These are dark and stormy times for the mass-market paperback, that squat little book that calls to mind the beach and airport newsstands.
Recession-minded readers who might have picked up a quick novel in the supermarket or drugstore are lately resisting the impulse purchase. Shelf space in bookstores and retail chains has been turned over to more expensive editions, like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the sleeker, more glamorous cousin to the mass-market paperback. And while mass-market paperbacks have always been prized for their cheapness and disposability, something even more convenient has come along: the e-book.
A comprehensive survey released last month by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group revealed that while the publishing industry had expanded over all, publishers’ mass-market paperback sales had fallen 14 percent since 2008.
via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
via infoneer-pulse
Emergent Futures Tumblelog
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Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author
SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon moved aggressively Tuesday to fulfill its new ambition to publish books as well as sell them, announcing that it had signed Timothy Ferriss, the wildly popular self-help guru for young men.
Full Story: New York Times
Non Traditional Book Publishing by Jana Bradley, Bruce Tulton, Marlene Helm, and Katherine Pittner
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Non–traditional book publishing, prospering on the Internet, now accounts for over eight times the output of traditional publishing. Non–traditional publishing includes books published by their authors and books representing the reuse of content, most of it not covered by copyright. The result is an heterogeneous, hyper–abundant contemporary book environment where the traditional mixes with the non–traditional and finding books that match a reader’s taste is more difficult than previously and may involve new methods of discovery.
The hyper-fracturing of the book world, accelerated by liquid media and tablets.
infoneer pulse: In case you didn't know where books are headed
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The Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced April sales figures for the publishing industry (22 companies reporting their sales). Guess which format is winning? University press paperbacks!
Category Sales % Change
E-books $72.8 million 157.5%
Downloadable audio $7 million
(Source: scribnerbooks)
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Rowling Conjures Up Potter E-Books - WSJ.com
When Rowling enters the new world of e-books and direct interaction with her “readers” it dramatically speeds up the transformation of the publishing industry from a chain and into an ecosystem of adaptive players of many different forms.
Another aspect is that it accelerate the change of the asynchronous nature of a relation between a storyteller and his or her audience into an ongoing interactive many-to-many conversation where the author or initiator gets a very different and continuously participating role than just an author.
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The British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century.It will allow readers to view, search and copy the out-of-copyright works at no charge on both the library and Google books websites. […] The works selected to be digitised date from between 1700 and 1870, and the project will take some years to complete, with Google covering the costs of digitising. Google has similar partnerships with about 40 libraries around the world. […] Director of external relations at Google Peter Barron said: “What’s powerful about the technology available to us today isn’t just its ability to preserve history and culture for posterity, but also its ability to bring it to life in new ways.” […] The digitised works are just a small fraction of the library’s collection which totals more than 150 million items representing every age of written civilisation, including books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages.(via BBC News - British Library makes Google search deal)
![futuramb:
The British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century.
It will allow readers to view, search and copy the out-of-copyright works at no charge on both the library and Google books websites. […] The works selected to be digitised date from between 1700 and 1870, and the project will take some years to complete, with Google covering the costs of digitising. Google has similar partnerships with about 40 libraries around the world. […] Director of external relations at Google Peter Barron said: “What’s powerful about the technology available to us today isn’t just its ability to preserve history and culture for posterity, but also its ability to bring it to life in new ways.” […] The digitised works are just a small fraction of the library’s collection which totals more than 150 million items representing every age of written civilisation, including books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages.
(via BBC News - British Library makes Google search deal)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln38nmnmJv1qz4fj0o1_400.jpg)
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Paul Higgins: I think you are right but my guess is that we will see:
- Librarians mostly disappear in the current form and become far more facilitators, and educators of knowledge.
- That The IT scenario of books in electronic formats will mostly prevail due to convenience and cost. Living in Australia it is much more attractive that I can access electronic versions from all across the spectrum .
- There will still be libraries of a sort and they will be for two things. Firstly they will be for books that cannot be be electronically accessed, which will be a smaller and smaller number as time goes by. Secondly as a social meeting place for thinking and learning where the facilitation and critical thinking skills will be paramount. One important role will be bring people together from different perspectives to avoid an internet based echo chamber - serendipity of interactions creating new thinking.
Robots, Not Humans, Retrieve Your Books at $81 Million “Library of the Future”
You enter the 8,000-square foot elliptical Grand Reading Room of the Joe and Rika Mansueto library, admiring the arched dome of glass panels overhead. You walk past the circulation desk, gaze at the stylish furniture and think: Where the heck are all the books?
via @mmartoccia
Full Story: Singularity Hub
Ahhh… This is the industrial scenario when librarians are replaced by robots but the books remain in libraries which now are equal to huge unmanned storages.
The IT-age scenario is that the books are replaced by computers, but the librarians remains spread in society or in the transformed libraries which now are combined café and conversation areas.
Two perfectly possible scenarios which can be combined in two diagonal ones as well:
One scenario where both libraries, books and librarians remain as they are today.
And one scenario where both have disappeared…
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