eBook Dilemma

I read this article on Barnes and Noble's new CEO, and it made me join in the speculation and start thinking about eBooks and the role they play in altering the publishing future.  Combine this with John Grisham's release of all of his titles as eBooks and David Baldacci's latest enhanced eBook content, and I really start to take a step back and think about the way this may actually revolutionize publishing as a whole, just as it has been predicted to.

I have long been conflicted on eBooks in that they have extremely high potential to help and destroy the reading market.  For starters, eBooks can potentially lower the bar for starting authors and allow just about anyone to get into the market and start pushing their books with little or no barrier to entry.  This means that lots of people who have previously not found a home for their work through traditional channels will have the ability to get their novels out in front of readers without having to navigate the traditional agent/editor/publishing maze.

And therein also lies the problem:  Once you have removed the barriers to entry, the market will essentially be flooded with crap, making it extremely difficult to find anything of value, and the mass market will, in essence, become the sifters of the slushpile instead of paying the premium for the agents and editors to have pre-filtered the content for them.

I have too much nostalgia, I understand.  I like flipping the pages of a book.  I like wandering the aisles of bookshelves in a local bookstore and looking for titles and covers that catch my eye or that I have heard of.  The market is and has changed, and I am rapidly growing out of most marketers' targets, but I have yet to understand how it will all shake out in the end.

The music industry was extremely threatened by mass distribution of media without DRM, etc., but I think part of that may be due to the fact that the music put out by the establishment in the late 90s and early 00s was (and to a large part still is) mass-produced crap, meaning that the premium placed on a "professional filter" was not something that the public had any need for anymore.  The "established system" had basically lost its value.  I don't see that in publishing (yet).  Maybe that's because the publishing houses are still putting out good books.  Maybe it is because I overestimate how bad the music industry got.  Maybe I place a perceived premium on published work over self-published and self-promoted work.

Certainly there is room for niche, and the major publishing houses will overlook those titles because the marketing and development expense would outweigh the returns.  Certainly there is a market and opportunity for established authors to make higher percentages of profits for cutting out the middle-distribution-channel and trading directly with the consumer.  I have yet to figure out, though, exactly how this will balance against the piles of Mary Sue fiction created by sixteen-year-old romantics that hide a true literary gem by their sheer volume.  Will finding good books to read be as difficult as searching for a single rare collectible in all the thrift stores of the world?  I have yet to understand how new authors will be able to place even more focus on their platform development and marketing strategies.  With pressures to build a following and build a market driving many authors to work harder to influence publishing decisions today, how will that change even more so if the author becomes the vendor?  Or will we just evolve into a new sense of author, the one who is killing him/herself promoting and building their fan base a la podcasters or podcast novelists like Scott Sigler or Mur Lafferty, and whose fan base turns out to support the author with whom they feel a sense of duty and a  relationship between author and reader that previously rarely existed/?

Maybe in the end, nothing has changed in the results.  Maybe all we have done is shift the burdens around.  In this view, we have moved the marketing and promotion responsibilities from grand publishing houses to individual authors.  We have moved the filtering responsibility to sift the slushpiles from the "professionals" to the democratic masses, who will find even more allegiance to and value in the works they discover themselves.  We have moved the hopes and desires of a young author from finding an agent and publisher who will accept their work and print it for the world to building a fanbase that will support the art and creation with their dollars directly.  And we have moved from ink on page to bytes flying wirelessly overhead to land in the Kindle.

As for me, I'm still undecided.  Since I'm not a traditionally-published novelist, I don't fit in that camp, but since I am not yet pushing new media to the limits, I haven't yet joined up with that crew either.  Maybe I am just someone who realizes the world is changing, wonders how he needs to adapt, and yet holds a sentimental place for the "days of old," longing for a time which may have never existed.  Where are you?