Future Of Books
Cloud Society: The future of books is ‘free’ – after a fashion
Two announcements this month show how Moore’s Law and the cloud are having an impact in the publishing world, and illustrate what might be the shape of things to come as far as e-books are concerned.
The first comes from Berlin-based e-reader company, Txtr. The device vendor announced the Beagle a few days ago (http://gb.txtr.com/beagle/), a no-frills e-reader which will set punters back a paltry 8 pounds. That’s one way or another – reports suggest the device will be bundled as part of mobile phone contracts rather than being sold direct.
Meanwhile we have Amazon’s announcement (LINK: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/54342-amazon-launches-kindle-lending-library-in-u-k-germany-and-france.html) of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which gives Amazon Prime members access to over 200,000 books. To feed the library with titles, the organisation is looking to self-published authors to enrol in its HDP Select pay-per-borrow programme.
Put the whole lot together and we see a clear trend towards ‘free’, at the point of access at least. The fact that the Beagle can do very little (you need to set options on your phone before transmitting books to the device via Bluetooth) illustrates how the cost of cloud-based endpoints is tending to zero.
And the both the Beagle sales channel and Amazon’s library model share the approach of offering added-value services to existing subscribers – either of mobile phone or of retail services. It wouldn’t be a surprise at all if the two came together at some point – the ‘free e-book library with your mobile phone contract’ sounds blindingly obvious.
Of course the Beagle still has to be released, and Amazon continues to come under a fair amount of stick for its relations with publishers and self-publishers. While the business models may still need a tweak, nobody is questioning the continuing fall in e-reader costs and, equally, the online library model looks here to stay.
While this might not spell the death of the paperback just yet, the ability to access any book at any moment for next to nothing is coming ever closer.