A recent Shelf Awareness offers a summary of points made from the Making Information Pay seminary held by the Book Industry Study Group. As emerging technology continues to change the publishing industry, some people will bemoan that consumers aren't reading like they used to. In fact, consumers are not reading less, necessarily, but they are reading differently.
Although e-books are nowhere near achieving their potential, there are many other digital opportunities, mostly on the Web and cell phones and iPods, that continue to grow and evolve. Publishers who aren't ready for those and unforeseen opportunities--such as by not digitizing their books, for example--will lose out. As Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co., put it: "The day will come when you should have done it last week."
Consumers are reading more and more online and want pieces of information, not full texts. As a result, making chapters and other parts of traditional books available is more important. "Consumers don't want to read a whole finance book when they're only concerned with mortgages," Nicole Poindexter of Hachette Group said. "New media is radically changing content. In the past, readers just took content as it was presented." Now, she added, "consumers create content."
Poindexter pointed out, too, that the next generation of readers are digital natives and to an extent will bypass books. "We'll have no chance to control our content unless we take action now to digitize it and be proactive."
As digital natives increase their share of the consumer marketplace, I wonder what new content products will emerge to serve their needs. What will books of the future look like? And how will we need to write them?
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