February 26, 2002
Books by the byte? ...
Libraries are quietly changing, which you may not know if your preferred finger-on-the-pulse-of-society is the Business section. What you'll read there is that the book-publishing industry is in questionable health.
High-ticket advances are dropping, agents are taking higher percentages, and no one is expressing confidence as to how the economics of book publishing will ultimately play out.
Sure, there are the big-name authors, as well as authors with big names, but they are relatively few and far between these days -- especially when you consider how many books are being published, and how many more are seeking publication.
First of all, there's the success of Amazon.com, at least from a user's point of view, and the proliferation of mega-bookstore chains. Better technology in the basic printing of books means no more retyping of the manuscript, much less typesetting or other outdated technologies. You email your book to the publisher, and the rest is practically on automatic.
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On the supply side of all this, the explosion of personal computers has spawned an author boom that's unprecedented. Who would write an entire novel in longhand these days? Even electric typewriters are tedious after the first draft. And who would trudge over to the library to look up references in the stacks, when a font of information is available on the Internet?
And now we're getting to the meat of it. Soon, libraries will be able to offer many books online. While it doesn't make sense to download an entire book and print it out on your printer, it works great for reference sources.
As you might expect, the book publishers have been thinking long and hard about this, and many are about to make the plunge.
One serious player is Ebrary, whose funders include Random House and McGraw-Hill. It's managed to forge relationships with Pantheon, Penguin Classics and Villard, as well as university presses, such as Harvard and MIT.
By fixing a charge to print out portions of text, Ebrary believes it can "regain revenues lost to the photocopy industry." At the same time, they can be assured of broad exposure, employ a browse-before-you-buy approach, reach a worldwide audience, and keep their content in print indefinitely.
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In this new model, libraries will be charged depending on their size and particular use. This sure beats purchasing all those books on a hit or miss basis. And best of all, everyone has access whenever they want it - not one at a time, in serial order.
The pilot launch of this service is going on right now in several libraries, so it may be awhile before this reaches a library, or a computer, near you. But coming, it certainly is.
While the details are still being attended to, there is finally a strategy for publishers to recover their costs. Without that, publishers simply could not embrace the online world.
Will they sell more books, or fewer? Will they be more profitable, or less? When the book industry reaches a workable bottom line, we will reach equilibrium once again.
But what I find most fascinating of all is that libraries will be just as quiet as ever, belying the fact that a complete revolution is going on behind the scenes.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
