Brilliant Predictions from 2009
So a few years ago, I posted “predictions” for the future of publishing. I clearly don’t have the gift of prophecy, but thought it would be fun to go back and look at what I had to say, and how my predictions panned out. This is from Dec of 2009:
1. Borders will survive, but Barnes & Noble will take over. Um… wrong. Borders, a fun but poorly managed business, is gone. B&N has taken over, but we’ll see if that lasts.
2. A major author will self-publish. This seems comical now, with everybody self-publishing, but at the time there was a question if established authors would try self-pubbing or remain exclusively with traditional publishers. Score a small one for me.
3. Ebooks will more than double in sales. Ha! It didn’t take a genius to figure that out, apparently. Ebooks have doubled, doubled again, then doubled again. Now the growth is slowing, but it’s still the future. I was right, but a blind man could have picked this horse.
4. Authors and publishers will offer a lot of free ebooks to boost readership. Again, this seems stupefyingly obvious now. So I was right on the basic idea. I just didn’t realize a million wannabes would glut the market with crummy free books, and therefore dilute the value of free ebooks.
5. Libraries will move to ebooks. Well… who knows? They want to, apparently, but publishers are worried about usage and lost revenues, so it’s still not clear how libraries are going to work (or if we need all of them, in an age when anybody can google a topic on their laptop). No points for me on this one.
6. Apple will create an e-reader. Um… score big on that one. This prediction was made before anyone had heard of an iPad, by the way. Again, it might be obvious now, but at the time it was a guess made by looking at the market.
7. Publishers will acquire websites in order to target niche audiences, and replace book sections in newspapers. Okay, this was one time I reached a bit. I thought publishers would purchase and promote some of the big, successful book websites. Instead, they simply started their own sites.
8. Publisher print catalogs and sales conferences will die out. Totally wrong. I guessed this because I thought the notion of a catalog and “selling season” were becoming passé. While companies have gone to a digital catalog, and are doing more with online ordering, the fact is that everybody still has a sales conference and creates a catalog of titles. Oops.
9. There will be a hardcover option for every book. I thought everyone who posted an ebook would have the opportunity to generate a hardcover edition for true fans. Swung and missed. One of the weaknesses in the current system at Amazon or B&N or Smashwords is that offering a “print” option of an ebook is a completely separate decision, a separate package, a separate set-up cost. (If I were going to make predictions this year, it would be that Amazon will figure out this mistake and solve it.)
10. Everybody will switch to XML. I assumed expandable markup language would be the core of every document. It’s still the basis of Word and iWork, but it’s clear that I lack the techno-geek qualifications to look into the future of digital bookmaking and tell readers anything about software. My bad.
So…. not a bad prognosticator, but not exactly as good as the Mayans, who predicted the world will end next Wednesday, in case you aren’t ready. You may want to go ahead and indulge in that extra slice of pie this weekend.
17 Comments
My local library has gone to e-books, at least as one of their offerings. They joined together with some other libraries and I can just log on from my iphone, search, choose, check out, and read (or listen, they offer audio too).
Not bad IMO. I’d like to hear you prognosticate more often. #6 was brilliant.
By the way, as a techno-geek with some qualifications, XML is a generic Markup Language. By generic I mean it’s like a sandbox: anyone can define any tag to mean anything they want. Having that feature makes it less than ideal for any specific task including formatting an ebook. So technical people often start out using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) but they always seem to transition to something more specific – usually by creating a new -ML specific to their needs. Ebooks don’t have their own because some brilliant people figured out ways to use HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the coding language webpages are written in) to format ebooks over the past several years.
See http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ebookstandards/ for more information from an industry perspective.
I don’t have the gift of prophecy, Daniel, so it’s sort of an educated guesswork. Thanks for your tips on XML!
Glad you said it: I just didn’t realize a million wannabes would glut the market with crummy free books, and therefore dilute the value of free ebooks.
Yeah – that’s what has happened. And all those readers have downloaded tons of crummy books.
Chip, you may missed on a few, but I think your success rate is amazing. If you had this good of a batting average in baseball, everyone would want you on their team.
Thanks, Peter. My guess is this year might have been a higher average than other years.
Ooooh, I knew I felt guilty for a reason. I went to my library’s digital download site, borrowed an e-book from a popular author, read it over my own designated period of time, and then it was deleted from my Kindle app on my smart phone. This is all done through Amazon.com and Kindle. I actually felt bad–like I had stolen the author’s royalty. I love the convenience–but not sure about the ethics. Now I feel dirty. [grin]
You can send me a check to make up for it, Cindy…
You know, whatever type of day I’ve had, Chip’s blog invariably gives me a chuckle. An extra piece of pie indeed! Of course, when we all wake up on Thursday a pound or two heavier, we can blame Chip. 🙂
And it seems I got my dates off by a week, so maybe I’m a terrible prognosticator!
well, Chip, I think that even the ones where you “missed” were still based on good reasoning 🙂 I have never understood how libraries with ebooks will work successfully for the publishing industry, btw, though I’m not one who truly knows that end of things.
And I ALways want to see “print” books. I “get” the e-reader stuff, but don’t see it as a way of life. Give me tangible–the beauty of ink on paper, the shelves lined with covers—and EMF free! 🙂
Yes, libraries are still re-defining themselves. Others tell me they’ll get it figured out and remain… I wonder if taxpayers can live with that.
Oh, Chip, are you saying libraries themselves will disappear in the same way the post offices are being hurt? I can’t bear the thought of a world without physical books, and the idea of no libraries? AGH!!!
So … what are your predictions this year?
That’s funny. I believe he predicted we would all have an additional piece of pie.
True. And I predict all those eating pie this week will be wanting a gym come january.