But the real question is, do the publishers get it? In an October 14, speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Paul Coelho claimed that giving away digital versions of a book on the Internet could actually boost sales rather than damage them. According to Coelho, people who read a few pages online, tire quickly of reading on the screen and then go out and buy the book.
There are currently three books available on Paul Coelho’s blog site; you can download each book as a .pdf file or you can purchase each in the traditional manner, or you can do both. Coelho has not sold the rights to any of the three to a publisher, so there are no problems with proprietary rights, which is obviously where publishers begin to get their hackles up.
A survey conducted by the organizers of the Frankfurt event found that 40% of the 1,000 who responded that they believed ebooks would overtake traditional book sales by 2018. However another one-third said they didn’t think it would ever happen. Coelho himself sees the publishers much the way copyist monks must have viewed Gutenberg back in the 16th century.
Publishers, ala the Napster battle, claim to see the value of digitalization but worry over the rights issues. Gottfried Honnefelder, director of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association, called for more regulation of intellectual property rights on the Internet. In other words, while publishers and booksellers see ebooks as a valuable commodity in the future, they’re hung up on how to secure their slice of the pie.
I would suggest that it’s the book stores that should be wary. The record companies won the battle and shut down Napster, but we no longer see many record stores around. Learn from that lesson. E-readers are coming, be they from Amazon, Sony, or someone else (Apple, maybe?) and booksellers need to figure out a way to coexist. I see a future of downloads, not only of the books themselves, but also of author readings podcasts. And it’s not at all a stretch to imagine interactive events with authors and readers taking an active, though virtual, role.
