Amazon, the Kindle, and the Future of All Books

New York City

This massive city is home to many things, one of which, of course, is the domestic book publishing industry.

Any time you spend a few days here, then, it’s inevitable that, by design or chance, the current state of book publishing will come up in conversations, polite or not.

These days, it is fair to say, the largest publishers are running scared.  Joanne Kaufman wrote a lovely piece in yesterday’s New York Times about the love-hate relationship book people here have with Amazon’s Kindle.

Meanwhile, as their own companies are suffering from all the signs of terminal decline (you can’t turn around in this town without bumping into yet another laid off editor), traditional publishers had to endure the humiliation of Amazon’s announcment yesterday that its Q-1 was one of its most spectacular ever — with net profits up 24 percent, to $177 million, from this time last year, on quarterly revenues of $4.89 billion, up 18 percent over Q-1 last year.

Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, allowed that sales of the new Kindle had “exceeded our most optimistic expectations.”

I’ve posted tens of thousands of words about the impending death of print publishing over the past year+ here on Bnet, and tens of thousands more about the exciting technology startups vying to bury the Gutenberg Era with Kindles and other portable tools better suited to our modern, nomadic ways.

Writing about the death of newspapers demands that one pound of flesh be laid down; doing the same about magazines, requires another. But, for me, to even contemplate a scenario that includes the death of books as we’ve known them is not yet voiceable.

Instead, what I envision is far fewer books getting published in the future, which, come to think of it, is not necessarily a bad thing. The book industry has grown bloated, issuing way too many titles, many of which are pure drivel.

If there were any real editors left, these redundant, poorly conceptualized and even more poorly executed excuses for books would have been remaindered before the poor trees that died in the process were forced to give up their lives in vain.

I’m taking a wild guess that maybe ten percent of the books published in the U.S. deserve to see the light of day, or for that matter, the flickering screen of a Kindle. The smaller, more attentive publishing imprints — such as Nation Books, which is an imprint of Basic Books, are the ones best positioned to survive the chaos that is now engulfing book publishing, IMHO.

As in other industries with antiquated business models, the biggest publishers may well be the ones to fall the hardest. Out of their dust, however, the new hybrid model of traditional and eBook companies will rise.

Note: I do not have a direct, but rather an orthogonal relationship with Nation Books, which is to say that as a member of the Editorial Board of The Nation magazine, I occasionally get to hear about some of its excellent line of titles before they are published.