told ya

My wife claims this is my I-told-you-so column, and, as usual, she’s probably right. However, I prefer to think of it as my even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day column. Mine was certainly not the only voice proclaiming the coming of ebooks when I first wrote a column about them way back in 2001. But here’s the first paragraph:
“Okay, it’s time to get serious about online science fiction. New and reprint sites are popping up like mushrooms after a monsoon. Hardware and software companies are offering new, or at least improved, technologies to ease the strain of eyeballing print on screens.” And here’s a bit from the end: “Perhaps the most difficult problem e-publishers will face is finding a way to make money selling fiction on the net. Information wants to be free, or so they say. And if it isn’t free, any number of netizens are willing to find ways to set it free. Hackers and data pirates have some print publishers scared silly. . . .
“Writers too will face challenges. Will we see a kinder, gentler online publishing industry, one that is less driven by a bestseller mentality? A publisher of ebooks has no need of a warehouse or a distribution system that deals with moving atoms from here to there. She can afford patience with a book, giving it time to find its audience. But then how will ebooks find their audiences? Even if only a fraction of the greatest hits of the science fiction backlist becomes available, it will flood a market that already offers far, far too many choices.” Skeptics scoffed, and they were the vast majority, even among the net’s digerati. In 2003, the astute Jeff VanderMeer <jeffvandermeer.com> conducted a survey about books, posing a series of questions to practicing speculative fiction writers. The Physicality of Books <fantasticmetropolis.com/i/books> appeared online on the wonderful Fantastic Metropolis—which has since become, alas, a ghost site. The survey is something of a love letter to a technology whose prime was about to pass; in it many of your favorite writers express their deep feelings for printed books. When asked whether it was necessary for such books to exist as physical objects, most asserted that it was, citing the many real failings of ebooks and their delivery systems. They weren’t portable and were too hard on the eyes, too fragile, too immaterial, not at all like our dear old paper books!
Even in 2006, true believers were thin on the ground. Here’s the opening of my column from then: “Although ebooks have come a long way since we last discussed them in March of 2001, many pundits would cite their perceived lackluster performance in the marketplace as proof that they were just another dot.com fad. Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Sales of ebooks rose 27 percent in 2003, to $7.3 million, according to Publisher’s Weekly.” Later in that column I advanced what I called The Two Certainties, cribbed from my friend Cory Doctorow: “1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day. 2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day. The consequences of The Two Certainties are profound: at some point the ascending digital line must cross the descending print line. Not if, friends, but when. The Two Certainties point to a future in which ebooks inevitably dominate paper books.”
When, as it turns out, is probably now, or maybe next Thursday at the latest.

kindling

For those of you perusing this column on an iPadKindleNook, know that your number is growing. While you are still just a fraction of all ‘Mov’s readers, you are becoming an increasingly significant fraction. Which brings us to one problem with assessing the impact of electronic publishing on print publishing: it is hard to know how many of those who take this magazine in its electronic form might otherwise have bought the print version. What is clear, however, is that many of those reading ebook versions of this and other traditional print books and magazines are new readers, or perhaps readers who have been wooed back to reading by the convenience and ubiquity of ebooks. A 2010 Harris Poll <harrisinteractive.com/vault/H1-Harris-Poll-eReaders-2010-09-22.pdf> found that about 10 percent of Americans owned an ereader and another 10 percent intended to acquire one shortly. Even more interesting to writers and publishers is that owners of ereaders read more and buy more books than the average.
Polls like these have helped give ebooks some serious buzz, but even as we discounted uninformed skepticism in the early days, it’s a good idea to take today’s exuberant optimism with many grains of salt. There is a lot of information out there for the armchair pundit, but how to interpret it? For example, recent monthly statistics from the Association of American Publishers <publishers.org/press/38> show that adult hardcover and adult paperbacks and ebooks rank first, second, and third in revenue respectively in trade books. The hard numbers? Adult hardcover: $111.4 million, adult paperback: $95.9 million, and ebooks: $72.8 million. Obviously, it’s a bit premature to crown ebooks, at about 17 percent of trade net revenue, as the new publishing champ! Monthly revenue from ebooks one year prior, however, was just $28.3 million. This 157 percent increase is even more astonishing in light of the fact that net sales for all trade categories declined 2.4 percent. Is it any wonder that the title of the 2011 annual Conference of the AAP’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division <publishers.org/_attachments/docs/library/psp winter-spring 2011.pdf> was “Digital or Die; Inventing Our Future”?
But what inventions will help them invent that future? The research firm In-Stat <instat.com/newmk.asp?ID=2852&SourceID=00000652000000000000>
claims that ereader shipments will jump from 12 million at the beginning of 2011 to 35 million in 2014. Meanwhile it projects tablet shipments to reach “approximately 58 million” by that date. However, Informa Telcoms and Media <http://blogs.informatandm.com/1420/press-release-e-readers-to-lose-out-to-smartbooks-in-battle-of-the-tablets> expects “mobile broadband ereader sales will peak at 14 million units in 2013, before falling by 7 percent in 2014 as the segment faces increased competition from a wide range of consumer electronic devices.” Will our digital libraries come to live in ereaders or tablets or something that doesn’t even exist yet?

do it yourself

Even as publishing bosses scramble to understand the changes that the ebook revolution is making to their business, literary workers (i.e., writers) are being offered access to the means of production. Through ventures like Kindle Direct Publishing <https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin> and Pubit <http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com>, it is now possible for anyone to write, publish, and sell an ebook. It used to be that self-publishing was a dirty word—or was it two dirty words?—but now it’s where some claim the smart money is. Established writers with an inventory of out-of-print novels and stories can bring them back under the light of readers’ eyes for a minimum amount of effort. Unpublished writers can bypass the fierce editorial trolls who once guarded the gates of Literatureland. Is this a good thing?
Yes, lost treasures will be rediscovered. Idiosyncratic new talents will emerge.
No, so many choices will lead to reader paralysis. The ratio of noise to signal will soar.
All of the above.
While many of my entrepreneurial colleagues have leapt into the digital marketplace, more have held back because they don’t control their electronic rights or because they perceive epublishing as too complex and time-consuming. After all, it’s a daunting enough life task to learn to write well—now we’re supposed to understand the difference between an epub <wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB> and a mobi <wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI> file? Novelists, particularly those who have managed to hold on to their electronic rights, have discovered that bringing their oldies but goodies back can be a lucrative sideline to their careers. But this is Asimov’s and we’re all short fiction fans here, right? The prospect for making money posting short fiction ebooks is somewhat less rosy, but that hasn’t daunted some of the best and net-savviest short story writers working today.
Take for instance, Tim Pratt <timpratt.org>, who is most familiar to readers of this fine publication for his Hugo-winning story “Impossible Dreams” from the July 2006 issue. You can read this great story today on the Nook and Kindle as a solo ebook for a mere $.99, or you can buy it in his collection, Hart & Boot & Other Stories, which includes the title story, selected for the Best American Short Stories 2005. Your cost for the collection: $2.99. Tim wrote some advice for would-be self-publishers: “My single stories on Amazon sell vastly better than my collection, even though the collection is a dozen stories for $2.99, as opposed to .99 cents each. So I would recommend posting stories individually. Some stories only sell a handful of copies per month, and some sell into low triple digits. I’ve only been selling them for two months, but it’s definitely brought in some grocery money.” Or Tobias Buckell <tobiasbuckell.com>, whose wonderful stories are not only available on the major ebook vendor sites but on his own popular site as well. He has been experimenting with unbundling his collection Tides from the New Worlds, by putting individual stories up for sale. He writes “(The collection) had settled into a $40-$50 a month pattern of royalties. Since releasing the single shots, it has plunged to half that. So selling the singles certainly affected that. I saw Tim Pratt mention his own singles experiment on twitter. He released a bunch of them and flooded in quickly, and he’s seeing better results. Looking also at sales and how they seem to cluster, my take is that readers are buying one, liking it, buying another, and moving through the stories quickly. Although it would be cheaper to buy the short story collection, the initial 99 cent value proposition creates demand.” For the record, my own self-published ebook sales are roughly in line with Toby and Tim’s.

exit

You can get Asimov’s on just about any ereader, but did you know that Sheila has started creating special e-anthologies of stories that have appeared in these pages? Enter A Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov’s Science Fiction is available now; more will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, you can buy individual ebook stories for a buck by Michael Jasper, Eric James Stone, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nancy Holder, Jeff VanderMeer, David Brin, Jeff Carlson, George Alec Effinger, and Robert Sheckley, to name but ten.
Oh, and FYI: ebooks are here to stay. You read it here first.

Copyright © 2011 James Patrick Kelly