{"id":89,"date":"2015-03-25T20:44:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-25T20:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/accintrotomedia\/chapter\/3-6-the-influence-of-new-technology\/"},"modified":"2022-08-06T23:28:58","modified_gmt":"2022-08-06T23:28:58","slug":"3-6-the-influence-of-new-technology","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/accintrotomedia\/chapter\/3-6-the-influence-of-new-technology\/","title":{"raw":"3.6 The Influence of New Technology","rendered":"3.6 The Influence of New Technology"},"content":{"raw":"\n
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Learning Objectives<\/h3>\n
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  1. Determine the benefits and drawbacks of digital libraries.<\/li>\n \t
  2. Define print-on-demand<\/em> and self-publishing<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n

    The book industry has changed enormously since its creation. From the invention of the papyrus scroll to the introduction of the e-book, new technologies continuously affect how people view and experience literature. With the advent of digital media, old-media industries, such as the book industry, must find ways to adapt. Some fear that this new technology will destroy the industry, while others maintain that it works to the industry\u2019s advantage. However, one thing is clear\u2014digital technology promises to reshape the publishing industry as we know it.<\/p>\n\n

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    E-Books<\/h2>\n

    The first e-book readers were related to the personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, pocket-sized electronics that could store and display large amounts of text, that became popular in the 1990s. However, early e-book readers lingered on the market, popular in certain techy niches but unable to gain traction with the wider population. Early e-readers had minimal battery life and text that was difficult to read. Through the 2000s, technological advances allowed for smaller and sleeker models, the Apple iPhone and the iPad helped make readers more comfortable with reading on a small screen. The second half of the decade saw the release of many e-readers. The technology got a boost when Oprah Winfrey praised the Kindle on her show in October 2008. By that holiday season, e-book reader sales were booming, and it wasn\u2019t just the technologically savvy individuals who were interested anymore. Despite being criticized by some as providing an inferior reading experience to dedicated e-readers, the Apple iPad has been a powerful driving force behind e-book sales\u2014more than 1.5 million books were downloaded on the Apple iPad during its first month of release in 2010 (Maneker, 2010).<\/p>\n

    E-books make up less than 5 percent of the current book market, but that number is growing. At the beginning of 2010, Amazon had about 400,000 titles available for the Kindle device. Some devices offer wireless accessibility, meaning that an e-reader doesn\u2019t have to be connected to a computer to access titles; an open Wi-Fi connection is all it needs. With access to a dazzling array of books available with just a few clicks, it\u2019s no wonder the contemporary consumer seems enamored with the e-book. An e-book reader has the space to store thousands of titles in an object smaller and lighter than the average hardcover novel. And though the devices themselves can be expensive, e-books are usually cheaper than their hardcopy equivalents; sometimes they\u2019re even free. Thanks to efforts like the Gutenberg Project and Google Books (see the following section), more than a million public domain titles are available as free e-books.<\/p>\n

    Anything that gets people excited about books and reading should be good for the publishing industry, right? Unfortunately for U.S. publishers, it\u2019s not that simple. Some publishers worry that e-book sales may actually end up hurting their bottom lines. During the Kindle\u2019s first year, Amazon essentially set the standard price for bestselling or new release e-books at $9.99. Since Amazon was acting as a wholesaler and buying these books for half the publisher\u2019s list price\u2014generally around $25 for a new hardcover\u2014the company was selling these titles at a loss. However, for Amazon, a short-term loss might have had long-term payoffs. At the start of 2010, the company controlled a 90 percent share of the e-book market. Faced with e-books that cost less than $10, traditional publishers worried that consumers would avoid purchasing a new hardcover priced at $25 (or even a $13 trade paperback).<\/p>\n \n

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    Figure 3.13<\/span><\/p>\n\"3.6.0\"<\/a>\n

    Most e-readers are the size and shape of one hardcover book.<\/p>\n

    ndh - Kobo eReader<\/a> - CC BY-NC 2.0.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n \n

    In January 2010, the conflict between Amazon and the publishing establishment came to a head. Macmillan, one of the six major publishing companies in the United States, suggested a new business model to Amazon, one that resembled the deal that the Big Six publishers had worked out with Apple for e-book sales on the Apple iPad. Essentially, Amazon had been able to buy books from publishers at wholesale rates\u2014half the hardcover list price\u2014and then set whatever retail price it wanted. This allowed Amazon to choose to sell books at a loss in the hope of convincing more people to buy Kindles. Macmillan proposed a system in which Amazon would act more as a commission-earning agent than a wholesaler. In Macmillan\u2019s proposed model, the publisher would set the retail price and take 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent for the retailer. Macmillan couldn\u2019t force Amazon to agree to this deal, but the publisher could strike a hard bargain: If Amazon refused Macmillan\u2019s offer, it could still sell Macmillan titles under the wholesale model, but the publisher would delay e-book editions for 7 months after hardcover releases. What followed was a standoff. Amazon didn\u2019t just reject Macmillan\u2019s proposal; it removed the \u201cbuy\u201d button from all Macmillan books listed on its website (including print books), essentially refusing to sell Macmillan titles. However, after a few days, Amazon capitulated and agreed to Macmillan\u2019s terms, but not before issuing a strongly worded press release claiming that they agreed to sell Macmillan\u2019s titles \u201cat prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books,\u201d because \u201cMacmillan has a monopoly over their own titles (Rich & Stone, 2010).\u201d Still, Macmillan and the other publishers seem to have won this battle: Amazon agreed that e-books for most new fiction and nonfiction books for adults will be priced at $12.99 to $14.99, though best sellers will still be $9.99 (Rich & Stone, 2010).<\/p>\n

    But the $10 book may be the least of the publishing industry\u2019s worries. At the start of 2010, more than half of the bestselling titles on Kindle were free. Some of these were public domain novels such as Pride and Prejudice<\/em>, but many others were books by living authors being promoted by publishers by giving away the book. The industry hasn\u2019t yet come to a consensus about the utility of free e-books. Some publishers consider it a practice that devalues books in the eyes of customers. \u201cAt a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,\u201d David Young of the Hachette Book Group told The New York Times<\/em>, \u201cit is illogical to give books away for free (Rich, 2010).\u201d Other publishers consider free e-books a promotional tool to build word-of-mouth and to introduce readers to new authors.<\/p>\n

    Other e-books emerge from outside the traditional publishing system. Four of the five bestselling novels in Japan in 2007 were cell phone novels, books that were both written and intended to be read on cell phones. Cell-phone novels are traditionally written by amateurs who post them on free websites. Readers can download copies at no cost, which means no one is making much of a profit from this new genre. Although the phenomenon has not caught on in the United States yet, the cell phone novel is feared by some publishers as a further sign of the devaluation of books in a world where browsers expect content to be free.<\/p>\n

    With e-book sales expected to triple by 2015, it\u2019s hard to say what such a quickly growing industry will look like in the future (McQuivy, 2010). Some people have theorized that e-readers will lead to an increasing popularity of the short story, which can be bought and read in short increments. Others have claimed that they\u2019ll destroy the book industry as we know it. Whatever the future of books looks like, everything\u2014from the way books are produced to the way we read them\u2014continues to change rapidly because of new technologies.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n

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    Digitizing Libraries<\/h2>\n

    The idea of a digitized library has been around since the early years of the Internet. A digital library<\/a><\/span> stores its materials in a digital format, accessible by computers. Some digital libraries can be accessed locally; others can be accessed remotely through a computer network. Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library, in 1971, 3 years before the Internet went live. Hart\u2019s initial goal was to make 10,000 of the most-consulted books publicly available and free by the end of the century. The forward-thinking Hart named his project after the inventor of the movable type printing press, perhaps realizing that book digitization had the potential to revolutionize the way humans produce and read books as much as Gutenberg\u2019s invention had centuries earlier. At first, the process was slow for Hart and his fellow book-digitizing volunteers because they were forced to copy text manually until 1989. In the early 1990s, scanners and text-recognition software allowed them to somewhat automate the process.<\/p>\n

    Fast-forward to 2010. Project Gutenberg\u2019s free online library boasts more than 30,000 public domain works available for free download. Stanford University uses a robotic page-turning scanner machine to digitize 1,000 book pages an hour. Stanford\u2019s partner in digital library production is Google Books, which has scanned over 10 million books since it began Google Books in 2004. A Chinese company claims to have digitized more than half of all books that have been published in Chinese since 1949. In 2006, The New York Times<\/em> estimated that humans have published at least 32 million books throughout history; the huge push for book digitization makes it seem entirely possible that nearly all known books could be digitized within 50 years (Kelly).<\/p>\n

    Some liken the prospect of these widely accessible, easily searchable, free libraries to the proliferation of free libraries in the 19th century, which led to a surge in literacy rates. One of Project Gutenberg\u2019s stated goals is \u201cto break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy\u201d through its library of digitized books (Hart & Newby, 2004). Digital libraries make a huge selection of texts available to people with Internet access, giving them the amazing potential to democratize knowledge. As Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe\u2019s e-publishing business, told The New York Times<\/em> in 2006, \u201cSome of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com<\/a> to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books (Hart & Newby, 2004).\u201d Digitized libraries can make fragile materials available to browsers without damaging originals; academic libraries are also able to share important texts without shipping books across the country.<\/p>\n

    Google Books, the largest online library, is not run by an academic institution, though it does claim several as partners. The bulk of free digital books available from Google Books or elsewhere come from the public domain, which constitutes approximately 15 percent of all books. Google Books has made over a million of these titles fully and freely searchable and downloadable. Other works in the Google Books digital library include in-print texts whose publishers have worked out a deal with Google. Some of these titles have their full text available online; others allow only a limited number of page previews. As part of its partnership with publishers, a Google Books search result will often provide links to the publisher\u2019s website and to booksellers.<\/p>\n

    Google Books ran into trouble, however, when it began to digitize the millions of books with unclear legal status, such as out-of-print works that weren\u2019t yet in the public domain. Many of these are considered orphan works<\/a><\/span>, meaning that no one is exactly sure who owns their copyright. In 2004, the site announced plans to scan these texts and to make them searchable, but it would only show sentence-long snippets to searchers. Copyright holders could ask Google to remove these snippets at any time. Google claimed that this digitization plan would benefit authors, whose books would no longer linger in out-of-print limbo; it would also help researchers and readers, who would be able to locate (and perhaps purchase) previously unavailable works.<\/p>\n

    Publishers and authors did not agree with Google. Many objected to Google\u2019s plan to scan first and look into copyright ownership later; others saw Google\u2019s profiting from works still under copyright as a clear violation of intellectual property law. In 2005, the Authors Guild of America and the American Association of Publishers (AAP) sued Google for \u201cmassive copyright infringement.\u201d Google argued that it was essentially creating a massive online card catalog; the Authors Guild and AAP alleged that Google was attempting to monopolize information and profit from it. In 2008, Google agreed to a $125 million settlement with the publishers and the Authors Guild. Some of that money would go directly to copyright holders; some would pay for legal fees; and some would go to found the Book Rights Registry, an independent nonprofit association that would ensure content users (like Google) are paying copyright owners. Copyright owners would get money from Google and from potential book sales; Google would get money from advertisers, book sales, and institutional subscriptions by libraries.<\/p>\n

    Still, not everyone agreed with the decision. The Open Book Alliance was formed by a diverse partnership of organizations, including Amazon, Internet Archive, and the National Writers Union, who fear that Google\u2019s proprietary control of so much copyrighted material was an antitrust violation. As the group states on its website:<\/p>\n\n

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    We will assert that any mass book digitization and publishing effort be open and competitive. The process of achieving this promise must be undertaken in the open, grounded in sound public policy and mindful of the need to promote long-term benefits for consumers rather than isolated commercial interests. The Open Book Alliance will counter Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors\u2019 [sic] Guild\u2019s scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world.\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Another concern, which was mentioned earlier, in the digital library world is digital decay. One librarian at Harvard University told The New York Times<\/em> that \u201cwe don\u2019t really have any methodology [to preserve digital material] as of yet\u2026. We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we\u2019re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines (Cohen, 2010).\u201d<\/p>\n\n

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    Paper Books vs eBooks Statistics, Trends and Facts [2022]<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
    \n\nFrom Toner Buzz<\/a>. Posted by Rob Errera on 02\/18\/2022\n