Jason Kottke just highlighted this brilliant map that traces the home towns of everyone mentioned in Homer’s Iliad; effectively a Litinerary of Homer’s Greece.
So here’s your chance to do the ultimate Homeric pilgrimage. Forget the Odyssey and it’s totally overdone homages. Get your walking boots on and get back to the roots of this 3,100 year-old story and the distant, deep heart of the western literary tradition.
A recent report from the Association of American Publishers signalled that the apparently inexorable growth in ebook sales has stalled. Having captured 24 per cent of the book market, the digital juggernaut ran out of puff and stopped. To the relief of booksellers and bibliophiles everywhere, it looks as if ebooks are going to take their place as just another format, alongside audio-books, leaving plenty of room for printed books.
Almost from the moment ebook sales took off, the format recorded triple-digit annual growth rates in the United States. But last year, growth slowed to just 45 per cent. And just this month [Nov 2013], it was reported that ebook sales in June were similar to sales for the same period in 2012: Looking very much like an abrupt halt.
Sales of ebook reader devices are declining. And there is evidence that some early adopters are putting their Kindle in the bottom drawer and returning to print.
For those of us who have enjoyed a lifetime of visual, tactile and olfactory pleasure from the printed page, any sign that printed books are going to survive this digital tsunami is welcome. But these trends and headlines bear some scrutiny.
There will always be a market for printed books, just as there is still a market for vinyl records and fountain pens
First, what caused this slowdown in ebook adoption? The short answer is that the market for ebooks — the present-day market — is saturated.
It should have been clear to us from the outset that there is a limit to the number of people who would actually want an ebook. For now, the “natural” market for ebooks includes a lot of early-adopter enthusiasts, extreme users (who read a book or two per week), travellers, professionals and scholars. It is likely that these natural users will continue to prefer digital, for obvious reasons.
But there is another group of users who could be described as normal people who were bullied into getting onto the ebook bandwagon by friends, family and the media. There are countless thousands of Kindles, Nooks and Kobos in the hands of grandmothers and uncles who received them as well-meaning gifts. Millions of us succumbed to brute force marketing campaigns by booksellers with everything to lose. Having tried the ebook experience, some are now drifting back to print. The novelty just wore off.
Many of us are buying both print and digital. If you see an interesting book in your local bookshop, you buy it. If you search for a book online, you download it. It is not a zero sum game, but it goes some way to explaining the slowdown in ebook market growth.
Notwithstanding this current hiatus, there are three key drivers that determine the destiny of any market: Innovation, price and demography. What happens next with ebooks will be a function of these three things.
By “innovation”, I don’t mean “enhanced ebooks”. A lot of heat is being generated these days about adding cool things to books to make them more appealing. Video and audio are tops. Links to external resources, functional mathematical formulae, in-book collaboration … There is probably value in all that, but the more of it there is, the less clear it is that the object you are enhancing is still a book.
The innovation I look forward to is not so much about added functionality as about elegant simplicity. Today’s ebooks are still a slightly awkward simulacrum of a print book. You cannot quickly flip through an ebook, back and forth, the way you can with paper. Even turning pages, after all the practice I have had, is still a bit clumsy.
Writing margin notes requires a keyboard of some kind. The list is long. But with time, and through the incremental efforts of thousands of designers and developers, all these things will resolve.
There will come a time, quietly, when the experience of reading and managing your ebooks will actually surpass that of paper.
The second driver of ebook adoption is demographic. While the natural market for ebooks sits at about 24 per cent of the total book market today, the relentless march of generations will have its way.
My children and their friends already get 85 per cent of their news and information online. My grandchildren are digital natives. There is no doubt that, by the time they enter consumer mainstream, they will prefer digital over paper. And that time is not far off.
Finally, price. The low-price channel always wins.
The massive downward price pressure in recent years has been a boon for consumers. More importantly, all that pressure simply accelerated a process that was inevitable.
It is true that the capital costs incurred by publishers and booksellers in re-tooling for the digital age are considerable. But, having built the infrastructure, the unit cost of production per ebook sold is tumbling, and ebooks have the capacity to just keep getting cheaper in coming years. Consumer expectations and the natural competition between publishers will continue to drive ebook prices lower.
The widening price gap between ebook and print editions, combined with improved usability and a generational growth in demand for digital books, will precipitate a moment of collapse for printed books. Improvements in book production and distribution services may delay things, but there will come a point where ever-smaller print runs will push the unit price of printed books upwards, beyond tolerance. Something will break.
It will no longer be economic for publishers to ship books or for booksellers to pay rent. When it happens it will happen quickly — over a year or two.
There will always be a market for printed books, just as there is still a market for vinyl records and fountain pens. But the real future, a golden future, for books and reading is digital. All things considered, I expect the print book market to collapse on Sept 12, 2020.
[This is a slightly edited version of a presentation to the International Summit of the Book, Singapore, August 2013.]
If you’re a lover of pictures for their own sake, here’s a treasure trove for you.
Miriam Harris at Digital Arts reports that a new archive has appeared online showcasing over 3,000 carefully scanned and annotated images from Victorian editions of the plays of Shakespeare.
The archive is hosted at the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive, which is the elegant result of a massive labour of love by its creator, Dr Michael John Goodman.
“The database emphasises that there really is a ‘Shakespeare Universe’ where different motifs, ideas and themes recur,” says Goodman.
Having nothing better to do on a lazy weekend sometime in 1969, the esteemed French novelist Georges Perec (1936-82) wrote an entire 300-page book without using the letter “e”. Why? you ask. Well presumably it’s one of those “Because it was there” things. Or, more precisely, wasn’t there.
Still, at a time when many other French intellectuals were at the barricades, young Georges was bending his formidable intellect to the project of avoiding Es. One can’t help but wonder what effect this project had on his subsequent output. Did Georges resist the popular vowel ever after?
This useful information, along with seven other little-known facts about vowels, is set out in Arika Okrent’s fascinating Mental Floss piece, 8 Things You Might Not Know About Vowels.
We all dream of a creative, stimulating job in pleasant surroundings. Working with nice people, maybe? How about a “commute” that includes rolling green countryside and quaint villages? Well it looks like some people get to live that life.
Abi and Katie, two young book designers at emc design, just shared a day in their work lives as (respectively) middleweight and junior book designers.
Far from the chaos of the world they serve, Abi and Katie get up in the morning and trundle from Bedford to the scenic English village of Oakley to put in a hard day’s slog of drinking tea and being creative.
From the vantage point of eBooks.com’s corporate head office here on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia, that seems like a pretty good gig.
There was a time when bibles were chained to pulpits and armed guards watched over royal libraries. But there were historically more subtle ways to discourage theft. A fascinating report from Atlas Obscura reveals popularity of curses.
A good curse can go a long way to putting, literally, the fear of God into any would-be thief. Just try writing a little ditty like this on the first page of a treasured tome:
“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand & rend him. Let him be struck with palsy & all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, & when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.”
That should do the trick.
