By: Michael Grothaus, from fastcolabs.com
While no one in the publishing world wants to halt the march of digital distribution, many would like to ensure the neighborhood bookstore doesn’t go the way of the record store. That’s why there are a growing number of people in the industry who are looking to disrupt the disruptors and show Apple, Amazon, and Google how to do digital publishing right–by embracing the new while keeping the best of the old. One of those people is Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife–one of the most popular debut novels of the last decade. She’s recently become involved with, and invested in, a new digital publishing startup called Zola Books–an e-bookstore that, among other things, aims to help physical bookstores thrive in a digital age.
The New Dividing Line
The Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest trade show of its kind, ended its run this year on Sunday. Though, like always, the fair was dominated with deals being made for new novels, selling foreign rights for existing books, and a continuing discussion on e-books versus paper books, this year’s fair also saw a new level of wariness growing for the encroachment of the big three tech companies–Apple, Amazon, and Google–into a world many feel they care little about. As the fair’s director Juergen Boos told industry insiders and members of the press, “The dividing line is no longer between old and new, print and e-books, analog and digital. Instead it runs between those who have a passion for content and who want to provide access to it, and those who don’t really care what they’re selling.”
A Cycle Of Passion-Fueled Profit
Boos’s “passion for content” comment was a reference to not only the authors and publishers but, primarily, the traditional book reseller: the bookstore. In the past the bookstore was a tender distribution point curated by those that really cared about the written word. To open and run a bookstore, after all, took time and money–and it never made many people rich. Selling books was a work based on passion. And that passion, in turn, helped readers discover new writers, which helped new authors make a living, which allowed publishers to continue to commission more books by more authors. It was a cycle of passion-fueled profit.
It was also a profit that could be measured in more than dollar signs and extended way beyond the authors, publishers, and booksellers. That’s because the bookstore itself was often a focal point in the community where people could go to not only buy books but, through talks and events, meet other readers and authors and explore and exchange new ideas. Indeed, in many cities it was the neighborhood bookstore that acted as the rock that other businesses, such as cafes and coffee houses, sprang up around–giving the local community its “vibe.”
But as the tidal wave of digital publishing progresses many in the industry increasingly bemoan that all that is built around the traditional bookstore is slowly fading away. They say that Apple, Amazon, and Google are only interested in books as a means to sell more of their own hardware, caring little about the material nor the community of readers, writers, and neighborhood bookstores they are disrupting.
To the tech giants, many argue, a book is no different than an app like Plants vs. Zombies: It’s just more arbitrary data to push people to buy each company’s impersonal hardware. And as more bookstores close and Amazon’s grip on digital distribution tightens, the rhetoric of the “battle between print and digital” only grows more heated.
But need there be a battle at all?
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