Book Wars. John B. Thompson
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ebooks, electronic formats or digital editions – this simply wasn’t envisaged as a format that publishers might want to exploit at some point, so no explicit provision for this format was made in the contracts that publishers negotiated and signed with authors and agents. This changed around 1994: from this point on, many publishers did add to their contracts an explicit provision for electronic formats or digital editions. The specific wording of the clauses, the ways in which revenues would be split and the timing of these contractual changes varied from publisher to publisher, and, even at the same publisher, varied over time – Random House introduced the first changes to their contracts in 1994, others followed suit later. However, for all those books for which contracts had been signed prior to 1994, publishers who wished to release electronic editions had to go back to authors, agents and estates and seek to negotiate an addendum to the original contract that would give them the explicit right to release an electronic edition of the work. Even when authors were amenable, this was a time-consuming and laborious process. Moreover, given the uncertainties surrounding the digital revolution and its potential impact on the publishing industry, it was also a contentious and conflict-ridden process in some cases, as the various parties tried to use whatever leverage they had to negotiate new and better terms in a context where previous norms for print editions could not necessarily be construed as a reliable guide.
And then there was the non-trivial issue of how a book released in an electronic format would actually be read. Texts could, of course, be read on desktops and laptops, and various dedicated reading applications were available for these devices; but desktops and laptops lacked the convenience and portability that many readers had come to associate with the print-on-paper book. A variety of portable, hand-held devices and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, and software was made available for reading ebooks on these devices, but the screen sizes were typically small and the resolutions were relatively poor. In 1998, the first two dedicated ebook readers were released in Silicon Valley: the Rocket eBook, a paperback-size device that held 10 books, weighed a pound and cost $270, was released by Nuvomedia in Palo Alto; and the SoftBook, which held 250 books, weighed 3 pounds and cost around $600, was released by SoftBook Press in Menlo Park. While the devices were innovative and attracted a lot of attention, they sold poorly (less than 50,000 units between them). In 2000, both Nuvomedia and SoftBook Press were acquired by Gemstar, a large technology company that developed interactive programme guide technology for cable and satellite television providers. The Rocket eBook and the SoftBook were phased out and replaced in November 2000 by two versions of the new Gemstar eBook, one with a black and white screen and the other with colour, manufactured by RCA under licence to Gemstar. But, again, sales were disappointing, and in 2003 Gemstar stopped selling ebook readers and ebooks.
Numerous other reading devices appeared and disappeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s – enough to fill a small museum of now-defunct consumer technology. But the first real breakthrough came in April 2004 when Sony launched the Librié 1000-EP in Japan, which was the first reading device to use e-ink technology. Unlike backlit screens, e-ink uses reflected light to simulate the appearance of a printed page. The screen is filled with tiny capsules containing charged pigment; when the electrical charge applied to each capsule is adjusted, its appearance changes, thereby altering the display and producing a page of text. The screen holds that display until the charge is adjusted again to produce a new page of text. E-ink is much gentler on the eye than backlit screens and is easy to read in direct sunlight; it is also very economical in terms of battery use, since electricity is used only when the page is changed. The Sony Reader was launched in the US in October 2006, selling at around $350 and capable of holding 160 books, and ebooks could be purchased from Sony’s own ebook library which offered up to 10,000 titles.
The Sony Reader was a major advance, but it was the Amazon Kindle, released a year later in November 2007, that was the real game-changer. Like the Sony Reader, the Kindle used e-ink technology rather than backlit screens; but, unlike Sony, Amazon used wireless 3G connectivity, free for the user, to enable readers to download ebooks directly from Amazon’s Kindle Store. Readers could now buy ebooks directly from their reading device, without having to use their computer to go online to download the ebook and then transfer it to their reading device via a USB cable. Now, buying ebooks was as easy as a single click. The first Kindle retailed at $399 and was capable of holding 200 books, and the Kindle Store claimed to stock 90,000 titles, including most of the books on the New York Times bestseller list. When the Kindle was released on 19 November 2007, it sold out in five and a half hours and remained out of stock for five months – though what exactly that meant in terms of actual sales remains a mystery because Amazon never disclosed how many they produced. In 2009, Amazon released the Kindle 2, a slimmer version with much more internal memory, capable of holding around 1,500 books, and it reduced the price to under $300. (The development of the Kindle is examined in more detail in chapter 5 below.)
By late 2009, Amazon faced new competition from Barnes & Noble, which launched its own ebook reader, the Nook, in November 2009. Barnes & Noble had been an early entrant in the online marketplace for books, having created an online bookstore, barnesandnoble.com, in 1997, two years after Amazon went live, but barnesandnoble.com struggled to compete with its more creative and efficient rival; the launch of the Nook was Barnes & Noble’s attempt to gain a foothold in the emerging ebook market and to compete head-to-head with the Kindle. Like the Kindle, the Nook used e-ink technology and wireless 3G connectivity to enable readers to buy ebooks directly from the Barnes & Noble store. The Nook retailed at $259 – the same price to which Amazon had reduced the Kindle 2 in October 2009. A year later, Barnes & Noble released the Nook Color, equipped with a 7-inch full-colour LCD touchscreen and priced at $249. Although Barnes & Noble was a relatively late entrant in the e-reader marketplace, it had one important advantage that it exploited to the full: the company had over 700 retail bookstores across the US and it devoted prime space in many of these stores to exhibit, demo and hand-sell the Nook. And, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble already had a large and established customer base of readers who were accustomed to buying books from its stores.
When Apple finally entered the ebook market with the launch of the first iPad in April 2010, they were entering a market in which the two largest book retailers in the US, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, already had major stakes. What Apple did, however, was to integrate the ebook reading experience into the environment of an ultra-stylish, state-of-the-art, multi-purpose tablet computer with a high-resolution LCD touchscreen. Unlike the Kindle and the Nook, the iPad was not a dedicated reading device, but it offered users the option of reading ebooks by downloading an iBook app from the App Store, which displays ebooks and other content that can be purchased from Apple’s iBookstore. The iPad proved hugely successful: 3 million devices were sold in the first eighty days, and by the time the iPad 2 was launched in March 2011, more than 15 million iPads had been sold worldwide. The iPad was much more expensive than the Kindle or the Nook (the initial models were selling for between $499 and $829, depending on the capacity and functionality), but this was much more than a reading device: with the iPad, books entered a new world in which reading was just one of the many things you can do on a small, portable computer, and where the potential for creating new kinds of content, capable of being read and consumed in new kinds of ways, far exceeded anything that had been possible on the Kindle, the Nook and other dedicated reading devices.
The appearance of a new generation of reading devices that were much more stylish and user-friendly than the ebook readers of the early 2000s, coupled with the aggressive promotion of ebooks by major booksellers with large and established clienteles, were the critical factors that underpinned the dramatic upsurge in ebook sales from 2008 on. This remarkable pattern of growth can be seen in table 1.1 and figure 1.1, which show overall ebook sales for trade books in the US between 2008 and 2012.4 In the period up to 2006, ebook sales had remained very low and largely static – probably under $10 million. This was a tiny proportion, a small fraction of 1 per cent, of a sector in which total annual sales were around $18 billion.