Book Wars. John B. ThompsonЧитать онлайн книгу.
id="ulink_2271b235-7045-554c-be89-24da6915225b">Figure 1.10 The ebook uptake model
In the case of general fiction, the switch to digital was not quite so rapid and dramatic as it was with genre fiction, but it wasn’t far behind, and by 2014 the ebook percentage for general fiction at Olympic was very similar to that for sci-fi and fantasy and mystery, although still well below romance. The kinds of books that are included in the category of general fiction share many of the properties of genre fiction. As narrative linear text that is read continuously in an immersive reading experience, these books are easy to read on e-reading devices like the Kindle – the form factor is good. The digital files are also easy and cheap to produce. The one thing that might differentiate some forms of general fiction, like literary fiction, from genre fiction is their possession value. For some readers, literary fiction, and certain books and authors, may have more possession value than genre fiction has – that is, they may be more inclined to want to own these books, and to own books by these authors, and to keep them on their shelves, partly as a way of signalling who they are and of displaying their cultural tastes. They may also be more inclined to give these books as gifts, which is another way of showing their possession value, since a gift is an object that you think someone else might wish to possess, and a physical book functions as a gift in a way that an ebook does not – ebooks make terrible gifts. These factors help to explain why general fiction, which includes literary fiction, is a category where the shift to ebooks has been a little slower than it has been for genre fiction and where the percentage reached in 2015 – 38.7 per cent – was still well below romance.
At the other end of the spectrum are travel books, cookbooks and juvenile books. Books in these categories tend to be non-linear and/or heavily illustrated. They are commonly read more slowly and often discontinuously – in many cases, they are not read in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, but are used more like a reference book that you return to time and again. Turnover is low and the book may be re-used, re-read or consulted again at a later date. In the case of some heavily illustrated books, it may also be displayed on a shelf or a coffee table. Unlike straight narrative text, it is often more difficult and more costly to make the content of these books available in digital formats that are attractive and easy to use. These are the categories of books where ebooks as a percentage of total sales remain at the lowest levels – below 12 per cent for Olympic (excluding the anomalous figures for travel books in 2016).
Between these two extremes are the categories of narrative nonfiction. The label ‘narrative nonfiction’ is a loose notion that includes a diverse range of BISAC nonfiction subject headings, from history, biography and autobiography to health and fitness, religion and self-help. We should not expect all of these categories to display the same ebook pattern, and they don’t. Those categories that are made up of books that are mainly narrative linear text, like biographies, autobiographies and works of narrative history, would be expected to display a higher level of ebook uptake, and this is indeed the case – the speed of ebook uptake was slower for narrative nonfiction than it was for fiction, but by 2015 the percentages for biography/autobiography and history at Olympic were only 5–10 per cent below the percentages for some categories of fiction, including general fiction and sci-fi. It is likely that ‘big ideas’ books, like the books of Malcolm Gladwell or Jaron Lanier, will also display a relatively high level of ebook uptake since they consist mainly of straight narrative text, although they don’t fit neatly into the BISAC categories analysed above. On the other hand, books that are more like reference works that might be read discontinuously and consulted from time to time, such as self-help and family and relationships books, would be expected to display a lower level of ebook uptake – and, again, this is what we find. In most cases, however, narrative nonfiction books display lower levels of ebook uptake than narrative fiction – both genre fiction and general fiction. This can be explained by the fact that the categories of genre fiction and general fiction will contain a higher proportion of books that are: (a) likely to display the character of pure narrative text, without illustrations; (b) likely to be read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience; and (c) likely to be turned over quickly as the reader moves on to a new reading experience. The categories of narrative nonfiction, by comparison, will contain a higher proportion of books that are likely to contain illustrations, to be read more slowly and discontinuously as the reader moves back and forth in the text, and to have a lower turnover rate, since the reader may want to hold on to the book with a view to returning to it at some later point in time.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on business and economic books in relation to other categories. As I noted earlier, many commentators in the early 2000s predicted that, when the ebook revolution came, it would be driven primarily by businessmen reading business books on their digital devices – the tech-savvy international jet-setters using spare moments at airports to keep up with the latest literature on business trends. In practice, business and economics books have performed very modestly when it comes to ebook uptake – relatively slow to take off, rising to 20 per cent by 2014 and then falling back to 15 per cent in 2015. This is well below the levels reached by fiction and other categories of narrative nonfiction, like biography/autobiography and history – the commentators in the early 2000s were wide of the mark. When ebooks did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by businessmen reading business books in airport lounges and more by women reading romance novels on their Kindles (most romance readers are women). Viewed through the lens of the model developed here, the relatively low ebook uptake of business books is not surprising. Many business and economics books are not the kind of books that you would typically read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience: they are more likely to be books that you would read more slowly and even discontinuously, where you may want to move back and forth in the text in order to remind yourself of information provided or points made earlier in the text. They are also books that you may want to come back to at a later point, consult again and use more like a reference work than a book that could be quickly read and then discarded. These features would suggest that business and economics books would perform more like self-help books and family and relationship books than fiction, and this is indeed what has happened.
Form vs format
What, if anything, does the experience of ebook sales since 2008 tell us about the likely impact of the digital revolution on the form of the book? Does it suggest that the digital revolution, by separating the symbolic content of the book from the print-on-paper medium in which it was traditionally embedded, has liberated the book from the constraints that were imposed on it by the medium of print and paved the way for a thorough re-invention of the book as a textual entity that displays very different characteristics from the entity we have come to know as ‘the book’? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many who speculated that the book would be re-invented in this way, that the very form of the book – that is, the way in which the text was organized, typically as a work of a certain length arranged as a sequence of chapters, etc. – could be and would be radically reworked in the digital age when the constraints imposed by the medium of print would fall away. One well-known example of this kind of thinking is Robert Darnton’s pyramid model of the scholarly book: a book no longer written as a straight linear text but constructed in multiple layers where the linear text is merely the top layer of a complex digital architecture that contains many more layers, enabling the reader to tack back and forth between a summary account on the surface and rich layers of documentation and illustrative material in the layers below.9 There are many examples in the world of trade publishing too: the digital book conceived of no longer as a capsule of content that can be embedded in a physical form of 200 or 300 pages of printed text, but rather as a book that exists entirely and exclusively in the digital medium, a book that is born digital and exists digitally sui generis. It may never have a physical equivalent, or, if it does, the physical book may be but a partial and subsequent realization, in print-on-paper, of content that was conceived of in relation to, and created for, a digital medium.
In the next chapter, we’ll look in detail at some of the attempts that have been made in the world of trade publishing to re-invent the book as a digital entity and examine what came of them, but here I want to reflect on what we can learn from the