• As a full-time author, it’s hard not to spend large parts of the day contemplating the future of publishing. These are indeed interesting times. Ebooks are finally beginning to make an impact on the public consciousness if not their pocketbooks – yet.

    But eBooks are coming, make no mistake about it. Where does that leave me? When I started out, gentlemen publishers were still around. They would make up their mind about a book on the spot and would often have the contract in the post the next day. Now that’s what I call doing business! It was fun, but things changed.

    As each of my publishers were bought out, I tended to follow my editors, as that was where my loyalties lay. They moved, the publishers they moved to were taken over, and again they moved on until there was nowhere left to move on to.

    All the little publishers became parts of the giants until there are now really only a handful of mega corporate trade and general publishers left. New publishers start out with the intention of selling out when they can.

    So what will happen next?

    I recently had a vision of a possible future. You could say that Google and Amazon are making the edges between distributers and publishers a bit fuzzy – Google with Youtube and Google Books, Amazon with the Kindle. These two organisations will soon realise that distribution is not enough if the other begins to own the rights to the content.

    When these two go head to head, there is going to be a bloodbath! The rights to all the copyrighted content in the world will be bought up as they slog it out, buying up publishers and their rights.

    Of course there is also Apple sitting quietly on the sidelines… they are sitting on a huge mountain of cash. The ipad and the iStore are brilliant distribution systems waiting to be fully exploited. How soon before Apple, Google or Amazon make their first bid to buy Pearson or Hachette? Not long, I predict.

    And what stupid politician is going to stand in the way of the juggernauts, holding their hands up and blathering about monopoly? None.

    What do you reckon?

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  • It dawned on me, just now, that there is one huge difference between the Music Industry and the Publishing Industry that, so far, has meant that eBooks haven’t taken off in the same way that music did.

    In the beginning, people began to rip their cd’s and put the digital files onto their computers, because it was convenient to have them catalogued and available on their hard drives. Originally, an mp3 player was piece of software that made it easy to find the music on your computer and make it play. Soon people were providing “skins” for the software to make it look more cool on the screen.

    Once all this data had been digitised, it was easy to start file sharing it and music took off as a downloadable product.

    The Music Industry hid under the covers and hoped it would go away, but it didn’t. Eventually they began to do something about it.

    Books are very different. It’s a huge bore to digitise a book, so no one does it (except for total nerds!). So, the material isn’t there to be shared. If everyone had piles of book data on their hard drives, clever software people would come together to make the data readable in beautiful ways, that would encourage more and more to adopt eBooks in favour of paper books.

    That is what is different and why eBooks are slow to get going. in the digital world, piracy is a necessary evil to get the show on the road!

    Want to read an eBook now? Click the picture above to read My First Picture Joke Book at www.magicblox.com. Enjoy!