SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
theage.com.au
EXTRA
F
OR 15 years, pundits
have declared the old-
fashioned book to be as
doomed as the orang-
utan. Just as we will one
day have to visit the last
of that sad species in a
zoo, the dog-eared paperback is
destined for a similar freakshow
status. Perhaps along the lines of
collectable Wedgwood or silver
spoons.
It isn’t only the smug futurists
who hold this view: some of Mel-
bourne’s most devoted biblio-
philes told The Sunday Age the
book is destined to be little more
than an ornament as technology
increasingly transports Charles
Dickens and Dan Brown into the
digital age.
If this is true, the local death
throes of tree-sourced literature
began in May, very quietly, when
the Borders website posted the
first e-book bestseller list for
Australia. For the first couple of
weeks, a No. 1 hit meant 20
copies sold. Four months later,
Borders Australia and its sister
company, Angus & Robertson,
have sold more then 100,000
e-books and 20,000 Kobo
e-readers, and seen 200,000
e-book applications downloaded
free (for iPhone and desktop
computer reading) from their
websites.
While one rival bookseller
queried the Kobo e-reader sales
figures, REDgroup, the company
that owns Borders and Angus &
Robertson, thinks they could have
sold more if more of them had
been available.
‘‘But for about six or seven
weeks we couldn’t get [enough]
devices into our shops,’’ RED-
group communications manager
Malcolm Neil says.
‘‘We were just getting orders
and managing demand . . . a huge
latent demand.’’
Ask local publishers and book-
sellers what the sales mean for the
future of reading and they’ll say:
‘‘We don’t know yet.’’
On one hand, the fact that the
applications (web-based soft-
ware) are available free on the
Borders website is just one part of
an aggressive strategy by RED-
group that, for the moment, is all
but locking up the e-book market
in Australia. On the other hand,
the fact there have been twice as
many e-reading applications
downloaded as actual books sold
by REDgroup suggests the
revolution so far is a geek-led
phenomenon. If there’s a new
gadget going, the tech-nerds will
tend to snap it up.
Graham Cottew, a web
designer who specialises in risk
and compliance management for
the finance industry, describes
himself as ‘‘an early adopter of
technology’’, yet he’s only read
one e-book so far, The Art of War,
and on his iPad, not on a ded-
icated e-reader. He reckons he
won’t take to stand-alone
e-readers ‘‘because they’re a one-
trick pony. I would never pick a
technology that did just one
thing.’’
As for the electronic reading
experience, he says: ‘‘At the time, I
really enjoyed it. The simulation
of turning pages is great, the clar-
ity of text is fine and I didn’t get
any eye strain. And the one thing I
haven’t seen mentioned: my wife
and I often fight about turning the
lights out when I want to read one
more chapter. Because the iPad is
back-lit, she could have the lights
out and I could keep reading.’’
Cottew sees e-books as having
two advantages over paper books:
portability and cost. ‘‘If you are a
geek, you always have your iPad
with you, which means you
always have your library with you.
That you’re virtually taking along
kilograms of paper with no extra
weight is a fantastic advantage.
‘‘The other thing: I’ve just been
given the Millennium trilogy (the
Stieg Larsson juggernaut) as
paper books . . . but I was going to
buy them as e-books because the
e-book version was $US9 [$A9.40
per volume] while the Albert Park
bookshop sells them for $27 each.
It might be over the top to say this
spells the death knell for tradi-
tional books, but it’s bound to
take a big share of the market.’’
Cottew admits an emotional
attachment to his favourite paper
books, including a number of
‘‘beaten-up paperbacks’’.
‘‘They mean something to me
sitting on the shelf. Sometimes
books mean more to you than just
the words written in them. They
might have been part of your life
or inspiration.’’
B
UT does this old-school
sentimentality wash with
a younger generation
suckled on digital techno-
logy? Cottew’s son, Tim,
19, is also a geek. To wit, a science
and engineering student at Mon-
ash University. He has read a
couple of science fiction e-books
on his computer but isn’t a fan,
largely because he already spends
too much of his time looking at a
screen.
‘‘I prefer reading to be a
different experience. I love a
paper book. I love [that] they all
have different covers, where I
think e-books would tend to all
look the same. So you don’t get
the same attachment. With a
paper book, it’s more intimate.’’
Of course, the death of intim-
acy tends to occur in stages, and
catches its victims by surprise.
For the moment, e-book sales
make up less than 1 per cent of
total book sales in Australia.
However, Australia is two to three
years behind the US, where
e-books accounted for 8.5 per
cent of all book sales as of May,
compared with 2.9 per cent in the
same period last year, according
to the Association of American
Publishers.
By the end of the year, e-books
are expected to account for 10 per
cent of the US market, and by the
end of 2011 may reach upwards
of 15 per cent. In July, Amazon
announced that Stieg Larsson was
the first author to have sold a mil-
lion copies via its exclusive Kindle
e-reader. In the same week,
Amazon said it was selling more
e-books than hardcover books.
The growth in the Australian
market will be on an equally
exponential curve, says RED-
group’s Malcolm Neil. ‘‘Every new
device and application adds to
the size of the market,’’ he says.
Two weeks ago, REDgroup
signed a deal to market the Sony
e-reader. Myer has also signed on,
but other booksellers are locked
out.
While REDgroup has trum-
peted its dominance of the
market, Neil doesn’t believe his
company has taken it hostage.
‘‘This is the new world,’’ he says.
‘‘Everyone is staking out their
claims. But it costs money to
do this, big investment. We
can do it because we’re
partners with other
markets around
THESUNDAYAGE
Is this the
final
chapter
for
books?
E-books are set to revolutionise the the world, which
means we’re sharing
way we read, writes John Elder. costs.
‘‘I wouldn’t say we’re
But plot twists may save trying to tie up the mar-
ket; we’re trying to obtain as
paper books from going much content as possible.
Content is king. If you don’t
the way of the dinosaur. have content, you can’t have a
share of the market.’’
Which is precisely what has
happened so far with the inde-
pendent book shops — they have
no easy access to e-titles. From a
consumer’s point of view, you
cannot go to an independent
bookshop’s website and buy an
e-book, because they don’t have
them in stock — regardless of
how tooled up you might be with
the latest e-readers or applica-
tions.
Surely it’s a simple matter of
the stores buying the files direct
from the publishers?
Well, no. It’s a delicate and
complicated issue that, as The
Sunday Age discovered, many
people in the Australian publish-
ing world find difficult to under-
stand, let alone explain. Here is
the short version, as related by
Stephen May, president of the
Australian Publishers Association:
■ The e-book trade is complex
because of technical and legal
issues related to file integrity and
copyright protection — and the
way a couple of big companies
have exploited these complexities
to corner the market.
■ For the past three years, some
publishers and bookstores, such
as Dymocks, have been selling
e-books on their websites but in
formats such as PDF that don’t
deliver the true e-book page-
turning experience. The true
experience is delivered via an
e-reader (such as the Kindle or
Kobo) or e-reading application (as
on iPad).
fm ■ When Amazon launched its
e-titles in 2007, it invested a huge
amount of money in being able to
digitally ‘‘talk’’ to all the publishers
and gain access to the titles. It was
then able to virtually monopol-
ise the market because people
could only buy and read the
books through Amazon’s
Kindle e-reader. The com-
pany has since domin-
ated the market via
aggressive pricing and
11
convenience.
■ Borders internationally has like-
wise invested in being able to talk
to all publishers — and Borders
Australia has benefited from this.
It then did a deal with the Cana-
dian company that produces the
Kobo reader, in effect copying the
Amazon model by initially adopt-
ing limited access via one type of
e-reader. However, Borders has
now begun selling the Sony
e-reader.
■ There are 2000 Australian book-
sellers. Very few of them could
afford to develop their own
e-readers, and they’d never make
their money back. Meanwhile,
there is no point in a publisher
simply emailing book files to
bookshops that don’t have the
technical support for their con-
sumers to access their books in
the format they choose.
■ However, there are new
e-readers coming on to the
market and the number of
devices is expected to grow radic-
ally — and, increasingly, they will
be open systems that can talk to
files sold from any outlet.
■ What’s missing is a new kind of
integrated distribution system —
akin to the old-fashioned ware-
house, but in digital form — that
will serve as a protected link
between publishers and book-
stores, and will digitally talk to
any device the consumer chooses
to use. These warehouses are
already being established in the
US and Britain.
Says Stephen May: ‘‘The only
way to get a file into an e-reader
has been through a bookstore. So
far, that’s meant either Amazon or
REDgroup. They have the march
on it. But every week there will be
a new e-reader out, and that’s
what we’re all dealing with at this
point.’’
As one industry insider
explains: the independents
expected the publishers to broker
individual deals with retailers,
while the publishers hoped the
retailers might amalgamate into a
big enough group to fund a ware-
‘‘If you are a geek, you
always have your iPad with
you, which means you
always have your library
with you.’’
GRAHAM COTTEW, web designer
house.
Victoria Nash, digital strategy
manager for Pan Macmillan, says
there is talk of ‘‘an industry-based
solution’’ but it will take time.
The most immediate solution
(or, at least, the big white hope for
the independent bookstores) rests
with the Google Editions library
getting online and serving as a
wholesaler. Google Editions,
which has scanned 21 million
titles from major libraries around
the world, could essentially serve
as the missing wholesaler link.
Although in recent years
Google has provided access to
many free books that are out of
copyright, Google Editions, which
has been negotiating with pub-
lishers around the world, includ-
ing Australia, will essentially be
another online bookseller — sim-
ilar to Amazon but willing to open
up the market by allowing users
to access books from a broad
range of websites using an array
of devices.
Mark Tanner, Google Editions’
man in Australia, says the com-
pany is planning to sell direct to
consumers, ‘‘but we’re willing to
work with retailers, including the
independents’’. It was widely
reported that Google Editions
would be ready for business in
July. Two months later, Tanner
says the company is keeping its
launch date under its hat.
Mark Rubbo, managing dir-
ector of Readings, believes Google
Editions ‘‘will be the game-
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