This article examines the future of the book publishing industry and presents strategies for publishers to decrease risk and increase profit. These strategies also benefit education, science, and technology by making books cheaper, more flexible, and more easily and quickly available.
Overview
Over the past two decades printing, paper, and transportation costs rose while their electronic counterparts-computing, electronic storage, and communication costs-halved roughly every four years. Both trends are expected to continue for at least two more decades.
The last time something this radical happened was in the 15th century when the printing press used the newly available cheap paper to take over the manuscript market, throw scribes out of work, and greatly increase the number of available books.
Print led to pagination, indices, and bibliographies, since they were now possible and they made searching easier. And those changes forced people to learn the alphabet so that they could use the new indices. Print increased literacy, democratized knowledge, increased accuracy, made fiction possible, made propaganda possible, created public libraries, and created the idea1 of authorship.
Print also decreased the importance of memories-and their main possessors, the elders; loosened the hold of the Church and led to the Reformation; added fuel to the Humanist movement and led to the Renaissance by putting classical authors back in print; increased education, science, and technology transfer; and created publishers.
Electronic books might bring changes of similar magnitude.
Electronic Books and Copy Protection
Today we can scan a printed book into electronic form, then distribute it over the phone in minutes to hundreds of people at pennies a copy. Further, we can produce books electronically without ever committing them to paper. Finally, we can augment electronic books to include sound and motion pictures, and automatic cross-referencing. Electronic books can be easier to distribute, less expensive, less