Print versus digital war is still a hot one
E-book sale numbers in decline needn’t mean print has won it decisively
and think, “No, thanks”. This leaves the field to new entrants, who keep improving their product and luring new customers until it becomes dominant. The former industry leaders are left on the sidelines wondering what went wrong.”
At least, that’s Christensen’s story. It’s not an immutable law, and these days its applicability is probably affected somewhat by the fact that executives at established companies are all quite familiar with it.
In book publishing, everybody knew that e-books were a potentially disruptive technology, and none of the big publishers ignored them. But apart from some experiments with short, cheap digital-only releases, they mostly resisted that notion — pushed hard by Amazon — that digital books should be seen as a new kind of product with a much different pricing approach.
To the publishers, book format.
This approach seems to have succeeded in keeping the print business reasonably healthy. It’s also probably responsible for some of the slowing of e-books’ rise.
But it also means the book publishers are largely absent from the low end of the e-book market, which is where most of the growth and innovation are.
Today that market is the territory of aspiring to moderately successful writers of romance, mystery, science-fiction and fantasy novels and a fan base of dedicated readers who consume such work in mass quantities. It probably won’t stay hemmed in like that, though.
It’s getting easier and easier for successful digital-first authors to move into print and even bookstores without the help of a publisher, and the spread of ebook reading from dedicated devices such as the Kindle to tablets and smartphones (22 per cent of Americans age 18 to 29 read books on their phones, according to the Pew survey) seems to offer new opportunities for those who get the format and pricing right.
In short, the e-book story probably isn’t over yet — and book publishers aren’t helping themselves by acting as it if were. they’re just another