Thanks to everyone who has responded to the essay I wrote for SLJ about the future of reading and publishing in the US. To answer a few more questions:

1. I am not in any way proposing that physical books are dying as a medium, nor do I imagine some all-digital future for text.

I do believe, however, that the survival of printed text won't matter very much from a business perspective, because the big issue is not the medium but the distribution network.

The distribution network--insofar as it still involves bookstores--is in big trouble. (As pointed out in the essay, the stock price for chain bookstores is a good indicator of how serious a challenge they face.) Whether you buy physical books or ebooks has no bearing on the survival of bookstores; all that matters is where you buy the books, and increasingly we buy them either at Amazon or at Wal-Mart.

2. Several librarians have commented and/or emailed that because they are not collection development specialists, they have little or no say in deciding which titles are purchased or how they are purchased.

I (respectfully and lovingly!) disagree, because, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but:

A. Librarians who work with teenagers and children can affect the circulation of titles in their library by being the ambitious bakers I talk about in the essay; collection development specialists pay close attention to circulation numbers.

B. The idea of "collection development" is a lot broader now than it was back before the Internet. You may not buy the books that get shelved in your library, but you can (if you want) turn your kids on to This Is Not Tom or many other hypertext novels, which amounts to collection development.

C. One may feel at times that collection development specialists listen to any person on the street as much as they listen to branch librarians, but you have (and should have!) advantages over the rest of us: You have more expertise and a deeper knowledge of your patrons. If your library system isn't set up to reflect this, then (imho) they're missing an opportunity.

More questions? Leave 'em in comments. Thanks!

School Library Journal has just published an extensively footnoted essay I wrote about the future of reading, book publishing, This Is Not Tom, and some other things.

I'm going to use this blog post as a space to answer questions about the essay and continue the conversation about the future of publishing, but none of this will make sense unless you've already read the essay. Feel free to leave more questions in comments; I will update this post frequently over the next few weeks. Questions so far:

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Q. What's this about Cory Doctorow abandoning his publishers? His new book is with Tor?

He does have a new book with Tor, but his short story collection With a Little Help is being published without assistance from traditional publishers. He is giving away ebooks and selling print-on-demand physical books. (He talks about this experiment here.) He's detailing the financials of this experiment publicly for readers and other people interested in publishing to determine if it makes financial sense.


Q. I like the smell of books, and I like cracking a book spine, and books aren't going anywhere.

Well, okay, you might be right, but I would argue that whether you're right doesn't actually matter. What keeps me up at night is not the thought of the format changing but rather the thought that there will be no physical place to buy books, and therefore a totally unregulated market.

Ebooks don't need to take a larger share of the market for the bookstore business to be in big, systemic trouble. We knows this because the bookstore business is already in big, systemic trouble.


Q. Can you explain why the millionth copy of a book makes more money for a publisher than the first copy of a book?

Yeah. Many of the arguments in the essay begin with the fact that publishers would rather sell a million copies of one book than a thousand copies of a thousand books. I promised that an explanation of why this is would make your eyes bleed with boredom, and because I don't want that to happen, I'm going to keep this brief, but:

A. The more copies of a title you print, the cheaper it is to print it. (This is particularly true if you are printing it in China, which you probably are).
B. Most of the costs associated with a book--layout, editing, copyediting, jacket design, shipping, etc.--are upfront costs.

There are also a lot of other reasons, but I'm worried about eye-bleeding.


Q. When are you going to finish This Is Not Tom?

A. Yeah. Soon. I told noted nerdfighter Valerie2776 that I'd finish it by the end of 2009, but that ship has sailed. I hope to finish it very, very soon and put it up with satisfyingly difficult riddles, but it's hard to balance my desire to finish TINT with my desires to 1. pay the mortgage, and 2. prepare for baby.

...you should probably watch this one to the end.



(Also, why don't you go subscribe to our youtube channel? It's far better than this old thing.)