Are Books Doomed to Extinction?

We all know that the Media Guy loves his books. You remember books, right? Those heavy bound things with lots of paper for people with an attention span…


What is happening in the industry is as saddening as it is maddening. 
How do we change it all?


I recently ran into Michael Levin, founder and CEO of BusinessGhost, Inc. (www.BusinessGhost.com) who said that “Publishers must innovate to save the book as we know it.” Who is he you ask? His resume speaks for itself…author of more than 100 books, including eight national best-sellers; five that have been optioned for film or television. He’s co-written with Baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield, football broadcasting legend Pat Summerall, NBA star Doug Christie and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman, among others.

With
all that on his side of the ledger, he says he can see the writing on the iPad.

“Unless
something changes, books as we know them are doomed, and not simply because
people prefer to read on their iPads or Kindles.” says Levin. “You’ll see the
major publishing houses starting to go away in three to five years,” Levin
says. “Their business model is in free fall. Already, we’re seeing books
becoming shorter, cheaper, and diminishing in quality. You’ll soon see fewer
really good authors bothering to write books, because books are no longer a
meaningful source of revenue.”


Levin
points to several developments he says foreshadow a sad ending for books:

• Attention
  spans are diminishing. Three-fourths of teachers said
  their students’ attention spans are shorter than ever, according to a poll
  released in June. By 11 years old, nearly half of the kids had stopped reading
  for pleasure. The poll, by publisher Pearson UK, is just the most recent
  survey/study documenting shrinking attention spans and a corresponding drift
  from books. “Part of the problem is children don’t see their parents reading,”
  Levin says. “Obviously, the kids’ aren’t the only ones with diminishing
  attention spans.”

• Major
  publishers are producing lower-quality books.
  The big publishing houses today are more interested in a quality marketing plan
  than in the quality of the book, so we’re being deluged by low-quality books.
  One reason is that many large publishers have stopped taking on the expense of
  marketing books, but they know it’s necessary for sales. So they take on
  authors with a marketing plan and budget. They’re also less interested in
  “star” authors, who demand higher royalties. They also lost authors when they
  eliminated advances in response to the 2008 recession.

• Books are
  moving to devices, where content is free and time is thin-sliced.
  Online, you don’t expect to pay for content. People will expect books available
  online to be either free or very inexpensive, and if those books turn out to be
  one chapter of ideas and eleven chapters of Hamburger Helper, they will be less
  willing to pay for them. Also, people don’t spend much time going into depth
  online; books are supremely inappropriate for the surface-skimming nature of
  the Internet. Once people have bought a bunch of ebooks they’ve never started,
  they’ll stop buying them altogether.

• Authors have a
  more difficult time earning a livable wage.
  Fewer authors can earn enough to make writing a full-time job. The audience is
  shrinking and fewer people are willing to pay $15 for a paper book when cheap
  alternatives are available. “We’ve already seen more books written to promote a
  product, service or company, or to brand the writer so he or she can pursue a
  more lucrative field,” Levin says. “Most books of the future will be marketing
  tools, since that’s the only way they’ll be profitable.”

He
does find reason for hope, but it will require publishers to change how they do
business.

“They
need to stop trying to go after the mass market, which doesn’t exist anymore,
settle on a niche and develop a brand. Publishers that stand for something in
the reader’s mind – like Harlequin stands for romance – are built for the long
haul,” he says.

Instead
of publishing 500 low-quality books every year, major publishers should bring
out only 50 top-quality winners and actually market them, he says. And publish how-to and other
guidance and instructional books in concentrated form: short, powerful and to
the point,


The
rest of us have a job to do, too, Levin adds.


“People
need to read, and they need to read to their kids or buy them books. If people
stop demanding good books, there eventually will be none available,” he says.
“The winners, going forward, will be that minority who still read and think for
themselves. It’s a lot easier for government, the military, and the corporate
world to control the way people think if they aren’t reading for themselves. That
ought to be reason enough to save the book.”