The Book is Dead. Long Live the Book!

Recent news of the book’s ailing health might lead one to think that the publishing industry was on its deathbed or close to it. Nothing seems to be further from the truth, if events like the Frankfurt book fair—more than 7,000 exhibitors strong—are any indication. There are dozens of book fairs each year around the world, from Albania to Zimbabwe. While some are sales events, many, like Frankfurt are trade fairs, where agents, authors, and publishers come to buy and sell rights and services.

If alive and well, the book is, however, suffering from a split personality. It still exists as the physical object we have long known, but increasingly it has a digital life. And the soaring popularity of e-readers and e-books is bringing fundamental changes to the publishing industry.

I work for a public organization that has been in the e-book business for more than 10 years – the International Development Research Centre. For decades we have published the results of research we fund – there’s not a large market share for this product, obviously. While we originally did our own publishing, since 2000 or so we have worked in collaboration with commercial and academic publishers around the world. The deal is simple: essentially our publishing partners have all rights to the printed book and sales; we share e-rights and the right to publish the ebook on our website, full-text, free of charge. We support the publication through buybacks of books to distribute to our key stakeholders. We also distribute the books through aggregators like Googlebooks, NetLibrary, and other vendors. Our motive is not profit, but to ensure that the results of valuable research are as widely disseminated as possible.

So far, this has worked well and we have many copublishing partners. But this past year or two, many of them have also entered the epublishing world and are selling ebooks themselves and through the same aggregators. You can see the problem. What is the solution?

On the positive side is that e-readers appear to be increasing, if not the market for books, at least readership generally. The Pew Research Centre reports that close to 30% of Americans own one of these devices. Those who do read an average of 7 more books a year than those who don’t have an e-reader.


. Long live the book!