Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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availability of personal computers and mobile devices with high-speed internet connections, it became possible not just to transform supply chains, back-office systems and production processes, but also to revolutionize the ways in which customers, i.e. readers, acquire books, the form in which they acquire them and, indeed, the ways in which the readers of books relate to those who write them. The traditional print-on-paper book, and the industry that had grown up over a period of some 500 years to produce this object and distribute it to readers through a network of retail outlets, constituted, in effect, a channel of communication that put one set of individuals (writers) in communication with another set of individuals (readers) through a particular medium (the book) and a ramified network of organizations and intermediaries (publishers, printers, wholesalers, retailers, libraries, etc.) which made this communication process possible. The great challenge posed by the digital revolution to creative industries like publishing is that it opened up the possibility of creating entirely new channels of communication between creators and consumers that would bypass the intermediaries that had hitherto enabled this process to take place. Traditional players could be ‘disintermediated’ – that is, cut out of the supply chain altogether.
Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the disruptive potential of this aspect of the digital revolution was provided by the music industry. For decades, the music industry, dominated by a small number of major record labels, had been based on an economic model in which recorded music was inscribed in a physical medium, traditionally the vinyl LP, and sold through a network of retail outlets. The first major impact of the digital revolution on the music industry – the development of the CD in the 1980s – did not fundamentally disrupt this model: on the contrary, it simply substituted one physical medium for another and resulted in a surge in sales as consumers replaced their LPs and cassette tapes with CDs. But the development of the MP3 format in 1996, and the coming together in the late 1990s and early 2000s of personal computers and the internet, resulted in a sudden and dramatic change in the way that music was acquired, shared and consumed. Very quickly, the world of recorded music changed from one in which consumers bought albums in bricks-and-mortar stores, occasionally sharing them with friends, to a world in which music could be downloaded, uploaded and shared online, potentially with anyone who had access to the internet.
The explosive implications of this transformation were highlighted most vividly by Napster, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service that was launched in 1999. The site catalogued the music files of millions of users so you could see who had what, and then enabled you to download a file from a remote PC, seamlessly and with no money changing hands. Napster grew exponentially – at its peak, it had 80 million registered users worldwide. As music sales began to decline, the music companies and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster for infringement of copyright, succeeding in closing it down in 2001. But the genie was out of the bottle and the short life of Napster brought home to everyone the massive disruptive potential of online distribution. A plethora of P2P file-sharing services flourished in the wake of Napster’s demise, many using the BitTorrent protocol that gathers bits of a file from a variety of hosts rather than downloading a file from a single server, making it much harder to shut down.
Quite apart from P2P file sharing, legitimate channels for the online distribution of music grew rapidly in the early 2000s. Apple, the most significant of these, launched the iTunes music player in 2001, the same year that it released the iPod MP3 player, and added the iTunes music store in 2003. Now it was possible for customers to download songs, perfectly legally, for 99¢ a track. By 2008, Apple had become the number one music retailer in the US, outstripping Walmart, Best Buy and Target. During the same period, the sales of CDs in the US collapsed, from 938 million units in 1999 to 296 million in 2009, less than a third of what they had been a decade earlier.5 Total revenues from US recorded music sales also plummeted, falling from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $7.8 billion in 2009.6 The collapse of revenues was cataclysmic, as can be seen in figure 0.1.
Figure 0.1 US recorded music revenues by format, 1998–2010
Note: revenues are for cassettes, CDs and downloads (singles and albums) only.
Source: The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Consumers who were still buying music were paying much less for it than they had paid in the late 1990s, when CDs were the overwhelmingly dominant format. In 1999, 938 million CD sales generated revenue of $12.8 billion, or $13.66 per CD; there were no download sales at that time. By 2009, CD sales had fallen to 296 million units; these were still generating revenue of $14.58 per CD but, because the units sold were less than a third of what they had been a decade earlier, the total revenue generated from CD sales had fallen to $4.3 billion. By contrast, music downloads had grown dramatically since 2004, and by 2009 there were 1,124 million single downloads and 74 million album downloads; taken together, however, these downloads generated only another $1.9 billion, and therefore came nowhere near to making up for the loss of $8.5 billion of revenue on CD sales.7 Moreover, while many people were paying for downloads through legitimate channels like iTunes, a very large but unknowable number of others were downloading music for free – according to one estimate by the online download tracker BigChampagne, the volume of unauthorized downloads still represented around 90 per cent of the music market in 2010.8
There were many in the book publishing industry who were looking over their shoulders at the tumultuous developments in the music industry and wondering anxiously if music was the future of books foretold. What would the book publishing industry look like if piracy became rife and total book revenues were cut in half? What kind of revenue models would replace the tried-and-tested model on which the industry had been based for more than 500 years, and how robust would these new models be? How could the book industry protect itself from the rampant file sharing that had become commonplace in the world of music? What would happen to bookstores if more and more books were downloaded as files, or even ordered online rather than bought in bricks-and-mortar bookstores – how could physical bookstores survive? And if they disappeared, or even declined significantly, how would readers discover new books? It didn’t take too much imagination to see that the book publishing industry could be hit just as hard by the tsunami that swept through the music industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Senior managers looking out of the windows of their high-rise office blocks in Manhattan might well be wondering whether the days of their panoramic views were numbered.
And yet, during the first few years of the new millennium, the signs of what would actually happen in the book publishing industry were anything but clear. There was no shortage of speculation in the late 1990s and early 2000s about the impending ebook revolution – one much-cited report by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2000 forecast an explosion of consumer spending on electronic books, estimating that by 2004 consumer spending on electronic books would reach $5.4 billion and would comprise 17 per cent of the market. Expectations were also raised by the startling success of one of Stephen King’s early experiments with digital publishing. In March 2000, he published his 66-page novella Riding the Bullet electronically, available only as a digital file that could be downloaded for $2.50; there was an overwhelming response, resulting in around 400,000 downloads in the first twenty-four hours, and 600,000 in the first two weeks. But, notwithstanding Stephen King’s good fortune, the predictions made by PricewaterhouseCoopers and others turned out to be wildly optimistic, at least in terms of the timescale. Those publishers who were actively experimenting with ebooks in the early 2000s invariably found that the levels of uptake were extremely low, indeed negligible: sales of individual ebooks numbered in the tens, in some cases, the hundreds, but were nowhere near the hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of units that many had expected. Whatever was happening here, it didn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the sudden and dramatic transformation of the music industry – or at least not yet.
The story of the ebook’s rise turned out to be much more complicated than most commentators had thought, and as this story unfolded through the first decade of the twenty-first