The Future of Publishing

Seth Godin wrote late last year , “Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It's the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It's over.”

Legendary book editor Daniel Menaker says, “I think that in 10-15 years at least 50% of book-length texts will be read digitally, probably more, and printed book will shrink down to a special, almost boutique market.”

The top two headlines of a recent PW Daily were “Amazon Has Blockbuster Year” and “Borders Eliminates 164 Positions.”

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson, recently tweeted that he was thinking about selling his iPhone now because no one will care about iPhones when Apple launches the iPad.

And have you seen the iPad? It is revolutionary.

I see two big changes. One has already knocked down our door, stormed us, and is now standing on our chest breathing in our face. The other is on the near horizon.

The change that has already happened is a major shift in the way books are purchased. Seth Godin is right. Bookstores, it’s over.

The near change is a major shift in how people read books. This has already happened to some extent. According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon has sold millions of Kindles (2–3 million, most likely). But the Kindle is nothing compared to the iPad; a better comparison would be the iPhone. Apple has sold over 40 million iPhones in three years. I predict Apple will sell more iPads in the same timeframe. The total population of the U.S. is about 300 million, so in the next three years it’s safe to say 15 to 20 percent of Americans will own a device that enables comfortable digital book reading. This 15 to 20 percent are the people who matter to the book industry—the people who purchase the vast majority of books.

In my next post I’ll discuss what I think publishers need to do to survive these massive and exciting shifts.