Heartfelt apologies for blatantly plagiarising my title from an insightful piece by an anonymous member of the Wattpad community.
Wattpad is an online community for authors and reader to share books.It is a kind of Youtube for books. If like me you just stumble across it on the internet while looking for some e-reading material you might be forgiven for assuming you have stumbled into the worlds largest selection of teen vampire novels. It seems that Wattpad has had some success among female readers of a particular age. Neverthless if you ignore the preponderance of werewolves and doomed romance and think about Wattpad for a minute, you have to admit it just might be the future of creative writing.
For some time now I have been wondering about the future of books and publishing. I am a relatively recent convert to electronic book reading but my brief foray into the world of e-books and e-books sellers has convinced me that none of the current models is sustainable in the long run. The ebook market is very fragmented at the moment with a confusing variety of formats and a lack of sensible pricing.
Some publishers and booksellers seem hesitant to even admit they are engaging in the e-book business. Case in point take Waterstones: They have a huge catalogue of ebooks available in epub format but their mobile bookstore app (the app that folks might run on the very devices they use to read ebooks) doesn't list any of them. Others are more enthusiastic. Barnes and Noble and Kobo are pushing ebooks very hard, Apple appears to be doing quite well with its Ibooks, and of course Amazon appears to have achieved amazing success with the Kindle. Nevertheless I am not convinced that any of these efforts are really all that significant in the long run. Locking customers into proprietary formats and expecting them to pay close to physical book prices for an ebook just doesn't make sense to me.
One thing I quickly realised about ebooks is that the story is more important than the device you read it upon. There is a minimum standard required for the experience to be acceptable but after that the reading device becomes irrelevant. Current day readers are just about reaching that standard but in the near future there will be a wide range of devices which are more than good enough. This choice of devices will leave readers free to choose for themselves and rob publishers and booksellers of the monopoly control over distribution of books they once enjoyed. Authors will still need ways to get their books to as wide an audience as possible. Readers will still need fast reliable means of selecting books that they enjoy reading. Services like Wattpad could be one answer to these needs.
Wattpad is an online community for authors and reader to share books.It is a kind of Youtube for books. If like me you just stumble across it on the internet while looking for some e-reading material you might be forgiven for assuming you have stumbled into the worlds largest selection of teen vampire novels. It seems that Wattpad has had some success among female readers of a particular age. Neverthless if you ignore the preponderance of werewolves and doomed romance and think about Wattpad for a minute, you have to admit it just might be the future of creative writing.
For some time now I have been wondering about the future of books and publishing. I am a relatively recent convert to electronic book reading but my brief foray into the world of e-books and e-books sellers has convinced me that none of the current models is sustainable in the long run. The ebook market is very fragmented at the moment with a confusing variety of formats and a lack of sensible pricing.
Some publishers and booksellers seem hesitant to even admit they are engaging in the e-book business. Case in point take Waterstones: They have a huge catalogue of ebooks available in epub format but their mobile bookstore app (the app that folks might run on the very devices they use to read ebooks) doesn't list any of them. Others are more enthusiastic. Barnes and Noble and Kobo are pushing ebooks very hard, Apple appears to be doing quite well with its Ibooks, and of course Amazon appears to have achieved amazing success with the Kindle. Nevertheless I am not convinced that any of these efforts are really all that significant in the long run. Locking customers into proprietary formats and expecting them to pay close to physical book prices for an ebook just doesn't make sense to me.
One thing I quickly realised about ebooks is that the story is more important than the device you read it upon. There is a minimum standard required for the experience to be acceptable but after that the reading device becomes irrelevant. Current day readers are just about reaching that standard but in the near future there will be a wide range of devices which are more than good enough. This choice of devices will leave readers free to choose for themselves and rob publishers and booksellers of the monopoly control over distribution of books they once enjoyed. Authors will still need ways to get their books to as wide an audience as possible. Readers will still need fast reliable means of selecting books that they enjoy reading. Services like Wattpad could be one answer to these needs.
Comments
It's almost ideological in that they reject the notion of downloads simply because there is a chance of sharing without them knowing.
The music studios, unlike movie studios, is doing a great job of fast-tracking their own demise with the huge amounts of aggressive suing and blanket blaming pretty much every consumer of being a pirate.
I guess it's a bit like the music shops themselves - total and utter lack of coordination. There could have been a much better system of total cataloguing and distribution even before the Web.
The music industry has only itself to blame.
All credit to Apple for taking up the obvious.
Solbright
Point is that even this crippled DRM method is better than what the industry itself ever produced. ie: A total void!
Solbright
Was meant to be in http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2011/05/i-want-to-watch-it-now.html
In fact I think the impact of the digital revolution will be even tougher for the incumbents of the book industry because books require no infrastructure at all. and therefore the traditional producers and distributors of books have no role at all in the new digital reality.
I think I'll repost my earlier comments in the correct thread.
Solbright
I still think they are going to wipe out paper books though for one simple reason: economics. The cost of producing and distributing ebooks is so much less than that of conventional books that once the technological reaches "acceptable" for most people I think the switch over will be quite rapid. Acceptable doesn't even have to be as good as paper - it just needs to be good enough.