The E-books Are Coming

There is something happening in the world of words, and it is this: more and more of them are not being printed.

Now, it's still true that the vast majority of book sales are in hardcopy format. What's new is how much more e-books are cutting into the market now than they were only three years ago. Adam Dewitz of printceo.com reports that while e-books accounted for 0.5% of total book sales in the United States in 2008, their market share in 2009 was 1.3%. This means the sale of e-books more than doubled in 12 months. Going further back, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) reports on their website that first quarter 2002 sales of e-books in the U.S. was only about $1.5 million, compared with third quarter 2010 sales, which amount to almost $120 million. Eight years = 80 times the revenue.

So it's no wonder why we now have the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, the HP iPAQ, the Pandigital Novel, the Kobo eReader and as of last year the Apple iPad all jockeying for position as the devices that will bring this electronic medium to us.

It makes sense, doesn't it? Traditional publishers spend gobs of money on print. The dollars spent on acquisition, editing, distribution and marketing amount to a huge financial liability if they have a flop on their hands. It's no wonder it is so difficult to get started as an unpublished writer. You almost have to be a sure thing - already published, already famous - for the gamble to be worthwhile in the eyes of a publishing house. And what the public gets as a result is the same old literary formulas rehashed at ever-rising prices.

E-books are cutting straight into the heart of the matter. As the print industry gets ever more inflated with cost and watered down with recycled content, electronic words will increasingly form the Wild West of the publishing world. Will there be, and is there currently, a whole lot of junk produced electronically? Of course. When writers of any caliber are permitted to submit their work directly to Amazon or other publishers of electronic media you do often get poor formatting, spelling and grammar, to name a few problem areas. That's to be expected. But you also see some real diamonds in the rough, writings that amount to pure genius despite their apparent lack of marketability.

From the writer's point of view, the e-book revolution on the horizon holds untold potential. Despite the fact that it appears - according to Mark Gross, president of Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc. in a recent article - that technical writing is what's selling best in the e-book format, writers of fiction and other non-tech genres are behaving as though it is far too early to be daunted. They are publishing electronically in droves. Type "ebook" into Google today and get at least 100 million results, whether on e-books for sale, tips on marketing e-books, devices that will store and display them, etc.

Besides the potential for writers, there are huge potential benefits for electronic publishers and consumers as well. Just as the Wild West was eventually tamed, so will the e-book business be. Spelling and grammar will have to pass muster for works to succeed as more people are involved in reviewing them. Formatting will become as needless a concern as website design is now, with the distribution of free software that will provide templates that standardize the process. That will eventually mean that quality content will be widely available at greatly reduced cost.

This is a great time for writers and readers alike to go electronic. Sites like Smashwords.com provide free and easy publishing services as well as an online store that makes shopping and download simple. Writers can really get in on the ground floor with no risk and, with a little elbow grease applied to online self-promotion, experience the benefits over time of being a part of a rapidly growing industry. Bibliophiles can purchase e-books today at extremely low prices, providing an opportunity to proudly recognize and support talented writers at the rookie stage.

We will always have printed books among us. Millennia of handwritten artifacts and the persistence of hardcopy documentation today are a testament to that. But just as the omnipresence of television, computers and cell phones in everyday life have opened new doors in communication without removing our ability to interact personally (as some predicted it would long before now), so electronic words will succeed without displacing their printed counterparts.

And vice-versa.