New eBooks To Show Movies

Perceived and Posted by Jerry Schwartz

Kindles burn at temperatures much greater than Fahrenheit 451. Should be Centigrade. The debate over eBooks gets even hotter.

Throughout history, old media never disappeared when new media appeared. They changed. Newsreels didn’t kill newspapers anymore than TV didn’t kill radio. The Internet won’t kill newspapers, either. Even illuminated manuscripts changed . . . into valuable artwork. Like the evening news, at the end of the day it’s the content, not the medium.

Personally, I like Barnes & Noble’s new Nook, or at least the name. It’s up there with other silly branding mistakes like Apple, Google and Twitter. Whatever happened to good old products like Pan Am, Ipana and Oldsmobile? Obviously, names have some value. At $259, the wireless Nook is hot and sales are unexpectedly back ordered, probably until Nook 2. Clearly, consumers love eBooks, particularly passionate book buyers. Symbolically, so do publishers like Random House with Kindle igniting sales of Dan Brown.

Crazy industry, though, book publishing. Gives big advances to writers. Sells new books at a loss. Takes back unsold books. Publishes hundreds for one or two successes. Never spends a penny on marketing till one is successful, then spends a penny. Why are so many successful foreign authors “over there” so widely unesteemed and unsold here? Apparently, books don’t travel well. Tough business. Tough to read.

Most books are still printed the way Gutenberg did it in 1439. Pagination finally showed up 100 years later. Most improvements have been for productivity to deliver millions of Harry Potters, like magic, to the computer generation (unbelievable). Believe me, the monks who wrote manuscripts back then were nun-too-happy with new technology. Neither are today’s union printers.

Someone, not sure who, claimed if the Internet came first, we’d all say, “Hey, look. We can print out this stuff.” Yup.

Everybody wants to be an author, though. Certainly, less risky than launching a digital device or operating a book store. Plus, you get immediate cache at cocktail parties and future cash from a movie deal or licensing. Almost forever. Your grandchildren never have to work. Your birthplace and country home become museums with tours on podcasts. Your autographed first editions get collected. All this without getting dressed in the morning.

The book business will survive as will the newspaper business. They’ll change with The Times and the times. These industries need to harness technology beyond the speed of printing pages. Trucking one copy to East Flatbush finally will make no sense because it makes no cents. Long entrenched institutions, like lunches at Michael’s and parties in Tribeca, will somehow change, too. Breakfasts are briefer and cheaper, anyway.

Will eBooks cannibalize sales of printed books? Amazon says eBook owners buy many more books than before, up to three times more. Sales also increase with iPhone apps that enable in-store user reviews. The spread of digital TV recorders has shown people actually watch more TV and – unexpectedly and incredibly – more commercials. Network ratings are up. The Boston Globe, a very old and highly regarded newspaper, has seen its circulation drop in half to about 260,000, yet its web site gets an extraordinary five million unique visitors a month.

In addition to smartphone apps, all digital books – mobile or desktop -– offer exciting new possibilities. Some call this “augmented reality.” A click will take you from pages of Petrarch to pictorials of Pompeii. Or a video of Mario Batali cooking. Maybe pop-up coupons for pasta makers at Williams-Sonoma. The magazine industry is aggressively experimenting with it. McGraw Hill is actively marketing it with a college product called Connect. Digital fiction is next, with an optional movie on your Kindle. Nice touch.

Book jacket art may end up the biggest beneficiary, despite its predictable death by digital. An old client was a leading printer of music album covers when “vinyl” provided a 12-inch canvas. He collected them. Brookstone sold pre-fabricated frames for hanging them. Eight-track cassettes, tape and CDs really hurt them. Downloads finally killed them. But, of course, paid downloads are up in the face of declining disc sales. So are prices for original album art. Norman Rockwell illustrated magazines. Quick, name one or two book jacket designers.

Grandma, mom’s mom from Russia, never learned to read, after 70 years in this country. Never became a citizen. Love knows no boundaries. She was a great story-teller, almost better than TV’s Mr. Rogers.

McLuhan was sort of right -- the TV replaced story telling. As children, as we gathered in front of the old DuMont (with Kindle-sized screens) the way village natives gathered around a bonfire to hear vanities of the tribal chieftain. People don’t view computers quite that way. Nobody gathers around the monitor. In fact, there’s rarely a Dell in the living room, but this is changing with WebTV.

Like the music, TV and motion picture industries before it, the book industry will finally embrace digitization. Digital is not another version of print, it’s more. Whether smartphones or dedicated devices, it’s all about how readers interact with a book. Digital also provides authors with new visibility on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other wildly popular social media. Bibliographies provide links to other sites, no longer pedestrian footnotes. Reading is richer. Publishers, too.

Google’s internationally unpopular goal will be realized – all books online. A global electronic bookstore with full texts, not snippets. A prominent prep school outside Boston now has a fully digital library. Other schools have all but eliminated printed reference material. Annotation is dying !

As you’re reading this, a price war for top books among the industry’s online giants is generating big sales. At prices often lower than wholesale. Maybe some of this technology thing is nothing more than a marketing issue – poor point-of-purchase, lousy packaging, minimal promotion, high cost. Is $25 for hardcovers too high? In Europe, bookstores and online sellers peddle books at prices fixed by the publishers. In Germany, where Gutenberg lived, discounting is outlawed to protect small merchants and publishers.

Pricing drives technology. My clunky 1980s Bowmar calculator at $350 is now the size of a credit card and free with magazine subscriptions. Smartphones and flat screen TVs have seen sales rise as prices drop. Same with eBooks. What’s needed are new business models with a choice of purchase, rental and subscription plans. The biggest beneficiaries are consumers. They love the big selection and low price. Also, the interactivity, accessibility, portability and customization. What type size do you prefer?

The industry’s biggest fear is that lower prices will erode the inherent value of books. Maybe, maybe not. A 1776 printing of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” recently sold for $62,000. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” sold for $168,000. But a perfect print of a great French impressionist is barely worth the cost of its paper. Owners of prints are paupers. Owners of rights are not. Old book plates are valuable, calendar pictures are not.

Digital is not paper in the same way that Starbuck’s Instant isn’t coffee. Then, again, reading SparksNotes for your book club isn’t reading, either.

Click, click.

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Trucking one copy to East Flatbush finally will make no sense because it makes no cents. Long entrenched institutions, like lunches at Michael’s and parties in Tribeca, will somehow change, too. Breakfasts are briefer and cheaper, anyway.