for newspaper industry. Sony Reader acquired 500,000 titles books about to go out of print and for “The publishing industry is in a dif- from Google. Both companies’ elec- scholarly or obscure books with low ficult position,” says Mike Shatzkin, tronic readers employ a technology readership. For non-, pub- CEO of the Idea Logical Co., a digi- that does not require backlighting, lishers can print out one book at a tal-publishing consulting firm. “We have making its glare-free text easier on time, saving the expense of big print all these new challenges to invest in, the eyes than a computer screen. 2 runs, storage and bookstore returns, and meanwhile the old model for pro- For years, e-book enthusiasts have while retailers can avoid holding in- ducing money is in trouble. So pub- said the product couldn’t really take ventory that doesn’t sell. lishers are squeezed from both sides.” off until the equivalent of an iPod for Yet all these innovations still ac- Amid troubling layoffs in publish- books was developed. 3 It’s not clear count for a small percentage of what ing over the past year, cutbacks in whether we’re there yet, but the sud- passes for reading a book. Despite

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 475 FUTURE OF BOOKS

tent digitally, while still making money Wholesale E-Book Revenue Tops $50 Million for themselves and their authors. U.S. electronic book sales have risen steadily since 2002. Last year “We’re moving to a post-literate wholesale revenues exceeded $52 million, or nine times higher than culture where YouTube is a search engine and video gaming is the main in 2002. Digital books still make up less than 1 percent of books sold form of entertainment. How does in the United States, however. that impact storytelling?” asks Pan Wholesale Revenue MacMillan’s Bhaskar. (in $ millions) This spring, won $60 U.S. Wholesale Electronic Book Sales top awards at the hip SXSW (South (trade books only)* by Southwest) interactive media festival 50 in Austin, Texas, for its online story- 40 telling experiment. Over a period of six weeks, readers clicking on a Pen- 30 guin Web site could read a develop- ing mystery being written by a nov- 20 elist online, search for clues planted 10 on the Internet and contribute plot suggestions to the as the story 0 was being written. Access to the site, 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 “We Tell Stories,” was free even * Library, educational and professional electronic sales not included; figures though it drew on the skills of sev- may be as much as double the above wholesale figures. eral published authors. 6 Source: International Digital Publishing Forum Penguin’s experiment “is fascinating, but I’m not sure how it ever makes rapid growth, sales revenue generat- Demand Books, which markets the money,” comments Shatzkin of Idea ed by electronic books, whether read machine, says the publishing model Logical, expressing a widely shared on a laptop, Kindle or cell phone, still of the last 500 years — in which pub- worry in the industry. And he’s puzzled accounts for only about 1 percent of lishers printed large runs and then had by those who see it as the future of the $11 billion adult trade book mar- to warehouse and ship physical books fiction: “Participatory content creation ket in the United States, estimates at enormous costs — is headed for makes sense, but why are we calling Michael Smith, executive director of extinction. it books?” he asks. the International Digital Publishing Today, “you can go directly from But those experimenting with on- Forum, a trade association. the digital file to the end user with line forms of literature suggest our de- Similarly, volumes produced through nothing in between,” he points out. finition of “book” itself needs to be print-on-demand account for less than “That means you can store in theory more expansive. “A book is an ex- 1 percent of the more than 3 billion every book ever written in whatever perience, not a chunk of paper,” Chris books printed each year in the Unit- language at practically no cost. And Meade, director of the London liter- ed States, according to David Taylor, deliver that file practically anywhere ary think tank if:book, recently told president of , the on Earth at no cost. This has a revo- an audience of book club members leading print-on-demand company. 5 lutionary effect on the way books are in Oxford, . “If you think of The , which made and distributed.” the experience of reading a great can deliver a bound in less Eventually, the traditional publish- novel and take the novel away,” you than five minutes, is currently installed ing industry would have collapsed can still have a “fantastic” experience, in only a handful of bookstores in anyway because of structural obsoles- he maintained. North America and England, but its cence, he says. “With this recession An online book about William Blake manufacturers envision widespread use and the arrival of digitization, the recently launched by Meade’s organi- in college bookstores, on cruise ships process will be hastened.” zation displays Blake’s poems along and in remote areas of the world. (See Publishers are still trying to figure with gorgeous graphics and videos of sidebar, p. 480.) out how to appeal to young readers an interview with a Blake expert and Former editorial di- — who do most of their reading on- an actor reading Blake’s poem “London.” rector Jason Epstein, co-founder of On line — by offering free multimedia con- Over the next few months, readers are

476 CQ Researcher invited to help it grow by contributing the first of Louisa May Alcott’s ment agreement, 51 percent of these via Twitter and Blogger (a free blog- Little Women and other 19th-century out-of-print books scanned into the publishing tool from Google) and the books too brittle to be handled. database will be priced initially at Blake “netbook” itself. 7 The recent Google Book Search $5.99 and below. 11 The ease of publishing a book from settlement among Google, authors “For many of these books the only a digital file means many more actors and publishers — if approved by the way you can get to them is if you’re can get into the act. Small presses can court — promises to make millions a student at Harvard,” or some other be formed in someone’s living room of out-of-print books available online major university, says Dan Clancy, en- or at a local bookstore. Authors who that were once limited to great uni- gineering director at Google. “One of could never interest a big publisher versity . But the fact that this the things we found exciting was the with their family genealogy or purple- vast of 20th-century litera- fact that it broadened access not just prose novel can be listed on Amazon ture will be in the hands of a private to subscription holders but also to or simply publish online. company has many librarians worried users at home, who get a free pre- With the cost down to a few hun- as the world’s treasure trove of books view and the book for what looks to dred dollars to have your book pub- — past and future — becomes in- be an inexpensive price.” lished by one of the author-services creasingly digital. However, some librarians have companies (the new vanity presses), Here are some of the questions harshly criticized the settlement be- who needs publishers? On the defen- being debated by publishers, librari- cause of fears that it puts too many sive, publishers say they still play an ans and the ultimate consumers — restrictions on public access. aesthetic filtering role as the curators readers: Harvard Library Director Robert of good writing. Darnton has criticized the agreement Yet more and more books and ex- Will the Google Book Search for placing what could be the largest perimental writing are becoming avail- settlement restrict public access digital library in the world in the hands able online for free without publish- to digital books? of a private company. In effect, he ers’ filters. And as publishers put out Last October, Google announced that has written, the settlement hands more digital books, it may be easier it had reached a $125 million settle- Google a monopoly over the digitiz- for hackers to convert copyrighted ment with authors and publishers who ing of “virtually all books covered by works into pirated editions. Some had sued the company for scanning copyright in the United States.” 12 publishers are reporting that piracy millions of books from university li- The settlement gives Google per- has surged in recent months along braries without compensating them. 10 mission to continue scanning copy- with rising demand for e-books, rais- The proposed settlement permits righted books as long as they were ing concerns that piracy partly accounts Google’s Book Search engine to make published before Jan. 5, 2009. for declining print book sales. Pirated entire copyrighted books available “No new entrepreneurs will be able editions of works by children’s writer online for a fee and to show up to to digitize books within that fenced-off J.K. Rowling have been posted on 20 percent of a copyrighted text at territory . . . because they would have Web sites like Scribd, and other copy- no charge. Google will keep 37 per- to fight the copyright battles all over righted works are cropping up on file- cent of the revenue from online book again,” Darnton wrote in the New York sharing services like RapidShare. 8 sales and advertisements that run next Review of Books. “[O]nly Google will be Still, some authors like Wired edi- to previews of book pages; the re- protected from copyright liability.” 13 tor Chris Anderson and novelist Cory maining 63 percent will go to authors “What will happen if [Google’s] cur- Doctorow claim that publishing for and publishers. rent leaders sell the company or re- free online is actually the way to sell University and K-12 school li- tire?” he asks. What will stop Google more print books because of the ex- braries will be able to access the en- from charging exorbitant prices or fa- posure it provides. 9 tire Google database, currently about voring “profitability over access”? Indeed, rather than chasing printed 10 million books, by buying a sub- “The settlement locks in a single books into oblivion, some experts say scription, while public libraries will player to offering access to the vast digitization is making more books be provided a terminal with free ac- majority of the 20th-century’s works,” available than ever before, even if they’re cess to the digital collection. The concurs Brewster Kahle, founder of in a different format. A massive digi- biggest impact will be on books still the , a nonprofit or- tization project by the Library of Con- under copyright but no longer in print ganization that has scanned some gress allows, for the first time, anyone — about 5 million of which have 1.2 million works in the public domain with a computer at home to look at been scanned so far. Under the settle- (out of copyright), which it makes

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Digital Era Arrives at Publishers urged to confront “perfect storm” by maximizing digital content.

t the international London Book Fair this April, a stroll The keys to survival, he told the publishers, are the prolif- through the massive exhibition hall could have lulled erating channels of digital content able to reach the tens of A a visitor into thinking the book business is alive and millions of readers who look for information on the Web but well: Publishers were busy striking deals over foreign rights for don’t frequent bookshops. Stop putting the physical book at printed books, sipping white wine to celebrate. the center of your thinking, he urged: “Experiment at all costs” But despite appearances, anxiety about the industry was by offering digital content — and make it free if necessary. palpable, as publishers and booksellers attended seminars on As further proof that the market is changing, the core au- digital publishing with gloomy titles like “Where’s the Money?” dience of American book buyers — middle-aged women — At the fair’s first-ever “Digital Zone,” Janet Hawkins, an in- will be dwindling in coming years, according to Bowker, a dependent bookshop owner from Blessington, Ireland, was try- leading source of publishing industry data. By 2016, those baby ing out a hand-held Sony Reader as she considered offering boomers will be retiring, going onto fixed incomes, while the digital e-books downloadable from a computer terminal at her Gen X-ers stepping into their shoes will constitute a smaller, shop. Hawkins is “terrified” her business will be destroyed if more screen-savvy generation of buyers. 3 Amazon’s Kindle, a competitor of the Sony Reader now avail- Despite all the attention to new mobile readers like the Kindle, able only in the United States, is introduced in Britain. Unlike desktop personal computers and laptops are still the devices used the Reader, which must download books from a separate com- most frequently for reading e-books, and it may have something puter, the wireless, hand-held Kindle downloads from Ama- to do with all those female romance readers, who are leading zon’s proprietary online bookstore and would eliminate any purchasers of e-books. You’re not likely to be detected reading role for shops like hers. (Her window of opportunity may soon a “bodice-ripper” at work if you do it on your PC, romance pub- evaporate, however; the trade press has been reporting that lisher Harlequin discovered from reader surveys. Sony plans to join Amazon in producing a wireless reader. 1) Yet iPhones hold the greatest potential for growth among Last year’s drop in American book sales, following years of lit- readers who don’t have gray hair, Bowker Vice President for tle or no growth, led Michael Healy, executive director of the Book Publisher Services Kelly Gallagher predicted, even though a Industry Study Group, to ask if book publishing was “doomed to company survey found iPhones account for only 10 percent of follow its dinosaur cousins, newspapers, to extinction.” 2 e-book purchases, trailing behind PCs and Amazon’s Kindle. What little growth the industry has seen in recent years has Surprisingly, Kindle’s largest ownership group is middle-aged, been driven almost solely by increases in book prices, not the the survey found, countering its reputation as the reading de- number of books sold, according to Healy, whose group tracks vice of future generations. industry statistics. He bluntly told a roomful of publishers that Over in the Digital Zone, fairgoers could see some of the theirs is “an industry in decline.” reasons why 1.7 million (mainly young) people have down- Publishing faces a “perfect storm” — more book titles every loaded the Stanza reading application onto their iPhones. Its year but fewer people who want to read them, Healy warned, latest features include 135 new background colors to pair with citing declining spending by households on books and inde- 21 crisp fonts as well as background “themes” like “bedroom” pendent bookshops struggling to survive. (red, satiny sheets) and links to a dictionary while reading. available to the public for free via an that Google has been granted a re- as opposed to working to make it bet- online platform. lease of liability to exploit that group ter,” he says. Moreover, the way Google Kahle says he’s particularly dis- of works that no one else has,” Kahle structures its searches is not intended turbed that the settlement gives Google says. Legislation could have made or- to help serious researchers do large- legal immunity to scan potentially mil- phan works accessible to anyone. scale searches quickly but involves lions of books whose copyright hold- Google is in effect “legislating through “speed bumps” aimed at maximizing ers can’t be located easily — so-called settlement,” he says. the number of times a person views “orphan” books. His organization would Kahle also contends Google will a search page with its accompanying also like to scan those works but would feel no competitive pressure to do a ads, according to Kahle. risk being sued for copyright infringe- good-quality job that ensures digital Google’s Clancy responds that the ment. Kahle favors legislation to pro- copies are as readable as possible. settlement gives Google a “non-exclusive” tect all scanners from copyright suits. “Once you have a monopoly, the temp- arrangement to scan these works, “Increasingly, people are gathering tation is just to defend your monopoly meaning other groups could copy the

478 CQ Researcher Worries About Piracy Consumers expect e-books Piracy discussions at the to be priced more cheaply fair underscored a central than printed books, and they anxiety — how to make will be because publishers and money on digital publish- booksellers have fewer ex- ing without being ripped penses, Shatzkin predicted. off. One speaker pointed That couldn’t have been re- to a decision by a Swedish assuring to the publishers in court as a sign that piracy the room who wondered is being stifled. On April 17 aloud why they should be in- vesting in a sector that now the court sentenced four CQ Press/Sarah Glazer founders of The Pirate Bay, Online books and hand-held digital readers were a commands barely 1 percent a popular file-sharing site, big feature of this year’s London Book Fair. of U.S. book sales. to a year in jail for violat- Indeed, British publishers at ing copyright. 4 the packed “Where’s the But skeptics at the fair predicted new piracy sites would Money?” session argued heatedly against lower pricing for e- pop up in its place. (As of May 27, Pirate Bay’s Web site had books. Such a move, Chairman and CEO John not been shut down, and similar sites also were operating.) Makinson told the standing-room-only crowd, would be “short- The day after the digital seminar, The Independent, a British changing authors.” 7 daily, reported substitute approaches already emerging. For ex- ample, searches for copyrighted material are being conducted 1 Marion Maneker, “How the Next Kindle Could Save the Newspaper Busi- ness,” Wired, May 6, 2009. by networks of individuals, avoiding the need for a legally vul- 2 5 The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) tracks publishing statistics. All nerable centralized Web site. statistics cited are for the U.S. market. According to the BISG, the number Paradoxically, piracy has stimulated sales of some titles by of books sold fell 1.5 percent from 2007 to 2008. giving them more publicity, according to a study cited by in- 3 Sixty-five percent of U.S. book buyers are women, according to Bowker, which publishes the authoritative Books in Print. dustry consultant Mike Shatzkin, CEO of Idea Logical Co. 6 He 4 “Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders,” BBC , April 17, 2009, argued that publishers’ encryption of e-books to prevent piracy http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8003799.stm. The decision was expected — known as digital rights management — has been ineffective. to be appealed. It would be more effective to price e-books cheaply enough 5 Pat Pilcher, “Pirate Bay ‘could soon be obsolete,’ ” The Independent, April 20, 2009, www.independent.co.uk. so consumers don’t feel they have to search for free versions 6 The study was conducted by Magellan Media Consulting Partners of New on pirate sites, Shatzkin argued. Strong consumer demand for York City, www.magellanmediapartners.com/index.php/mmcp/Research/. cheaper books is evident in the recent growth in 7 See Lynn Andriani, “British Publishers Try to Find the Money in E-Books,” purchases, which explain in part why fewer new books are , April 21, 2009, www.publishersweekly.com. being bought, he said. books as well. And Paul Aiken, exec- ing to let his organization in to scan representing the American Library As- utive director of the , one once Google has knocked on their door. sociation and the Association of Re- of the parties to the suit, says authors Indeed, it’s not clear why a library search Libraries. His associations don’t “want real competition in getting these would let anyone in to scan except oppose the settlement. But in com- books out to the world.” At the same Google, since their legal protection for ments filed with the court responsible time, he cautions, these books “are out scanning copyrighted works appears to for approving the settlement, they are of print for a reason” — they’re not extend to the host library, according to proposing “vigorous” court oversight to commercially in demand. (See “At Randall Picker, a professor of law at the prevent artificially high pricing in the Issue,” p. 493.) University of Chicago. absence of competition. The libraries Out-of-print books are vital to re- Many libraries worry that Google is have also asked the judge to protect searchers, however, and Kahle contends likely to abuse its monopoly by charg- the privacy of users who read Google’s the agreement is exclusive in practice: ing them exorbitant subscription prices, books online. 14 Libraries in the past have been unwill- according to Jonathan Band, a lawyer Continued on p. 481

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Is This the Future of Book Publishing? “Espresso” machine produces a book in five minutes.

bout as big as a large photocopier, the machine is just starting to do.) In addition to bookstores, Epstein sees the probably the last thing one would expect to see at the Espresso being used in libraries, schools, hospitals, cruise ships A flagship store of Blackwell — Britain’s leading academic and developing countries that lack book distribution networks. bookseller. But tucked in an alcove at the store on Charing Blackwell’s machine cost about $100,000, according to a Cross Road in London, it offers a glimpse at a possible future company spokesperson, but Gipps expects it to pay for itself for book publishing. As signs alluringly promise: “Become an in about six months. The machine can produce a book for author — Print your own book” and “Out of print, Out of about $3, with retail prices set by the publisher. The makers stock books — Available Right Here Now.” expect the Espresso’s cost to decline significantly as more are The Espresso Book Machine, which its makers hope will one marketed, and eventually hope to lease it out for about the day become the ATM of books, can dispense a paper-bound same price as a photocopier. book in under five minutes from a digital file, using ink-jet tech- That could make it attractive to libraries trying to save on pur- nology for the cover and high-end laser for the pages. chasing and storing books, says Kari Paulsen, president of To the average reader, the color cover and black-and-white pages Library, which markets e-books to more than 1,000 libraries world- are indistinguishable from the traditional published version. wide. Increasingly, libraries trying to save on storage are telling “Suddenly, it’s increased our stock by a million titles,” says her that if a book is not in e-book form they don’t want it. With store manager Marcus Gipps, citing the number of digital files an Espresso, a librarian could tell a patron, “You can get it as an in the catalog offered by On Demand Books, the manufacturer. e-book or pick it up downstairs printed out in 15 minutes.” A li- That’s the equivalent of brary might also make some rev- 23.6 miles of shelving, ac- enue back by selling Espresso- cording to Blackwell. At least printed books. 250,000 of those titles are At the University of Alberta out of print, once inacces- Bookstore in Edmonton, Cana- sible to most customers. da, the Espresso has printed some Previously, when cus- 13,000 books since November tomers asked for a book that 2007. “Edmonton is a long way wasn’t on the shelf, the typ- from pretty much everything, so ical response was, “Can we we have huge shipping bills and order it for you?” Often the long delays,” says Todd Ander- customer decided to look else- son, director of the bookstore. where.”Now we say, ‘Can we The store has saved on shipping print it for you?’ ” says Gipps. costs by acting as a local print- AFP/Getty Images/Leon Neal The Espresso was installed Customers can print their own books on the Espresso er for publishers who would have in the store in April as a test. machine at the Blackwell bookstore in London. to send a book thousands of If successful, it will be installed miles; it saves inventory costs by in more Blackwell shops, many located at universities, says Black- printing only as many copies as students request. It’s been able well CEO Andrew Hutchings. He expects it to be particularly pop- to save students money by printing assigned classics that are out ular for self-publishing, publishing theses and printing course packs of copyright, like Frankenstein, and selling them for less than the — selected chapters from assigned by professors. standard publisher’s sticker price. The bookstore has also printed As of mid-May, the Espresso had been installed in a dozen books of local interest like a 1908 visitors’ guide to Edmonton, sites in North America, England and Australia, according to Dane local self-published genealogical histories and original small-press Neller, CEO of On Demand Books. In the United States, an books by local authors. Espresso machine is in use at the University of Michigan Library, Because of the ease of printing digital files at outposts like Ed- where it prints out-of-copyright and rare books from the library’s monton, the machine could make it possible to distribute “virtually digitized collections, and at Northshire Books, an independent every book ever published, in any language, anywhere on Earth as bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., among other sites. easily, quickly and cheaply as e-mail,” claims On Demand’s brochure. Eventually, as On Demand Chairman Jason Epstein envi- Epstein, a former editorial director of Random House, thinks sions it, customers will be able to order any book they want the effect on publishing could be revolutionary — and could from a computer or cell phone and pick up a freshly printed even save precarious independent bookstores. “I think indepen- copy in their neighborhood shop. (To accomplish that, pub- dent bookstores will flourish, and some will become publishers, lishers will have to digitize all of their titles, which some are as they were in the 18th century,” he predicts.

480 CQ Researcher Continued from p. 479 Parties to the settlement — the Amer- in New York and London. He sug- “I’m concerned that as Google seeks ican Association of Publishers and the gested that “we change our descrip- the market for this it could be so ex- Authors Guild — defend the agree- tion of reading to include the full pensive for a public library that it will ment, maintaining that without Google range of these activities, not just time be out of our reach,” says Sari Feldman, such a vast digital library would never spent looking at the printed page.” 19 executive director of the Cuyahoga have existed. In Stein’s view, as electronic books County Public Library in suburban Cleve- “Wouldn’t it be much better if the start to have links to yet more references land and executive president-elect of Library of Congress had done this? and multimedia enrichment, the central- the Public Library Association. Yeah, probably it would have,” said ity of printed books in our culture will Feldman is also concerned that the Patricia Schroeder, outgoing president fade. “They’ll stop being the principal one terminal per building where Google of the publishers’ association and a way people exchange ideas,” he pre- will provide free access to its data- former Democratic congresswoman dicts. “That role is shifting to things hap- base “is not nearly going to satisfy the from Colorado. “But they didn’t have pening on screens on our desks or in customer demand we have,” especially the money to do it, and they didn’t our pockets. In all likelihood the future since the agreement does not permit do it, and the libraries have copies of of the book is as an art object — beau- the database to be accessed remotely everything now. What do we do at tiful objects that look like books — not from library members’ homes. this point as rights holders?” 17 what most of us will use as the way we According to Clancy, the free termi- Before Google started scanning li- take ideas from the culture.” nal is intended to help libraries that can’t brary books in 2004, even well-endowed Despite such futuristic scenarios, afford the institutional subscription and libraries were digitizing less than 10,000 e-books — the main form in which dig- could be expanded later. “It’s a start,” he volumes per year — a rate Google ital books are sold — remain less than says. University libraries that purchase ratcheted up to tens of thousands of 1 percent of the entire U.S. book mar- subscriptions will be allowed to provide volumes per week, observes Univer- ket, and some in the industry are skep- remote access to students and faculty. sity of Michigan librarian Paul Courant. tical that e-books will ever take over. By contrast, K-12 school libraries will not In his article, Darnton charged that “When I first came to this job [more have access to a free terminal; they will the special status granted Google under than eight years ago], people were pre- have to purchase a subscription. Nor will the settlement dashes the Enlighten- dicting that e-books were here and any they be able to provide remote access ment philosophers’ dream of establish- minute they would be taking over the to students and teachers; readers will ing a Republic of Letters, in which any- world,” says outgoing AAP president have to use the database on school prop- one who could read would have access Schroeder. “The other thing people would erty to access full-length copyrighted works to the entire universe of knowledge. tell me is, ‘I don’t know why you’re that are out of print. (In comments filed But Courant retorts: “In the absence of going into books. Young people want with the court, the American Library As- the settlement, we would not have the whistles and bells and noise.’ Then sociation and Association of Research Li- digitized infrastructure to support the along came Harry Potter.” As for e- braries cite these differences as inequities 21st century Republic of Letters.” 18 books, “it’s been a lot slower conver- between K-12 schools and higher edu- sion than many people thought.” cation institutions that could deepen the Will traditional print books dis- Publishing consultant Shatzkin agrees. “digital divide.”) 15 appear from the marketplace? “We’re having a lot of conversation Google has discretion as to which The mother of a 10-year-old boy about something that doesn’t have a lot books it copies, and under the agree- recently described the way her son of commercial heft right now,” he says. ment it does not have to make public reads a printed book: “He’ll put the “This is not a profit center for anybody its entire list of scanned books. 16 “A book down and go to the book’s Web in regular book publishing yet; this is foreign government might put pressure site. Then, he’ll check what other read- still an experimental investment.” As an on Google to exclude books about the ers are writing in the forums, and example, he points to Amazon’s policy Armenian genocide or [the 1989 protest maybe leave a message himself, then of pricing most of its bestselling Kindle at Beijing’s] Tiananmen Square,” library return to the book. He’ll put the book books at $9.99, significantly below pub- association attorney Band observes. And down again and Google a query that’s lishers’ retail prices, which means the if Google has employees in those coun- occurred to him.” company is taking a loss. tries, Google might agree to leave those This description was recently post- Some in the industry think 2009 books out. “You could have a very im- ed on the Web by Bob Stein, founder will be the year that changes all that, portant research base with holes dictat- and co-director of the Institute for the with the introduction of the Kindle 2.0 ed by foreign governments,” he says. Future of the Book, a think tank based and DX, the availability of Kindle books

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 481 FUTURE OF BOOKS on the iPhone and Google Book ing and discussion groups, author vis- ture — at least in nonfiction. But what Search’s deal to provide millions of its and a renewed commitment to cus- about fiction? books to the Sony Reader. A new, tomer service.” In a recent post, Stein of the Insti- lightweight, large-format reader, which An even more radical future is seen tute for the Future of the Book sug- feels like a plastic sheet of paper, Plas- in and , countries without gests that will no longer be the tic Logic Reader, is due for commer- sophisticated publishing distribution. They dominant form of fiction in the future cial release next year. 20 may skip the traditional book stage en- but will be replaced by something that Yet skeptics note that electronic tirely and move directly into electronic looks more like the multiplayer online readers are expensive, and many find readers with purchasing enabled by game “World of Warcraft.” Its 10 mil- them annoying to use. On-demand their extensive cell phone network — lion subscribers assemble into teams of publishers think digital will take over much the way Kindle users buy books 30 or more to accomplish specific goals. in another way — by making it pos- — to wirelessly download and purchase “It’s not a big leap to think of the sible to print out books on demand books; Amazon provides a free, per- person who developed the game as an from digital files. For Taylor it means petual cell phone subscription to Kindle author whose art is conceiving, de- glorified printers at central plants; for users for this purpose. signing and building a virtual world in Epstein it means ATMs for books wide- In his 2008 book Books as History, which players (readers) don’t merely ly distributed at bookstores, hotels, David Pearson, director of the Uni- watch or read the narrative” but actu- airports, cruise ships and remote lo- versity of London Research Libraries, ally contribute to it, Stein writes. In this cations in Africa and Asia. argues that books as owned objects vision, digital fiction would include video, If there’s consensus, it’s that non- have been important for historical re- sound and readers’ comments. 23 fiction references like encyclopedias, search and may continue to be — at Many readers and publishers react atlases and dictionaries will continue least if book owners still write in the in horror to the idea of communal to migrate online, where they can be margins. For example, by recording creativity — what happens to the updated continually, and where com- who the owners were and their mar- single, narrative voice that creates a munity efforts like Wikipedia have gin notes on all surviving copies of world of the imagination into which benefited from many contributors. the first two editions of Corpernicus’ the reader can plunge? Whether read on screen or on paper, De Revolutionibus, scholar Owen And what author would want to par- the classical book format has a much Gingerich was able to show how quick- ticipate? As writer Cory Doctorow com- better chance of survival than news- ly Copernicus’ heliocentric ideas were mented on Stein’s post, “many authors papers and magazines, because books accepted (or not) by 16th-century as- lack the capacity to interact with their don’t have advertisers to lose or sub- tronomers across Europe. 22 audiences. They are grumpy. To publish scribers they need to hold onto, ac- Although many find the prospect these authors successfully, publishers will cording to Peter Osnos, founder of the of vast digital libraries that can be ac- either have to hire ‘ghost-bloggers’ or independent publisher PublicAffairs. 21 cessed on screens exciting, others see give them charm lessons.” 24 By the early 2000s, well over 30 per- dire consequences if printed books are Already there have been several cent of all books were publishers’ ex- abandoned entirely in favor of digital closely watched experiments online. In cess inventory — largely the result of storehouses. 2007 Penguin Books sponsored a wiki- their policy that books shipped to re- Computers crash, they argue, and ob- novel writing experiment, A Million Pen- tailers could be returned for full credit, solescent digital information in the form guins, written by hundreds of readers Osnos observes. The costs in wasted of, say, old floppy disks sometimes can’t collaborating online. Penguin CEO paper, manufacturing, packing, ship- be accessed with modern computers. John Makinson called it “not the most ping and the glut of remaindered books “Imagine if all the printed books read, but possibly the most written all depress profits. disappeared,” says Epstein. “If we novel in history.” That will begin to change after the blew a fuse, we’d all be savages again. Penguin kicked the novel off on a current recession, Osnos predicts, now Whoever we are is in these books.” special Web site with the opening line that digital technology for reading, lis- from Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane tening and printing on demand is be- Will literary reading and writing Eyre: “There was no possibility of coming easier to use. In the future, survive online? taking a walk that day.” he predicts, bookstores will become The success of Wikipedia, written “Within about five minutes it had mainly showrooms — places “to en- by thousands around the world, sug- completely changed. We had 1,500 edits gage in the time-honored pleasures of gests that collaborative or “networked” the first couple of days,” recalls Bruce browsing and conversation, with read- books could be the wave of the fu- Mason, a research fellow at the Uni-

482 CQ Researcher The Long Tail Phenomenon How “low-sellers” revolutionized bookselling.

n 2001 the first so-called digital natives came of age. Chil- the same or better margins than a hit, Anderson points out. dren who had started using the Internet in 1995 at age 12 The 1988 low-seller Touching the Void is an example of I turned 18, graduating into the 18-34-year-old demographic how specialist niches help unknown books. By 2004 it was most sought after by advertisers. But they were fundamentally outselling Jon Krakauer’s best-seller Into Thin Air on the same different from previous generations — TV viewership in their age subject of mountain climbing tragedies, because of word of bracket dropped for the first time in half a century. 1 mouth and Amazon reader reviews. Instead they were occupying The long tail phenomenon an online space where “niche The Impact of ‘Low-Sellers’ affected other aspects of the book economics rule,” in the words business, too. In 1997 Alibris was of Wired magazine editor-in- Best-sellers sell the most copies and make the launched as an online retailer for chief Chris Anderson, using blogs most money. While books far down on the sales used books. It aggregated the in- and Web sites rather than mass- charts sell fewer copies and make less money ventories of some 12,000 used- audience TV to explore inter- individually, they bring in a large portion of book stores and made the data- ests and buy products. base available to Amazon and In an October 2004 article in total publishing revenue because so many so- Barnes & Noble’s bn.com, bring- Wired (expanded into a 2006 called low-sellers (the long tail of the graph) are ing millions of users to the used- book), Anderson introduced the sold overall. book market. Even though used term “The Long Tail,” now wide- books are usually sold one at a ly used in the publishing and Annual publishing revenue time, Alibris was soon growing digital industries. He pointed out at double digits. that the traditional marketing strat- The long tail phenomenon egy of focusing on best-sellers at has tapped into a growing the top of the demand curve was community of people interest- missing the many low-sellers, ed not only in consuming but which form the endlessly “long also producing information 2 tail” of the same demand curve. “Long tail” of the about a huge range of topics, (See graph, at right.) many of them obscure. In When aggregated, the low- demand curve 2001, Jimmy Wales, a wealthy sellers make up a big portion of options trader, came up with the market, Anderson argued — the idea of getting millions of a market that the new online sell- Sales Rank amateur experts to create an ers were uniquely positioned to online encyclopedia, using a take advantage of. For example, Source: Book Industry Study Group software application called wiki. he pointed out that one-quarter Wikipedia was a far cry from of Amazon’s book sales came outside their top 100,000 titles. 3 the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which recruited experts to write Anderson credits with being the first to test this its entries. Yet by 2005, Wikipedia had become the largest en- idea when he launched Amazon in 1995. Amazon uses online cyclopedia on the planet, with more than 1 million articles retail to aggregate a large inventory of low-sellers. At the time, compared to the Britannica’s 80,000. 4 even superstores carried only about 10 percent of the titles available in English. 1 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (2006), p. 95. 2 Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, Amazon didn’t have to worry Ibid. Also see Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, October 2004, www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. about filling up shelf space in valuable real estate. And with no 3 Anderson, The Long Tail, op. cit., p. 23. shelf space to pay for, a niche product is just another sale with 4 Ibid., p. 66. versity of Edinburgh specializing in folk- had to be moved to another. At first, When the wiki-novel finally closed lore who helped to run the experiment. vandals tried to delete much of the novel, on March 7, 2007, at least 75,000 differ- So many people tried to get onto the and along the way some contributors ent people had viewed the site. Of those, site in the first few days that the serv- insisted on reshaping the plot continu- 1,476 people had registered as users of er was overwhelmed, and the project ally according to their liking. the wiki. The ultimate, chaotic product,

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 483 FUTURE OF BOOKS which involved 11,000 edits and 1,500 generations, requiring more multime- is about “transport methods” rather pages, wasn’t really literature, most ob- dia content and more participation, than the cargo being shipped. “Every- servers agreed, but it demonstrated the says Pan MacMillan digital publisher one wants to be captivated by a great way that passionate, online literary com- Bhaskar. story or a great argument.” 29 munities can form. 25 Networked books (like A Million Mary Harrington, an associate at the “The final product itself . . . is more Penguins) are “quite a nebulous con- Institute for the Future of the Book in akin to something produced by the cept in that nobody really knows ex- London, is more skeptical that long- wild, untrammeled creativity of the folk actly what one might look like. Al- form fiction will migrate from print to imagination,” researchers Mason and most by definition it’s an experiment,” digital. “The Internet is very good for Sue Thomas, professor of new media says Bhaskar. And with the current re- conversation, but once the conversa- at Britain’s De Montfort University, cession, “I think right now the climate tion’s been had, it makes sense to fi- Leicester, wrote, describing it as “rude, is less forgiving for these eye-catch- nalize it in print,” she says. She points chaotic, grotesque, sporadically bril- ing, high-profile experiments that have to the new science fiction novel Play- liant, anti-authoritarian and, in places, no revenue stream attached.” ing for Keeps, by Mur Lafferty. 30 It devastatingly funny. As a cultural text And so far, even in networked book started out as free digital content (in it is unique, and it demonstrates the communities, barely 1 percent of those this case podcasts), built up an online tremendous potential of this form to who sign on tend to be interested in community and then became a print provide a stimulating social setting for actively contributing; the rest just read book. writing, and publishing.” 26 what’s going on. 27 The physical nature of a book gives Yet the narrative didn’t really hold University of Chicago sociologist it qualities that are completely inverted together as a single story line, and Wendy Griswold thinks there will con- when it comes to the Internet, Harring- the writing varied from “exciting and tinue to be readers of print books, but ton points out. As a fixed entity be- talented to really bad clichés,” ac- they will be an elite reading class that tween covers, a book must limit and cording to Mason. is highly educated, older and pre- choose its words carefully. Its authorial “I don’t really think the wiki novel dominantly female — much like today’s voice has made the book authoritative makes sense,” says Thomas, who co- core group of book buyers. ever since the creation of sacred works authored the research report and Surprisingly, though, a similar demo- like the Bible, and its message can be helped run the experiment. “A novel graphic group has been drawn to the universal. has to be quite controlled. We didn’t Kindle. The largest group of Kindle By contrast, Harrington says, the In- produce a novel; we produced some- owners is middle-aged (56-64 years old) ternet is “boundless, never authoritative thing fascinating.” and includes slightly more women — there’s always someone who has In another Penguin-sponsored exer- than men, according to a survey of something to add,” on a blog or a Web cise, an award-winning novelist was 120,000 book purchasers presented site. “And it’s never universal,” since asked to write a detective-story version by Bowker at the London Book Fair writers online are writing for frag- of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, on April 19. 28 (Men are more frequent mented audiences. “Because the Inter- to which readers were invited to con- adaptors of the iPhone, the survey net is boundless, intangible and not tribute. Readers searched for clues hid- found.) edited, you can never publish the de- den on Craigslist and other Internet And other traditional literature is finitive anything online.” sites, interacting in real time with the migrating onto the new screens. novelist/narrator to give her solutions Narrative — an online literary maga- to the mystery. zine that publishes stories by celebrated The result: a charming story, written veterans like Joyce Carol Oates as well BACKGROUND with a sly slant. Unlike A Million Pen- as new talents — has become the first guins, it succeeded as a coherent story literary magazine available on Kindle. — probably because the novelist had If readers are going to be viewing ultimate control over how the story was literature on a screen no bigger than In the Beginning composed and which contributions to a beer coaster, the writing needs “to incorporate. (See sidebar, p. 490.) be sharper, smarter and more eco- he Greek philosopher Socrates Publishers are experimenting with nomically and elegantly expressed than T (469-399 B.C.) lamented the loss these new formats because they think ever,” writes Philip Gwyn Jones, pub- of knowledge because the media of the younger generation reads in a fun- lisher of Granta and Portobello books. transmission were changing. Before the damentally different way from older In his view, most of the debate so far Continued on p. 486

484 CQ Researcher Chronology

1965 2001 19th Century RCA acquires Random House. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia Publishing becomes an estab- written by readers, is launched; lished industry in Europe and 1975 first “digital natives,” who used the United States; modern presses Gulf & Western Industries acquires computers at age 12, turn 18. speed printing and reduce the Simon & Schuster. cost of books. 2004 1980 Wired magazine editor Chris Ander- 1810 German publisher ac- son publishes seminal article about Steam press invented. quires Bantam, later Dell, Double- “The Long Tail” in publishing. day and Random House. 1817 2007 Brothers, one of the nation’s 1989 Penguin sponsors online wiki-novel, earliest publishers, begins as a New Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. ac- A Million Penguins. Hundreds con- York . quires HarperCollins. tribute, 75,000 view it.

1850 • 2008 By mid-century, New York is ship- Google reaches landmark settle- ping millions of books to the rest ment over . . . . of the country. 1990s Publishing indus- Troubled publishing industry hit try becomes more concentrated; with layoffs and pay freezes on 1891 World Wide Web introduces digi- “Black Wednesday” (Dec. 3). . . . International Copyright Act passed tal reading, online bookstores. Amazon’s Kindle sells out in Unit- by Congress extending protection ed States by Christmas. to foreign copyright holders. 1994 Viacom acquires Simon & Schuster. 2009 • American Association of Publishers 1995 announces 2008 book revenue Amazon founded as online book- dropped 2.8 percent from 2007. . . . 1920s-1930s store. . . . ’s Holtzbrinck Book Industry Study Group re- Readership expands during Group acquires St. Martin’s Press. ports 1.5 percent fewer books golden age of publishing. were sold in the U.S. in 2008 than 1997 in 2007, for a total of 3.1 billion 1926 Alibris, an online retailer for used books sold, including e-books and Club founded. books, launched. traditional trade, educational and professional books. . . . Amazon 1928 1998 launches Kindle 2.0 (February) and Random House founded. Bertelsmann acquires Random large-screen Kindle DX. . . . House, making half of top 20 Google announces deal to provide 1939 U.S. publishers foreign-owned. 500,000 e-books to Sony Reader. launched, introducing . . . University of Michigan an- . • nounces its scholarly publications will be digital only. . . . More than 1.7 million people have • 2000s New electronic downloaded Stanza reading appli- readers like Kindle and iPhone cations onto an iPhone. . . . 1960s-1980s boost e-book sales. Scribd.com launches online vanity Mergers and takeovers by con- press (May 18). . . . On Oct. 7, glomerates combined with mi- 2000 2009, the U.S. District Court for gration of Americans from cities Best-selling American author Stephen the Southern District of New York to suburbs kill downtown book- King publishes novella Riding the will hold a hearing to accept or re- stores and large inventories. Bullet solely in electronic form. ject the Google Book Search settle- ment with authors and publishers. www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 485 FUTURE OF BOOKS

Print-on-Demand Flips Traditional Publishing Model ‘Sell first, then print’ is publisher’s new motto.

hen Sarah Palin was picked last August as Sen. John tionary in Spanish was pumped out right after eight copies of McCain’s presidential running mate, the publisher E-business in Healthcare and Multivariate Density Estimation. W of the only existing biography of the once-obscure “I’ve been amazed at the most obscure books that some- Alaskan governor found itself in a quandary. Printing more one wants to read,” says Taylor. Many of those titles would be copies on a traditional offset press would have taken weeks dead without print-on-demand, he says, because “you would — and missed the sales window for the book. never print them speculatively” hoping for a sale. Instead, Epicenter Press turned to a leading print-on-demand Only about 40 percent of Lightning Source’s production is for company. Within a few hours of receiving a digital file, Light- mainstream publishers; the remainder is for non-traditional pub- ning Source was producing copies of Sarah on its giant, high- lishers like self-publishers, micro-publishers with as few as one or quality laser printers, and within days — not weeks — it had two titles and content aggregators like bibliolife.com, which offers 30,000 copies. 1 out-of-print books that are printed only in response to an order. A sudden spike in demand is only one of the ways that Despite the significant cost savings to be gained from avoid- traditional publishers are starting to use print-on-demand (POD). ing storing, shipping and pulping unsold books, mainstream More than a decade ago, Ingram Book Group, the word’s lead- publishers have been slow to adopt print-on-demand, mainly ing book wholesaler, was trying to cut down on the unsold because the printing cost per book is higher — especially for books crowding its warehouse. Out of this need it created a best-sellers. Many publishers also have sunk costs in ware- company that would print books from digital files only when housing or haven’t realized that there are potential cost sav- Ingram needed them. ings, according to industry analysts. Today that company, Lightning Source, makes a profit print- However, some publishers aiming for a small, professional ing an average order of only 1.8 books — capitalizing on the readership in areas like medicine and accounting, as well as “long tail” phenomenon, in which individual orders for un- some academic presses, are going straight to print-on-demand, popular books add up to a lot of sales. because it is economical for small . Print-on-demand technology is best known for fueling the re- POD has also stimulated some innovative new uses: Readers cent explosion in self-publishing. Authors who can’t break into can assemble their favorite articles from Wikipedia or Wikitravel, mainstream publishing get their book listed on Amazon or an- for example, and have them bound in a customized book by other database, usually expecting to sell only a few copies to their the German company PediaPress. 2 friends and families, each one printed in response to an order. Digital printing now accounts for only about 1-3 percent of But increasingly, large publishing houses and retailers like all the books printed in North America, but the business is Amazon are also using print-on-demand to fill orders when projected to grow 15-20 percent over the next three years, ac- books are out of stock or out of print. cording to Gilles Biscos, president of Interquest, a market re- As David Taylor, president of Lightning Source, puts it, search company in Charlottesville, Va. print-on-demand reverses the traditional sequence of printing, Increasingly, Lightning Source’s business is shifting toward warehousing and then selling. Instead, his motto is “sell first, traditional publishers as they rethink the way they do business, then print.” according to Taylor. He thinks this trend will continue, partic- Now the world’s leading POD printer, Lightning Source more ularly in an economic climate where publishers are looking to than doubled its monthly printing volume from 600,000 books cut costs wherever possible. in 2005 to more than 1.4 million last year. The company’s plant in Milton Keynes, a sprawling “new 1 “Gov. Sarah Palin Biography brought to market by Epicenter Press and town” 60 miles northwest of London, produces a stunningly Ingram Content Companies,” Lightning Source press release, Sept. 2, 2008. eclectic variety of books. A single copy of an accounting dic- 2 http://pediapress.com.

Continued from p. 484 would weaken the Greeks’ mental ca- “” — parchment pages bound invention of the Greek alphabet 2,500 pacities for memorizing and retelling. together between covers, initially years ago, knowledge and stories were (Paradoxically, we only know about made of wood or leather and later of recited aloud, much like Homer’s epic Socrates’ concerns because they were cloth. The form proved usable and poem The Odyssey. written down by his student Plato in durable, and sometimes labor-intensive. The new technology of writing meant his famous Dialogues.) 31 The great texts of Greek learning, stories no longer needed to be mem- The shape of contemporary books Christian theology and medieval liter- orized, a development Socrates feared can be traced to the invention of the ature were preserved through laborious

486 CQ Researcher hand copying by library scribes and Harper Brothers, one of the ear- monks. Golden Age liest American publishers, began as The next revolution for books came a New York printer in 1817. The with the 15th-century invention of rom its origins more than two cen- firm was soon competing with other printing with changeable type. The F turies ago, the American publishing printers to ship books via the Erie invention is attributed to German industry has followed a historic pattern Canal, which gave New York print- metalsmith Johannes Gutenberg, that has varied little: Copy is delivered ers an advantage over competitors who cast type in molds using a to a printer who ships inventory to a in Boston and Philadelphia, and melted metal alloy and constructed publisher’s warehouse from which it is helped turn New York into pub- a wooden-screw printing press to sent to bookstores. 33 lishing’s center. transfer the image American publishers onto paper. made a brisk business Gutenberg’s first of publishing pirated and only large-scale works by British authors printing effort was like Charles Dickens, the now iconic William Thackeray and in the Bronte sisters the 1450s — a Latin throughout most of the translation from the 19th century, ignoring Hebrew Old Testa- international copyright. ment and the Greek By the 1840s, the Amer- New Testament, ican market had become copies of which can big enough for Dickens be viewed on the to cross the ocean to British Library Web protest the theft of his site. Gutenberg’s in- property, but his plea CQ Press/Sarah Glazer vention made mass The Lightning Source print-on-demand company prints some for copyright protection production of texts 1.4 million volumes a month. About 40 percent of the printing is for was ignored. 35 possible for the first mainstream publishers, but President David Taylor, above, at the plant Soon after, however, in Milton Keynes, outside London, expects the percentage to increase as time. Although the publishers revamp the way they do business. Digital printing now American authors asked Gutenberg Bible it- accounts for only about 1-3 percent of all the books printed in for protection for their self was stratos- North America, but the business is projected to grow own works in foreign pherically expen- 15-20 percent over the next three years. editions. By the end of sive, printed books the century Congress began to spread widely over Euro- Technological developments have had passed the International Copyright pean trade routes during the next made the process more efficient: Act, which allowed publishers to con- 50 years, and by the 1500s printed Steam presses were invented in 1810, tract for exclusive rights to the works books had become more widely ac- and stereotype plates developed in of British and other foreign writers cessible and less costly. 32 1846 made it possible to produce longer and earn a profit from them. By the 17th century, books were runs at less cost per copy. The type By the 1850s, New York publishers being printed by the thousands, in- produced printed sheets that were were shipping millions of books to the stead of hundreds. By this time, then folded, sewn together and rest of the country. too, America had its first printers bound, much as in Gutenberg’s times. The 1920s have been called “the — in Boston, Cambridge and Much as today’s traditionalists fear the golden age” of American publishing. Philadelphia. disappearance of print books, there were The firms that were launched in the By the 19th century, publishing those who decried what they saw as the ’20s were still run by some of these was an established industry in both mediocrity of machine-made books. The distinctive personalities in the 1950s. Europe and the United States, and private hand-press movement began in Bennett Cerf founded Random publishing houses emerged that dealt the 19th century as a reaction to the loss House. Richard Simon, Max Schuster in a general book list, which they of this craft, led by Arts and Crafts artists and Alfred A. Knopf all founded sold to a growing mass market of like William Morris, and such works con- houses that bear their names. They readers. tinue to be valued by collectors. 34 introduced to American readers many

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 487 FUTURE OF BOOKS of the great modernist writers of the sands of titles disappeared into the Dawn of the Digital Revolution time, from James Joyce to Gertrude “orphan” category — no longer in In the 1990s as the World Wide Stein. Thousands of bookstores in print but still in copyright. Web’s popularity grew, entrepreneurs towns and cities were the main dis- In the 1950s, no publisher survived began jockeying to use Web sites to tribution channel for these writers. without its backlist, and best-sellers reach millions of customers at little Publishers also saw a growing were viewed as lucky accidents, ac- cost — driving the first dot.com bub- readership for their books as U.S. il- cording to former Random House ed- ble from the mid-1990s to its collapse declined from 7.7 percent in itorial director Epstein, who first worked in 2000. By the end of the ’90s, the 1910 to 2.9 percent in 1940. School for in the 1950s. “Publish- publishing world was filled with enrollments and libraries grew, and the ers depended on the existence of speculation about electronic books increasingly urbanized nation created thousands of independent bookstores and Internet publishing. receptive homes for bookstores. Book that knew how to sell backlist,” he re- At the time, industry analysts opti- readership also expanded through the calls. In Epstein’s view, the steep de- mistically predicted the nascent e- Book of the Month Club, founded in cline in backlists turned the industry book market would reach $2.5 billion 1926, and paperback books, launched upside down, forcing publishers to by 2002. But the market remained re- by Pocket Books in 1939. shave their profits by vying for best- markably sluggish until recent years. The explosion in recreational read- selling authors with unrealistically high Even by 2006, it had increased to a ing was an historical exception to a advances and guarantees. total of only about $20 million, from tradition in which reading had been Such difficulties forced increasing $7 million in 2003. 39 limited to elites — and it didn’t last, consolidation of the industry. But the Publishers also hoped to make money argues University of Chicago sociolo- big entertainment conglomerates — selling CD-ROMs (acronym for “com- gist Griswold. “The period from the CBS, ABC, RCA and MCA-Universal pact disc: read-only memory”). Although mid-19th to mid-20th century was un- — that acquired publishing houses the CD encyclopedia Encarta proved usual because you had high, univer- in the 1970s and ’80s found them a popular at first, CD-ROMs failed to be- sal literacy and a middle class, but you burden on the balance sheets and come significant sellers. After the CD- didn’t have a lot of alternatives” for sold them off. 36 ROM bubble burst, “a widespread cyn- entertainment, she says. By the 1950s Between 1986 and 1996, 63 of the icism arose about digital publishing, TV began to erode the primacy of 100 best-selling titles were written by which has continued among publish- reading as entertainment. “We’re re- only six writers — Tom Clancy, John ers into the networked era and has only turning to a period where lots of read- Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, begun to adjust,” write Harrington and ing is a minority pastime,” she says, Michael Crichton and Danielle Steel. Meade in a recent report on digital even though many people read for Publishers often sacrificed much of possibilities for literature. 40 work and online. their normal profit and incurred loss- es to keep these highly successful authors. 37 Decline of the Backlist “Publishing was never a profitable busi- CURRENT ness,” says Epstein. “You didn’t do it to y the mid 1970s, as American make money; you did it as a vocation.” B book customers migrated from By the beginning of the 21st cen- SITUATION the city to the suburbs, the great tury, U.S. publishing was dominated downtown bookstores with their large by five financial empires: the German “backlists” — inventories of books other conglomerates Bertelsmann, which had Publishing Woes than new releases and current best- acquired the Random House group, sellers — began to disappear. and Holtzbrinck, which now owns St. ome observers think the tough times Bookstores cropping up in shop- Martin’s and Farrar, Straus and Giroux; S for publishing signal the end of tra- ping centers now had the same lim- London-based Longmans, Pearson ditional ways of doing business, not just ited space and high rent as the cloth- (owner of Viking, Penguin, Putnam a temporary reaction to the recession. ing store next door and needed the and Dutton); Rupert Murdoch’s News Last November, Houghton Mifflin same quick turnover — forcing them Corp., which owns HarperCollins and Harcourt — whose authors include lit- to focus on best-selling authors and William Morrow, and Viacom, which erary giants such as Philip Roth, books by celebrities. By the 1980s, had taken over Simon & Schuster and Gunter Grass and J.R.R. Tolkien — backlists were in steep decline. Thou- Pocket Books. 38 was awash in so much debt that it

488 CQ Researcher announced an unprecedented buying freeze on new manuscripts. 41 At the time, other houses had also frozen ac- quisitions unofficially. 42 Then on Dec. 3 — dubbed Black Wednesday — Penguin and Harper- Collins announced pay freezes. The same day Random House announced it was dissolving Doubleday and Ban- tam Dell and distributing their re- mainders among the conglomerate’s other three publishing groups, ulti- mately causing more layoffs. 43 “To be a journalist or author these days in America is to be a lumber- jack in Wisconsin in the 1930s or a steelworker in Pennsylvania in the 1980s or an auto worker in Michigan, well, right now. It is to be watching your industry, and indeed your way of life, collapsing around you,” Samuel Getty Images/Sean Gallup Freedman, an author and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, recently wrote. 44 In recent years the U.S. book mar- ket as a whole has remained relatively static at 3 billion books sold annually. At the end of last year, book revenues tracked by the American Association of Publishers were down 2.8 percent from 2007. 45 The continuing trend towards con- glomerates got some of the blame. In 2006 an Irish firm, Riverkeep, bought Houghton Mifflin and by July 2007 had taken over one of Mifflin’s largest rivals, Harcourt, in a $4 billion acquisition that left the parent company billions of dol- lars in debt.

“There were hedge fund guys with AFP/Getty Images/John MacDougall no background in publishing buying Reading Devices, Here and Now up publishing houses,” New Press More than 1.7 million users of the Apple iPhone (top) have downloaded Founder Andre Schiffrin told Salon. In Stanza software, which permits them to read a book on their cell phone his view, corporate owners expected from a selection of more than 100,000 titles. In March Google announced unheard-of 15-20 percent profit mar- plans to offer its more than half a million digitized public-domain books gins in an industry with traditional mar- on the Sony Reader (bottom). gins of 3 to 4 percent. 46 The practice at Barnes & Noble publishers’ practice of accepting re- While the big book chains have been and Borders of requiring publishers turned books from stores for full cred- blamed for driving out small bookshops to pay “co-op” fees to get their books it has become another major expense; and squeezing publishers, they’re now placed prominently in a store also returns now represent nearly 40 per- having their own problems. Borders pinches publishers’ profits. American cent of all hardbacks shipped. 47 hovers near bankruptcy, after investing

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 489 FUTURE OF BOOKS

Writing a Tale With Help From Your Readers Readers collaborate with novelist to create a modern take on Alice in Wonderland.

looked at the black mirror, and suddenly it was like Alderman calls this kind of writing a literary form that is in I was falling into a dream.” Alice Klein is a character its infancy. But it has historical antecedents. The earliest Eng- “I in a novel who suffers from writer’s block — until lish novels, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa she finds a strange, black mirror in the second-hand bookshop (1748), are told through characters writing letters in “real time.” where she’s working. When she looks into the mirror, it sends Dear reader, my pursuer is knocking at my door at this very her into a trance and seems to get her writing again. But the moment! mirror also turns out to have evil powers. “It was very exciting to be involved in something so new That’s the plot real British novelist Naomi Alderman cooked where you’re making the rules as you’re writing,” Alderman up when Penguin Books asked her to write an online tale based says. “It’s a different kind of writing; it’s much more collabo- on Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1 rative.” Readers’ suggestions about the direction of the plot But she didn’t write the story by herself. ranged from great to “lousy,” according to Alderman, who Over six weeks, Alderman posted (almost) daily blogs writ- likened the activity to a chef choosing ingredients. ten in the voice of her protagonist, Alice Klein. Readers were As the lead writer on the Alternate Reality Game “Perplex sent to six different locations on the Web to search for secret City,” which has sent hundreds of players running around London messages providing clues to the mystery of the mirror that Alice searching for clues to a murder mystery, Alderman says the re- was trying to untangle. These ranged from answering an ad wards in this kind of collaboration are different from writing on Craigslist to showing up at a live event in London where novels. But she insists she enjoys both. Alderman won the dis- readers could meet a character who had valuable information. tinguished Orange Prize for New Writers for her first novel, Then they e-mailed helpful suggestions to the author. , published in 2006, about growing up in an ortho- At one point in the story, Alice decides to break into the dox Jewish family in England. offices of an evil doctor to steal the mirror. While Alice was “If I just sit in my house and write novels all day, eventu- attempting to break in, she asked readers — blogging live with ally I go crazy because being alone with the imaginary peo- her — to offer clues. “What buttons do you think I should ple you’ve made up in your head does send you crazy,” Al- press?” she asked when she reached a locked door with a mys- derman says. “But if I’m constantly working with other people, terious design. Readers sent solutions. “You’re all geniuses! It I begin to feel like I don’t have any ownership over my own worked!” Alice responded. work, and that also sends me crazy.” heavily in music sections just as CDs market are as high as 30 percent. Their as jockeying by industry giants to make were going out of style. By February, heavy discounting further squeezes their device the iPod of books. 50 Barnes & Noble’s stock price had fall- publishers’ profit margins and spells But some were betting on anoth- en by more than half in the previous more difficulty for brick-and-mortar er horse. At year’s end, Forbes mag- 18 months, triggering job cutbacks. 48 bookshops. azine declared Apple’s iPhone the most Meanwhile the Internet has been popular e-reader, given that 395,000 invading newspapers’ book reviewing users had downloaded the Stanza read- territory, with a flourishing dialogue Revolutionary Changes ing application, which enables the on literary blogs. Two years ago, blog- downloading of 100,000 book titles gers were already reporting that they his past year, almost every month — half of them for free. 51 were being courted by publishers send- T seemed to herald a revolutionary Now more than 1.7 million unique ing them pre-publication galleys in development in the still small but grow- users have downloaded Stanza — along hopes of a mention. As of mid-May, ing e-books market. with more than 7 million e-books — ac- only two newspapers still had sepa- In February, Amazon launched a sleek- cording to Lexcycle, Stanza’s maker. On rate book-review sections: The New er version of its $359 Kindle, with wire- April 27, Amazon purchased Lexcycle, York Times and The San Francisco less access to more than 230,000 elec- leading some industry observers to sug- Chronicle. 49 tronic books. The following month gest that Amazon really seeks to domi- Reference books also have been Google announced plans to offer its more nate the entire electronic books market, badly hit by Wikipedia and other free than half a million digitized public do- not just Kindle devices. 52 works on the Web. Estimates of on- main books on the Sony Reader device. Is iPhone the most popular e-reader? line retailers’ current share of the U.S. Industry analysts described the two deals It’s hard to say because rival companies

490 CQ Researcher What about the widely held view spired the Alice of his Wonderland tales. that art has to be the product of a Another character, Mr. Marsh Ayre, is single imagination?” I think we’re a reminiscent of the March hare. little too hung up on the idea of the In the last episode, Alice is awakened artist as this magnificent individual by a phone call from her agent con- with his or her magnificent genius gratulating her on writing her second that comes only from them and has novel — something she has no memo- nothing to do with the wider world,” ry of writing — much the way the orig- Alderman responds. “Actually, we’re inal Alice wakes from her Wonderland all products of the stories that we dream. hear, of conversations and writers “Apparently I’ve written my second we’ve been exposed to.” novel,” she writes in her final blog post. She likens readers’ real-time re- “At least according to Penguin I have.” sponses to the experience of a play- The link takes readers to a real Pen- wright, where the live audience re- Getty Images/Chris Jackson guin Web site that seems to be selling With help from online readers, British sponds to the words as they are novelist Naomi Alderman wrote a tale a book entitled A Trickle of Ink, described spoken. Her “Alice in Storyland” had based on Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice’s as a “rip-roaring” instant classic by Alice about 1,000 unique hits, with about Adventures in Wonderland. Klein, complete with a price and reader 150 people actually contributing review. 2 Except that no matter how ideas, according to Alderman. In that sense, she says, it’s sim- hard you click, you can’t buy the novel. Like Alice Klein, it ilar to a magic show where only a few audience members doesn’t really exist. will volunteer, “but it’s quite fun to watch” everyone else. “Alice in Storyland” is filled with sly references to the classic, 1 http://wetellstories.co.uk. For “Alice in Storyland,” see http://treacleandink. starting with the character’s names: Alice Klein (Klein means wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/. “little” in German/Yiddish) is a stand-in for Alice Liddell, the 2 www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141885025,00.html. “little” girl for whom Carroll wrote the classic and who in- like Amazon won’t say how many read a book on a tiny screen? When and on a submarine.) “It has to have Kindles they’ve sold. But industry ana- Lexcycle CEO Neelan Choksi is con- color and be multifunctional; it will lysts say up to 500,000 Kindles were sold fronted with that question, he retorts, have to have video.” All the content last year, and up to a million of both “Aren’t you the same person who read you get on your PC, not just books, versions have been sold so far. 53 As 50 e-mails on your BlackBerry yester- will have to be available through it, of mid-March, Sony had sold 400,000 day?” And some users say they find the Choksi believes. of its $350 Readers. 54 crisp iPhone screen with its ability to Mary Klement, a San Diego engi- Stanza is only one of several read- choose 125 background colors easier neer who travels frequently, has 150 ing applications accessible to iPhone to read than the gray and black Kindle. books loaded onto her iPod Touch, users (owners can also download Kin- Most people will go back home which she also uses to watch her fa- dle and , among others), to get it if they’ve forgotten their cell vorite HBO series while flying and to which suggests even more iPhone users phone, not so likely with a Kindle, check e-mail. She likes the conve- are reading on their phones. But most Choksi points out. “If you’re 30 or nience of always having a “book” e-book reading still occurs on laptops under, you’re used to reading blogs with her that’s easy to hold in her or desktops, according to the recent and Facebook on your cell phone palm while waiting at the airport bag- Bowker survey, which found 48 per- already.” gage claim. She can download books cent of all e-book purchases are for The ultimate reader, Choksi thinks, anywhere in the world where there’s PCs. The survey found the Kindle came will have to be “something with the a wireless Internet connection — an in second at 22 percent, followed by convenience of the iPhone.” (Unique advantage over the Kindle, which the iPhone at 10 percent. uses reported in Stanza’s customer sur- only works over Sprint’s U.S. cell phone But how many people want to vey included in the bathroom at work network.

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 491 FUTURE OF BOOKS

With so much activity, e-books are gan’s The Ruins of Gorlan, which in- readers will be able to produce printed “getting closer to a tipping point” for cluded posting downloadable e-books versions with print-on-demand systems. market success, says Smith at the In- on Scribd.com (a YouTube for books); “Why try to remain in a territory ternational Digital Publishing Forum. in the first two weeks, 20,000 people you know is doomed? Scholarly press- E-book retail sales last year increased downloaded the book. 58 es will be primarily digital in a decade,” 68 percent over 2007 to an estimated Just this winter, HarperCollins start- said press director Phil Pochoda. Other total of $107 million, according to the ed releasing e-book versions along with university presses, including Penn State, organization. (See graph, p. 476.) But its new print titles for children in six are moving to digital-only for some that doesn’t include some of the e-book formats including Kindle and books. 65 largest publishers that have been re- Sony Reader. 59 The top three novels porting triple-digit growth, according downloaded from libraries last year to Smith. Nor does it include library were from Stephenie Meyer’s popular Settlement Fallout or higher-education sales, sectors that teen vampire Twilight series, accord- both boast twice the electronic sales ing to library distributor Overdrive. 60 s a result of the Google Book of trade publishers. Meanwhile, Over- Aiming for the millions of Ninten- A Search settlement, up to 10 mil- drive, a leading seller of e-books to do DS machines in British children’s lion out-of-print books where copy- libraries, logged 10 million downloads hands, HarperCollins launched its 100 right holders can’t be located could in 2008. Classic Book Collection in December, now be the exclusive province of In addition, e-books’ fourth-quarter making 100 classics from Romeo and Google to scan and commercially ex- sales doubled last year over the same Juliet to Treasure Island readable on ploit, according to Internet Archive period in 2007, Smith pointed out, and the portable devices. The publisher has founder Kahle’s estimate. this January sales jumped 174 percent sold 200,000 copies of the collection, A variety of groups are planning to over the first month of last year. Pen- which can also play appropriate back- file comments in court raising con- guin announced its e-book sales jumped ground music for about $23 extra. 61 cerns over the settlement, including 500 percent in 2008 over the previ- In February, Sourcebooks became the Internet Archive, the Institute of ous year, although e-book sales are the first major print publisher to re- Information Law and Policy at New still less than 1 percent of total rev- lease a digitally enhanced . York Law School (which has financ- enue. 55 Random House and Simon & Readers of Laura Duksta’s I Love You ing from Microsoft), the American Li- Schuster also expected e-book rev- More can hear the voice of the moth- brary Association and the Association enue to at least double. 56 er and the son as they read along. 62 of Research Libraries. 66 “I don’t think the traditional print The market position of e-books At the end of April, The New York book will be replaced, but I do ex- could be improved by the adoption Times reported that the Justice De- pect reading habits of the younger gen- last year of a uniform standard for e- partment was launching an inquiry into eration will change,” says Smith. “My books known as .epub, developed by the antitrust implications of Google’s 9-year-old gets in the car and wants Smith’s organization. Usable on a va- settlement and was talking with groups the Sony Reader all the time; she reads riety of platforms, it saves publishers opposed to the settlement, including her Nancy Drew titles on it.” the cost of producing digital files in the Internet Archive and Consumer several different formats. Watchdog. That same month, Judge Some publishers see a big digital Denny Chin of U.S. District Court in Appealing to Youths future. HarperCollins CEO Victoria New York, who is overseeing the set- Barnsley has estimated that “within 10 tlement, postponed until Sept. 4 the ublishers are enticing young read- years more than half our sales will deadline for parties to file briefs op- P ers using combinations of Web come from digital downloads.” 63 posing the settlement and for authors content and books. For instance, Last October, Newsweek announced to opt out of it. The court’s hearing to Scholastic’s The 39 Clues — aimed at it would publish four books about the decide whether to accept the settle- 9-12-year-olds — combines online presidential and vice presidential can- ment and to consider objections was game playing and card collecting didates, available only electronically also postponed, to Oct. 7, 2009. 67 with a series of traditional books; its on the Kindle. 64 Under the settlement, revenue gen- first one, Maze of Bones, became a In March, the University of Michigan erated from subscriptions and advertis- best-seller. 57 Press announced that it will shift its ing on Google search pages will be split Penguin’s children’s division ran a scholarly publishing from a primarily print — with 37 percent going to Google month-long giveaway of Johan Flana- operation to digital-only editions, although Continued on p. 494

492 CQ Researcher At Issue:

WillYes the Google book settlement expand access to digital books?

DAN CLANCY BREWSTER KAHLE GOOGLE ENGINEERING DIRECTOR FOUNDER AND DIGITAL LIBRARIAN, INTERNET ARCHIVE WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, MAY 26, 2009 WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, MAY 26, 2009

ix years ago, Google embarked on a massive project to n the short term, the settlement negotiated between digitize millions of books to make them as searchable as Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Web pages. Today, as a result, anyone in the U.S. can iPublishers will certainly expand access to digital books. s Google’s 7 million books (and counting) is an important addi- search across the entire texts of more than 10 million books for free, simply by visiting Google Book Search. People can read tion to the recent flood of digitized books. In the medium and and download 1.5 million public-domain books in their entirety, long terms, however, the settlement will stall and stifle the ex- from the works of William Shakespeare to Benjamin Franklin. citing future of digital books by granting a single entity too Until now, though, we’ve only been able to show our much power and control. users a few snippets of text for millions of in-copyright books If the settlement is approved, the outcome will be not one we’ve scanned. Since most of these books are out of print, to but two court-sanctioned monopolies. First, Google will be the actually read them you have to hunt them down at a library only organization with an explicit license to scan and sell access or a . And if the only known copy is on the to in-copyright but out-of-print books, which make up the major- other side of the country — you’re out of luck. ity of books published in the 20th century. The settlement also If approved by the court, our groundbreaking agreement creates a new entity, called the (essentially, with a broadyes class of authors and publishers stands to open a monopoly), which,no in conjunction with Google, will set prices access to millions of such books in the U.S. By unlocking ac- for all commercial terms associated with those digital books. cess to these books, anyone, any place in the country will be We need to learn from our experiences with other compa- able to benefit from the wealth of knowledge contained in nies that have come to dominate different types of digital our nation’s most renowned libraries. content: Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw in law publishing and Users will be able to preview millions of works online with academic journals. Each aggressively pursued acquisitions from anywhere in the U.S. If they want to read the whole and digitization to gain a strong position, while enjoying en- thing, they’ll be able to go down to the public library to use thusiastic support from libraries and universities. It was diffi- a computer station with access to the whole book for free. cult for them to see the future effects of allowing companies And if they want a copy for themselves, they’ll be able to to gain dominance in a market: Elsevier grabbed control of purchase access to an electronic copy of the book. Mean- academic journal publishing by aggregating journals and sell- while, schools around the country can obtain an institutional ing them in bundles to libraries — progressively raising sub- subscription to give their students access to most books that scription prices. Similarly, Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw left no real we’ve scanned. alternatives for accessing law materials. Our non-exclusive agreement requires that these new ser- The publishing and distribution of digital books could face vices be priced for “broad access,” which means they must be the same danger. affordable enough to allow universities and libraries across the But there are alternatives to Google. Hundreds of libraries, country to take advantage of them. Partners like the University publishers and technology firms are already digitizing millions of of Michigan will be able to review the prices of all institutional books, with the goal of creating an open, freely accessible system. subscriptions and challenge them through arbitration if they If Google is allowed to create a monopoly on access to a believe they’re too high. large segment of digitized books, the entire publishing environ- What’s more, the settlement creates an independent, not- ment will weaken. Publishers will see their opportunities for for-profit Book Rights Registry run by authors and publishers selling limited. Authors will suffer as one company’s Web site that can work with others (including Google’s competitors) to increasingly dictates who an author’s readers will be. And read- build alternative or even competing digitization services. ers, who for generations have seen their lives enriched by a di- Just because the University of Michigan — one of Google’s verse world of book publishing and libraries, will also suffer. many partners — isn’t down the road or around the corner As controlling entities turn from innovation and competition doesn’t mean people around the country should be denied to defending their dominant positions, access to digital books access to its library. As the discussion continues, it’s important will suffer. Google might get richer, but society will become much poorer. to understandNo what readers stand to gain.

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 493 FUTURE OF BOOKS

Continued from p. 492 line vanity press and bookstore that application earlier this year. Admittedly, and 63 percent going to authors and allows anyone to upload and sell he notes, many of these books are am- publishers. Some of the settlement money their own work. Although other com- ateurish affairs like family genealogies, will go to establish a Book Rights Reg- panies offer digital self-publishing, which might only attract a few buy- istry to administer the system and en- the announcement received a lot of ers who know the author personally. sure that authors and However, one sure- publishers get paid. fire big seller went the “The court needs self-publishing route to to supervise the reg- get a bigger cut of the istry in its interac- revenues. Amy Fisher’s tions with Google 2004 memoir about very carefully to shooting her lover’s wife make sure that the when she was 17, If I monopoly the set- Knew Then . . ., was tlement creates does published as a print-on- not abuse its power,” demand book by self- says attorney Band, publisher iUniverse and who represents the appeared briefly on The library associations. New York Times best- Legislation passed seller list. 70 by the U.S. Senate Some publishers fear last year (but not by that kind of authorial en- the House) would trepreneurship could cut have limited the into their business. But copyright infringe- so far, successful writ- ment liability for li- ers have, for the most CQ Press/Screenshot braries or companies Scribd, the popular Web site that bills itself the YouTube of writing, part, continued to seek wishing to scan or launched an online vanity press and bookstore on May 18 that allows out name-brand pub- otherwise use “or- anyone to upload and sell their own work. The announcement received lishers. 68 heavy media attention because Scribd claims 60 million users a month, phan” books. At and its audience has been doubling every six months. In addition to its van- press time, no new ity press, Scribd is try- orphan-works bill had been introduced media attention because Scribd ing to position itself as a potential rival in this congressional session. claims 60 million users a month, and to Amazon by offering books for sale Google’s Clancy notes that his com- its audience has been doubling every that can be read on any device, un- pany supports even stronger orphan- six months. 69 like Amazon’s Kindle, and hopes to works legislation than the Senate Several authors (none famous) an- carry the full digital catalog of books measure and that Google’s efforts to nounced they would be publishing from publishing partners like Random identify rights holders under the set- their new books for the first time in House. 71 tlement could actually help clarify digital form and selling them on the Scribd claims to offer publishers which books still have identifiable site for only $2 but would still make an advantage over Kindle, which copyright holders. But most observers more money than going the conven- sets the price and keeps the major- agree the settlement takes the wind tional publishing route. Scribd allows ity of revenue on some titles. Some out of the sails of new legislative ef- authors or publishers to set the price publishers are worried that Amazon forts — at least for books covered and keep 80 percent of the revenue. is gaining too much market power by the settlement. (Mainstream publishers pay authors and may start squeezing publishers’ royalties of 15 percent or less.) revenue even more — especially if “As more and more authors become it continues to price bestsellers as Bypassing Publishers bloggers, individuals now can market low as $9.99. 72 their own books in a way they never In a move reminiscent of iTunes, n May 18, Scribd, the popular could before,” says Choksi of Lexcycle, which sold one song at a time for $1, O Web site that bills itself the which added a self-publishing com- Scribd will now sell a or two YouTube of writing, launched an on- pany, , to its Stanza iPhone of a travel guide for as little as $3,

494 CQ Researcher under arrangements with publishers The Plastic Logic Reader, which al- but is quickly installing cell phone net- like Lonely Planet. 73 most fits that description (it’s bend- works, the method for purchasing and Meanwhile, the National Endowment able and is thinner than a pad of paper downloading books on the Kindle. for the Arts (NEA) reported in January but can’t be folded up and put in your Publishers must also decide whether that for the first time since 1982, the pocket), is to be introduced in pilots to continue to exercise so-called digital number of adults who said they had later this year and will be widely avail- rights management (DRM) over e- read a novel, short story, poem or play able by early next year. books, aimed at preventing piracy and in the past 12 months had risen — from Amazon’s new, large-format Kindle free sharing of files. (See sidebar, p. 479.) 47 percent of the population in 2002 to DX appears to be targeting the same Some see protective encoding as more than 50 percent in 2008. 74 market — business travelers — since it an impediment to further adoption of While one expert called the rise also permits wireless exchange of doc- digital books because it locks in each “just a blip,” others cited a 24-percent uments. It’s not clear Amazon’s other e-book to a proprietary format and rise among young men ages 18-24. 75 target audience, student textbook read- limits the variety of devices on which The survey questions did not distinguish ers, will be enticed by a device costing it can be read. “It’s as if you had a between online and print reading. close to $500. Major textbook publisher DVD you can’t play on your laptop Former NEA chairman Dana Gioia Pearson Education reports about 25 per- or on a friend’s DVD player,” says called the rise at least partly a reac- cent of its sales are digital — with most Lexcyle’s Choksi. “I think e-books as tion to earlier reports of a reading cri- of them read on laptops. 77 an industry would do so much bet- sis. “Reading has become a higher pri- Amazon’s April release of the DX ter if DRM were used only for en- ority,” he said. 76 Still, 22 percent of seemed timed to beat not only Plas- cryption and for managing the rights Americans did not read a book last tic Logic but also other devices whose the publishers want managed.” year because they couldn’t — one of announcement is expected immi- Most authors and publishers can be the worst illiteracy rates among wealthy nently from Apple, Palm and possi- expected to stand by DRM as the only countries. bly Murdoch’s News Corp. Sony’s bulwark protecting their copyright and expected release of a wireless ver- income. sion of its Reader will likely inten- Eventually, piracy could become ir- sify competition. 78 relevant if publishers turn to storing OUTLOOK Some are skeptical of all the devices e-books “in the cloud” — i.e. in cy- and think print is still the perfect tech- berspace like Google Mail, with a user nology. “I don’t think there will ever password to gain access. “In the long be an iPod moment” with the book, run we won’t need DRM,” predicts The iPod of Books? says Lightning Source’s Taylor. Instead, Idea Logical CEO Shatzkin, because, he sees print-on-demand exploding in “We’ll stop having hard drives; every- ooks may be changing, but in a the next few years as publishers try to thing will be on the Internet.” B direction that appeals to many cut costs in a tough economic climate. Research libraries are running to different audiences — from the com- Marketing researcher Interquest projects catch up with all the online activity. puter-linked to the print loyalists. annual growth of 15-20 percent over the Already, some scholarly journals have For years, publishers have said, next three years for the digital-printing been migrating to electronic-only ver- “We’re looking for the iPod for books” market because of new ink-jet tech- sions, and many libraries are cancel- — the universal device that makes it nology that will make somewhat longer ing their print-version subscriptions in easy to load and read books when- press runs more economical. favor of electronic versions. Some think ever and wherever you want. Smaller on-site computer printers, books will follow suit. Have we found it with the iPhone, like the Espresso, could make it pos- Much like Wikipedia, the sciences Kindle or Sony Reader? Probably not sible to print out books almost any- are being revolutionized by the abil- yet. Some think the next generation where — whether in bookstores, rural ity to share scholarly papers online will be a lightweight electronic read- African outposts or on ships at sea. without waiting for peer-reviewed er — offering the advantages of a It’s still unclear how big an e-book publication. “We know scholars are large-format screen, which can display audience will emerge. Ironically, if elec- depositing and sharing their work the front page of a newspaper or a tronic devices come down in price, way outside the traditional scholar- complicated nautical chart, with the some think they could have a bigger ly framework” of publication, says convenience of a gadget that can be market in the underdeveloped world, Columbia University chief librarian folded up. which has little publishing infrastructure James Neal. “Our challenge is how

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 495 FUTURE OF BOOKS

do we get in there, capture and pre- 3 For background, see Kenneth Jost, “Future 18 Paul Courant, “Google, Robert Darnton, and serve that stuff?” of Books,” CQ Researcher, June 23, 2000, pp. the Digital Republic of Letters,” Au Courant, Paradoxically, digitization is pre- 545-568. (Paul Courant’s blog), http://paulcourant.net. serving many printed books that are 4 Miguel Helft, “Google and Amazon to Put 19 See www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/ now too brittle to be handled. The More Books on Cellphones,” The New York 2008/09/a_unified_field_theory_of_publ_1.html. 20 Library of Congress has digitized some Times, Feb. 6, 2009, www.nytimes.com. Brad Stone and Motoko Rich, “Amazon 5 If digital printing used by publishers for short Unveils a Large-Screen Kindle Aimed at Text- 29,000 books, going back to the runs of up to 1,200 books are counted, digi- books and Newspapers,” May 7, 2009, The early 19th century, which can be tally printed books accounted for 3 percent of New York Times, www.nytimes.com. The three viewed on the Internet Archive Web all books published in North America, according newspapers are The New York Times, The site. Some are so fragile they will to Interquest, a market research firm. Boston Globe and The Washington Post. be sent to a climate-controlled vault 6 www.wetellstories.co.uk. 21 Peter Osnos, “Rise of the Reader,” Co- at Fort Meade, in Maryland. 7 www.songsofimaginationanddigitisation.net. lumbia Journalism Review, March/April 2009, “So for all intents and purposes they 8 Motoko Rich, “Print Book are Target of Pirates pp. 38-39. will never be handled again,” says Mike on the Web,” The New York Times, May 12, 2009, 22 David Pearson, Books as History (2008), p. 25. Handy, who supervises the digitiza- www.nytimes.com. 23 Bob Stein, “A unified field theory of pub- 9 tion effort at the library. Ibid. lishing in the networked era,” if:book, www. 10 Amidst all this activity, the U.S. print- Miguel Helft and Motoko Rich, “Google futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/a_ Settles Suit over Book-Scanning,” The New unified_field_theory_of_publ_1.html. book market will probably continue to York Times, Oct. 29, 2008. 24 Ibid. hover at about 3 billion sales per year. 11 The formula only applies to books for 25 Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas, “A Million “It’s a flat market because there’s a which the rights holder has not set a price. Penguins Research Report,” April 24, 2008, lot of competition from electronic The purchaser gets perpetual online access De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K., media,” says Gilles Biscos, president to the book. www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/amillionpenguins of Interquest, a market research com- 12 Robert Darnton, “Google & the Future of report.pdf. pany in Charlottesville, Va. “People Books,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 12, 26 Ibid. have other things to do than read 2009, www.nybooks.com. 27 Ibid. books, and they spend a great deal 13 Ibid. 28 Presentation by Bowker Vice President for 14 of time on the Internet reading screens.” Miguel Helft, “Libraries Ask Google to Publisher Services Kelly Gallagher, “Under- That’s where both the opportunity Monitor Google Books Settlement,” The New standing tomorrow’s digital consumer by York Times, May 4, 2009, www.googlebook knowing what they are up to today,” London and the challenge lie for the future of settlement.com. Book Fair, April 19, 2009, www.bowker.com. books. 15 K-12 users will still be able to view up to 29 “Publishing’s High Flyers,” newbooks, 20 percent of a book’s content, as part of March/April 2009, p. 30, www.newbooksmag.com. the free search function, as will all other 30 www.playingforkeepsnovel.com. Notes users in the United States. For background, 31 Marcia Clemmitt, “Learning Online Literacy,” see Kathy Koch, “The Digital Divide,” CQ in “Reading Crisis?” CQ Researcher, Feb. 22, 1 Whispersync permits Kindle owners to ac- Researcher, Jan. 28, 2000, pp. 41-64. 2008, pp. 169-192. cess their library of previously purchased books 16 Google is obligated to reveal only 85 per- 32 British Library, “Treasures in Full: Guten- at no additional cost and to pick up where cent of the books it has scanned into the berg Bible,” www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/ they left off through automatic . database, under the agreement. background.html. 2 The screen displays ink particles electronical- 17 The association announced on Feb. 27 that 33 Jason Epstein, “An Autopsy of the Book ly to create a reading experience much closer Schroeder would step down as president on Business,” Daily Beast, Jan. 8, 2009, www.daily to printed paper than most computer displays. May 1, www.publishers.org. beast.com. 34 Pearson, op. cit., p. 65. 35 Jason Epstein, Book Business (2001), pp. About the Author 97-98. 36 Ibid., p. 33. Sarah Glazer, a London-based freelancer, is a regular 37 Ibid., p. 33. contributor to the CQ Researcher. Her articles on publish- 38 Ibid., p. 11. ing, health and social-policy issues have appeared in The 39 “Interquest Report: High Growth Segments New York Times, The Washington Post and Gender and of Digital Book Printing — Market Analysis Work, a book of essays. Her most recent CQ Researcher and Forecast 2007,” Interquest, 2007. report was “Declining Birthrates.” She graduated from the 40 Mary Harrington and Chris Meade, University of Chicago with a B.A. in American history. “read:write Digital Possibilities for Literature,” A Report for Arts Council England, July 2008, www.futureofthebook.org.uk.

496 CQ Researcher 41 Motoko Rich, “Book Publisher Suspends New Acquisitions,” The New York Times, Nov. 25, 2008, www.nytimes.com. FOR MORE INFORMATION 42 Colin Robinson, “Diary,” London Review American Library Association, 50 E. Huron, Chicago, IL 60611; (800) 545-2433; of Books, Feb. 26, 2009. www.ala.org. Represents librarians in the United States. 43 Jason Boog, “Read it and Weep,” Salon.com, Dec. 23, 2008. 44 Association of American Publishers, 50 F St., NW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC Samuel Freedman, “In the Diaspora: The 20001; (202) 347-3375; www.publishers.org. Principal trade association for the ever-dying people of the ever-dying book,” publishing industry. Jerusalem Post, March 5, 2009, www.jpost.com. 45 American Association of Publishers, press The Authors Guild, 31 East 32nd St., 7th Floor, New York, NY 10016; (212) 563-5904; release, “AAP Reports Book Sales Estimated www.authorsguild.org. Represented authors in the Google Book Search settlement. at $24.3 Billion in 2008,” March 31, 2009. 46 Boog, op. cit. http://books.google.com. Google’s Web site for searching books explains how 47 Robinson, op. cit. 48 the search engine would change under the out-of-court settlement with authors Ibid. and publishers. 49 Freedman, op. cit. 50 Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jessica E. Vascellaro, www.googlebooksettlement.com. Official Web site run by the administrator of “Sony and Google Team Up to Battle Amazon,” the Google Book Search settlement. The Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2009. 51 Dave Caolo, “iPhone the most popular ebook reader,” The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Institute for the Future of the Book, 74 N. 7th St., #3, Brooklyn, NY 11211; www.futureofthebook.org. Think tank experimenting with future forms of the Oct. 3, 2008, www.tuaw.com. book in New York and London. 52 See Kassia Krozser, “Amazon Buys Lexcy- cle,” April 28, 2009, booksquare.com and An- drew Ross Sorkin, “Dealbook: Amazon Buys International Digital Publishing Forum; P.O. Box 215, Toronto, Ontario M3C 2S2 Canada; (905) 235-IDPF (4373); www.openebook.org. Trade association for Lexcycle,” http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com. the e-book industry. 53 Peter Osnos, “Platform: The Kindle Surge and Beyond,” teleread.org, May 19, 2009, www.teleread.org. Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Columbia University School of Law, 435 W. 116th St., Box A-17, New York, NY 10027; (212) 854-7424; 54 Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jessica E. Vascellaro, http://kernochancenter.org. Streaming video of the center’s March 13, 2009, con- “Sony and Google Team Up to Battle Amazon,” ference on the Google Book Search settlement. The Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2009. 55 Jim Milliot, “Penguin Posts Solid Gains Scribd; www.scribd.com. A Web site where users share and sell original writing, Worldwide,” Publishers Weekly, March 2, 2009. and mainstream publishers are starting to post free excerpts. 56 Dominic Rushe, “Market Warms to Elec- tronic books,” Timesonline, Aug. 31, 2008, http://business.timeonline.co.uk. We Tell Stories; http://wetellstories.co.uk. This Penguin experiment with online storytelling won the “Best in Show” prize at the SXSW interactive festival in 57 www.the39clues.com. Austin, Texas. 58 Judith Rosen, “Taking Steps into the Dig- ital Future,” Publisher’s Weekly, Feb. 16, 2009, www.publishersweekly.com. 66 Miguel Helft, “Google’s Plan for Out-of- 72 Brad Stone, “Site Lets Writers Sell Digital 59 Ibid. Print Books is Challenged,” The New York Copies,” The New York Times, May 17, 2009, 60 “OverDrive Announces 2008 Library Times, April 4, 2009, www.nytimes.com. www.nytimes.com. Download Statistics and Milestones,” Jan. 6, 67 Miguel Helft, “Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust 73 See www.scribd.com. 2009, www.overdrive.com. Inquiry into Google Books Deal,” The New 74 “Reading on the rise,” National Endowment 61 Vicky Frost, “Waiting for the iPod Mo- York Times, April 29, 2009, www.nytimes.com. for the Arts, www.arts.gov/research/Reading ment,” , April 20, 2009. Also see official Google Book Settlement Web onRise.pdf. 62 Rosen, op. cit. site, www.googlebooksettlement.com. 75 Ibid. 63 Robinson, op. cit. 68 www.thomas.gov/. 76 “Adult literacy: the readers,” The Economist, 64 Richard Perez-Pena, “Campaign Articles from 69 Kenneth Li, “Scribd launches online book Jan. 17, 2009. pp. 411-412. Newsweek Become E-Books for Amazon Kin- market,” Financial Times, May 18, 2009, 77 Brad Stone and Mokoto Rich, “Amazon dle,” The New York Times, Oct. 13, 2008, www.ft.com. Introduces Big-Screen Kindle,” The New York www.nytimes.com. 70 See Sarah Glazer, “The Book Business: Times, May 6, 2009, www.nytimes.com. 65 Scott Jaschik, “Farewell to the Printed Mono- How to Be Your Own Publisher,” The New 78 Marion Maneker, “How the Next Kindle graph,” Inside Higher Ed, March 23, 2009, York Times, April 24, 2005, www.nytimes.com. Could Save the Newspaper Business,” Wired, www.insidehighered.com. 71 Li, op. cit. May 6, 2009, www.wired.com.

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 497 Bibliography Selected Sources

Books pp. 38-39. The vice chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review and Anderson, Chris, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, founder of PublicAffairs books imagines the future world of Hyperion, July 7, 2009. the book, digital and otherwise, in 2014. “Every industry that becomes digital eventually becomes free,” including books, Wired editor-in-chief Anderson argues. He Pullinger, Kate, “My Digital Evolution in Fiction,” Internet has even promised there will be a way to get this book free. Evolution, March 18, 2009, www.internetevolution.com. A published novelist suggests that works of literature by a Anderson, Chris, The Long Tail, Random House Business single author may be a “relic of a cultural moment” as lit- Books, 2006. erature becomes increasingly collaborative and multimedia The editor-in-chief of Wired magazine introduced the term — online and on our phones. “long tail” into the business lexicon to argue that aggregat- ing many low-selling items creates a lot of sales — in books Reports and Studies (think Amazon and print-on-demand), music and other areas. “Book Industry 2008,” Book Industry Study Group, Epstein, Jason, Book Business: Publishing Past Present www.bisg.org. and Future, W.W. Norton, 2001. An industry trade association issues a comprehensive report The former editorial director of Random House sprinkles per- each year on trends in publishing revenues and output. The sonal reminiscence about his 50 years in publishing throughout 2009 report was to be released May 29. this discussion of publishing’s history and where it’s headed. Band, Jonathan, “A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries Pearson, David, Books as History, The British Library and the Google Library Project Settlement,” Nov. 23, and Oak Knoll Press, 2008. 2008, www.arl.org/pp/ppcopyright/google. In this beautifully produced book, the director of University An attorney for the Association of Research Libraries provides of London Research Library Services discusses the importance a detailed description of the Google Book Search settlement of physical books as artifacts in understanding history. from the perspective of libraries.

Articles Harrington, Mary, and Chris Meade, “Read: Write: Digital Possibilities for Literature,” Arts Council of England, “Sony, Google Challenge Amazon,” The Wall Street Journal, www.futureofthebook.org.uk, July 2008. March 19, 2009, http://onlinwsj.com. Two members of a London literary think tank, The Institute The Wall Street Journal describes Google’s deal to provide for the Future of the Book, report on online experiments with 500,000 books to the Sony Reader as a challenge to Amazon’s literature. Kindle. Mason, Bruce, and Sue Thomas, “A Million Penguins Re- Courant, Paul, “Google, Robert Darnton and the Digital search Report,” De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K., Republic of Letters,” Au Courant: Paul Courant’s blog, April 24, 2008, www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/million- Feb. 4, 2009, ttp://paulcourant.net/2009/02/04/google- penguinsanalysis.html. robert-darnton-and-the-digital-republic-of-letters. Two British academics analyze a wiki novel-writing ex- The University of Michigan’s dean of libraries counters Darn- periment sponsored by Penguin that attracted hundreds of ton’s critique (below), arguing that such a vast digital library contributors to a developing plot online. could never have been assembled without Google. On the Web Darnton, Robert, “Google and the Future of Books,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 12, 2009. Songs of Imagination and Digitisation, if: book, Harvard Library’s director expresses concern that Google www.songsofimaginationanddigitisation.net. will abuse its “virtual monopoly” over what could be the Click onto this book by and about the British poet William biggest digital library in the world as a result of its recent Blake to get an idea of the future multimedia “netbook,” out-of-court settlement with authors and publishers. containing poems and essays along with videos, inventive computer graphics and an invitation to contribute online. Osnos, Peter, “Rise of the Reader: How Books Got Published by the London literary think tank if: book with Wings,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2009, support from the Arts Council of England.

498 CQ Researcher The Next Step: Additional Articles from Current Periodicals

Google Book Search Sony has become the first major electronics company to offer a digital book device — the Sony Reader — telling Gibson, James, “Google’s New Monopoly?” The Wash- customers half a million books optimized by Google will be ington Post, Nov. 3, 2008, p. A21. available for download. Google is the only Internet company with enough funds and resources to compensate copyright owners in a project Stone, Brad, and Motoko Rich, “Amazon Unveils a Large- to digitize vast collections of books. Screen Kindle Aimed at Textbooks and Newspapers,” The New York Times, May 7, 2009, p. B7. Harmanci, Reyhan, “Google, Trade Groups Settle,” The Amazon has introduced a larger version of its Kindle reading San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 29, 2008, p. C1. device, touting it as a new way to read traditionally large items Google has agreed to pay $125 million to start the Book such as school textbooks and newspapers. Rights Registry to compensate authors for providing online access to their books. Traditional Books

Helft, Miguel, “Microsoft to Stop Scanning Books,” The Burnett III, James H., “E-books Bringing New Power to New York Times, May 24, 2008, p. C8. the Printed Word,” Miami Herald, Nov. 15, 2008, p. A2. Microsoft has decided to end a project to scan millions of Traditional ink-on-paper books continue to dominate book books onto the Internet amid tough competition from Google. fairs, but more and more readers are being tempted to read paperless electronic books on handheld devices. Larson, Erik, “Authors to Consider Google Deal,” The Boston Globe, April 29, 2009, p. B11. Cuevas Jr., Andres, “Students Prefer Hard Copy,” State A federal judge in New York has given thousands of authors Hornet (California), Sept. 17, 2008. a four-month extension to decide on whether to join a settle- The majority of college students still prefer traditional hard-copy ment with Google over its book-scanning project. textbooks despite the growing popularity of electronic versions.

Print-on-Demand James, Andrea, “Books a Weighty Issue for Law Schools,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sept. 11, 2008, p. E1. Bonenti, Charles, “Publishing Your Novel in Minutes,” Representatives from law schools across the country are set to Berkshire Eagle (Massachusetts), March 8, 2008. discuss the future of heavy bound textbooks in their courses. The Espresso Book Machine automates virtually every aspect of book production. Lekwa, Claire, “Books Not So ‘E-easily’ Accepted,” Daily Iowan, May 15, 2008. Kitchen, Patricia, “Publish and Prosper?” Orlando , Traditional books are not likely to be eliminated despite July 25, 2007, p. F1. the increasing popularity of electronic books. An author writing a book about diabetes has decided to bypass traditional publishing routes and produce copies of CITING CQ RESEARCHER her work via print-on-demand services. Sample formats for citing these reports in a bibliography Meyer, Ann, “Entrepreneurs Get Book Smart,” Chicago include the ones listed below. Preferred styles and formats Tribune, June 9, 2008, p. C5. vary, so please check with your instructor or professor. Self-publishing of books through print-on-demand services is an effective way for business owners to build credibility. MLA STYLE Jost, Kenneth. “Rethinking the Death Penalty.” CQ Researcher Reading Devices 16 Nov. 2001: 945-68.

Baig, Edward C., “iPod Touch, iPhone Join Kindle’s APA STYLE Book Club,” USA Today, March 4, 2009, p. 3B. Jost, K. (2001, November 16). Rethinking the death penalty. Apple’s App Store is providing a free application that allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to read electronic books from CQ Researcher, 11, 945-968. Amazon that so far have only been compatible with the HICAGO TYLE . C S Jost, Kenneth. “Rethinking the Death Penalty.” CQ Researcher, Nelson, Sara, “Sony Adds to Book Download Stockpile,” November 16, 2001, 945-968. Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2009, p. B3.

www.cqresearcher.com May 29, 2009 499 In-depth Reports on Issues in the News

Are you writing a paper? Need backup for a debate? Want to become an expert on an issue? For 80 years, students have turned to ?CQ Researcher for in-depth reporting on issues in the news. Reports on a full range of political and social issues are now available. Following is a selection of recent reports:

Civil Liberties Education Health/Safety Closing Guantánamo, 2/09 Reading Crisis? 2/08 Reproductive Ethics, 5/09 Affirmative Action, 10/08 Discipline in Schools, 2/08 Extreme Sports, 4/09 Gay Marriage Showdowns, 9/08 Student Aid, 1/08 Regulating Toxic Chemicals, 1/09 America’s Border Fence, 9/08 Racial Diversity in Public Schools, 9/07 Preventing Cancer, 1/09 Immigration Debate, 2/08 Heart Health, 9/08 Environment/Society Global Food Crisis, 6/08 Crime/Law Hate Groups, 5/09 Judicial Elections, 4/09 Future of Journalism, 3/09 Politics/Economy Mexico’s Drug War, 12/08 Confronting Warming, 1/09 Business Bankruptcy, 4/09 Prostitution Debate, 5/08 Reducing Carbon Footprint, 12/08 Future of the GOP, 3/09 Public Defenders, 4/08 Protecting Wetlands, 10/08 Middle-Class Squeeze, 3/09 Gun Violence, 5/07 Buying Green, 2/08 Public-Works Projects, 2/09 Upcoming Reports Student Rights, 6/5/09 Drug Decriminalization, 6/12/09 Retirement Crisis, 6/19/09

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CQ Press • 2300 N Street, NW, Suite 800 • Washington, DC 20037 Updated Sept. 14, 2010 www.cqresearcher.com Future of Books Here are key events, legislation and court rulings since publication of the CQ Researcher report by Sarah Glazer , “Future of Books,” May 29, 2009.

he publishing world marked a Visel, a researcher at the Brooklyn- milestone in July 2010 when based Institute for the Future of the d

word shot ’round the exploding Book. But “this is likely to prove n T a array of digital news-reading gadgets with time to be similar to the music n u D

that e-books — for the first time ever industry’s introduction of the eight- l e

— had outsold books on track or the cassette tape, providing, u n Amazon.com. And though the 600,000 essentially, a new way for consumers a m m

books now available electronically rep - to buy the same content. It will pro - E / s resent only a fraction of the online vide money in the short term, but I e g giant’s total book offerings, the news don’t think it’s sustainable.” a m I

led Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to pre - A chief concern, Visel says, is the y t t dict that e-books sold for reading on likely rise in publishing piracy once e G /

the company’s Kindle would overtake a larger portion of the books being P F paperback sales within 12 months. 79 published become available as eas - A Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveils the $489 Kindle DX, In fact, the sales figures released in ily copyable electronic books. “The a large-screen version of Amazon’s popular July looked good for the entire pub - public is also going to start to won - Kindle electronic reader. lishing industry. Book purchases were der why Apple or Amazon has ar - up an encouraging 11.6 percent over bitrarily decided that they should pay the previous year, while trade e-book $10 [per book] for something that sales shot up from less than 3 per - isn’t really costing Apple or Ama - through the Rocky Mountains to the cent of the total market a year earli - zon very much money,” he adds. “The Pacific,” he says, the industry will have er to 8.48 percent. 80 consumer isn’t getting anything besides to get past two major obstacles that Despite the impressive rise in e- digital bits.” most book lovers know little about. books’ market share, some observers The industry deserves credit for The first involves “finding a com - doubt that traditional book publishing catching up and “conquering the first monly sensible answer to the relation - veterans are adapting quickly enough frontier,” which is getting printed books ship between costs and consumer de - to the consumer demand sparked by converted to the computer screen, mand,” Shatzkin says. There is a “wide the e-revolution. “Right now, the in - says Mike Shatzkin, CEO of Idea Log - range” of concepts about what an e- dustry is flush with cash because peo - ical, a digital publishing consulting book could be, other than just a book ple are buying digital versions of books firm in New York. But to expand e- on a screen enhanced by some new from Amazon or Apple,” says Dan books from “Ohio and Indiana “apps” and “perhaps some video.” He

PUBLISHED BY CQ PRESS, A DIVISION OF SAGE WWW.CQPRESS.COM FUTURE OF BOOKS

Efforts at standardizing e-books to maximize interoperability between dif - ferent readers and software programs were advanced in August, when the International Digital Publishing Forum, a Toronto-based trade group, an - nounced the launch of a program to implement standard specifications for e-publishing (EPUB). “As EPUB is rapid - ly gaining momentum, it’s great to see such wide industry interest in per - forming the technical work to keep [up] the . . . standards that make EPUB error-free and modern,” said Garth Con - boy, vice chair of the EPUB Standards Maintenance Working Group. 82 Also in August, Bowker, the longtime industry compiler of bibliographic in - formation that administers the ISBN cat - alog numbers used in books, announced that it had created a new Internet-based

t manuscript-submission service. Bowker o h

s says it will bring “authors, publishers n

e and agents together in an efficient on - e r c

S line system, where authors present their / s

s book proposals to the leading pub - e r P

lishers in the industry from one central Q

C location, and acquisition editors apply The millions of Americans now buying Apple’s iPhone and iPad (shown above) e-tools that allow them to sort through are in many cases also buying Stanza, the book-reader software developed by them and zero in on the ideas they Seattle-based Lexcycle, which was acquired by Amazon.com in April 2009. find most interesting.” 83 In May, Bowker announced it had cites as an example The Girl With the same place. “It will take a combination teamed up with Google to establish a Dragon Tattoo and other murder mys - of curation and presentation to rebuild system to facilitate consistent ISBN tery blockbusters by the late Swedish the new subject infrastructure that is numbers to identify, catalog and pub - journalist Stieg Larsson. “I wish I could connected to a community,” he says. licize the e-books to be published as click on some of his Swedish proper Nonetheless, e-books, which retail for Google Editions, many of which are names and learn what some of those less than half the cost of hardcover books, classics or out-of-print books that the references mean,” Shatzkin says. are making their presence felt. Barnes search-engine powerhouse has been `The second challenge involves the and Noble, the nation’s biggest bookseller, scanning and acquiring rights for. setting at which book shoppers go to was recently put up for sale, and its board “Publishers, digital intermediaries browse. “We’re still working on the ana - linked the rise of the e-book to the com - and their trading partners continue to log of the physical store: Barnes and pany’s slumping sales and customer traf - deal with an increasing array of e- Noble, Borders, and Amazon are all try - fic. Though the chain has marketed its book formats with specific features, at - ing to be superstores, where you go to own electronic reader, called the Nook, tributes or restrictions,” said Brian Green, the section on, say, history,” Shatzkin it is considering expanding into more executive director of the International says. “But the presentation of choices is sales of toys and games. 81 ISBN Agency. “It makes the assign - clunkier in a digital environment.” He Meanwhile, the digital revolution con - ment of separate ISBNs to each for - predicts that future book buyers will tinues to smash the longstanding bar - mat even more important for ensur - likely go on Websites organized by com - riers to aspiring authors seeking audi - ing that the e-book ordered is the munities in a given field rather than to ences for their work without benefit of correct one for the user’s device or bookstores offering all e-books in the agents, editors or professional marketers. software platform.” 84 Chronology

those of . . . . 2009 2010 Amazon makes deal with the Wylie Agency to publish e-book July 13, 2009 — After one Feb. 18, 2010 — District Court versions of 20th-century year on the market, Apple- in New York conducts hearing American classics. based e-book reader Stanza on proposed amended Google tops 4 million downloads. Book Settlement with authors August-September 2010 — and publishers on book Court decision expected in Google copyright ownership. Book Settlement. . . . Wylie largely abandons its e-books deal with July 19, 2010 — Amazon Amazon in favor of new reports e-book sales surpass agreement with Random House.

Not that putting ink on paper is “The volume, however, does increase Another sign of the times came in disappearing. Indeed, digital technol - the chances that good writing will February 2010, when the U.S. District ogy has made old-fashioned pub - not receive the attention it deserves. Court for the Southern District of New lishing more economical. For one Assuming a constant number of read - York held a hearing on the pending thing, near-instant printing of small ers, which may well be incorrect,” court verdict on what is known as the quantities of books based on advance he adds, “the amount of attention Google Book Settlement. Supporters orders avoids the expense of ware - given on average to each book has of the proposed deal included Uni - housing. Interquest Ltd., a Charlottesville, gone down; concurrent with this has versity of Michigan library science Pro - Va.-based research and consulting firm, been the decline of the print book- fessor Paul Courant, who argued that predicts that digital book manufactur - reviewing establishment. Given this, Google’s plan to scan books is one ing over the next five years will grow it’s entirely possible that any num - solution to an age-old problem: To 15-20 percent in volume. 85 ber of masterpieces have been pub - read and study many important but Whether the exponential growth of lished and aren’t receiving any at - rare books, researchers and scholars equal-access publishing has harmed the tention, and the average reader is must travel to read them. “Broad so - quality and reliability of published lit - increasingly adrift in trying to figure cial progress depends on being able erature is another evolving question. out what to read.” to find, use and reuse the scholarly Wikipedia, which in its early years was Perhaps the most disgruntled record,” Courant told the court. regarded skeptically by journalists, schol - players in the transformed world of Opponents of the settlement, who ars, and makers of traditional ency - publishing are the mid-list authors outnumbered supporters, warned of a clopedias, is now armed with fact- wary of domination of the process Google monopoly. William Cavanaugh, checking editors. The free site now by Amazon.com, Google and Apple. an assistant U.S. attorney general, said offers an astonishing 3.4 million en - The millions of Americans now buy - the publishers and the Authors Guild tries in English, according to its Web - ing Apple’s iPhone and iPad are in lacked the right to enable a third party site, many of them on topics that sim - many cases also buying Stanza, the such as Google to use authors’ works ply aren’t covered by Britannica or book-reader software developed by without their permission. The settlement Compton ’s. Seattle-based Lexcycle, which was “has the effect of rewriting contracts,” But are discerning readers well- acquired by Amazon.com in April 2009. he said. 86 served by an overabundance of books? It’s a sign to some that yesterday’s Meanwhile, in July Amazon cut a “There’s certainly more bad writing economic model for New York- short-lived deal with the Wylie Agency’s that can be bought now than at any based elite publishing has collapsed, new publishing arm to publish e-book time in the past, but that’s a func - presenting both threats and oppor - versions of numerous 20th-century tion of volume rather than necessar - tunities as the definition of a pub - American classics whose print copy - ily a lack of good writing,” says Visel. lisher broadens. right (but not electronic rights) are FUTURE OF BOOKS

owned by other publishers. Before the favor of Bertelsmann’s Random House, 82 International Digital Publishing Forum, press deal fell apart in late August, it drew which had challenged Amazon’s right release, Aug. 16, 2010. a mixed reaction from the Authors to sell some 13 titles in digital form. 89 83 Bowker, press release, Aug. 11, 2010. Guild, which is also a party in the suit 84 Bowker, press release, May 5, 2010. 85 against Google. It applauded the move — Charles S. Clark Cassandra Carnes, “Book Publishing Evolves,” to permit established authors and their DPS Magazine , March 2010. 86 Greg Sandoval, “Google book settlement families to craft new deals for elec - draws fire in court,” CNET News, Feb. 18, 2010, tronic rights, given that such technol - Notes http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10456382- ogy didn’t exist when the original con - 261.html. 87 tracts were signed. 87 “Wylie Agency Circumvents Publishers on 79 Claire Cain Miller, “E-Books Top Hard - But the guild also warned that “when e-Books With Odyssey Editions,” POD (Print covers at Amazon,” , an agency acts as publisher, serious The New York Times on Demand), July 22, 2010, http://mick - July 19, 2010. See also Edward C. Baig, “Vol - potential conflicts of interest immedi - rooney.blogspot.com/2010/07/wylie-agency- ume of Kindle book sales stuns Amazon’s ately come to mind. . . . And Ama - circumvent-publishers-on-e.html. Jeff Bezos,” , July 29, 2010. USA Today 88 Authors Guild, statement, July 26, 2010. zon’s power in the book publishing 80 Association of American Publishers, press 88 89 Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Amazon Loses E- industry grows daily.” release, July 14, 2010. Book Deal,” The Wall Street Journal , Aug. 25, However, Wylie announced on 81 Julie Bosman, “Quick Change in Strategy 2010, p. B1. Update Aug. 24 that it was largely abandon - for a Bookseller,” The New York Times , Aug. 12, ing the agreement with Amazon in 2010.

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