eBooks may be popular, but they are not going to replace paper books any time soon. (Image by Maximilian Schönherr, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
When I was writing geology textbooks in the late 1990s, many people came up to me and say “Paper books are dead! In ten years, all books will be electronic, and there will be no market for books in any other form.” I kept hearing those prophecies, year after year, especially when Kindle and tablet computers took off less than 10 years ago. Nevertheless, I kept on revising my various geology textbooks and they kept being printed in new paper editions. Eventually, my publishers went to publishing parallel electronic and paper editions. But here we are, almost 20 years since I heard those first dire warnings, and electronic media have not completely replaced books in paper. Vinyl and cassette tapes and now CDs have been replaced by newer audio media, VHS tapes have been replaced by DVDs and now by streaming videos, typewriters have been replaced by many generations of computers and software, film cameras by digital cameras and now by camera phones, slide rules by calculators and now by phones which do that job, and many other technologies have come and gone in my lifetime—but paper books, which have not changed fundamentally in over the 500 years since Gutenberg printed the first Bible, have not.
As this article points out, eBook sales tripled every year since the introduction of Kindles in 2007, but in 2013 and again this year, their growth slowed to low single digits. About 23% of books sold are eBooks, but hardcovers are still over 25%, and paperbacks over 42% of unit sales. Ebooks may eventually pass hardcovers in sales, but there is no sign that they will drive paper books to extinction any more. Instead, they seem to have reached an equilibrium, where all three versions of a book seem to co-exist peacefully. In this article, numerous publishers suggested that this may be the long-term future of publishing—a stable state with multiple platforms.
So why the difference? Why are VHS tapes and cassette tapes and slide rules and film cameras virtually extinct, but books are not? I would submit that in the case of other technological advances, the new technology was so clearly superior to the old one (better quality, cheaper and faster) that there was no value in keeping the old technology. But eBooks are not superior to paper books in every aspect. Sure, they can be sent electronically in seconds, and can be cheaper than paper books (although textbooks in eBook form are almost as expensive as the paper version). A single tablet can store hundreds of electronic digital media, and there is no additional weight (especially when you take your reading on an airplane).
But as I’ve watched students use both eBooks and old-fashioned textbooks, the limits of eBooks become clear. Real books don’t need batteries, and won’t be ruined if you drop them or crush them or pass a magnet near them. Many real books even get wet and survive, but your tablet is fried if it is dropped in water. Real books are readable in all but the dimmest light conditions, but the screen brightness and glare issues are serious problems with eBooks in certain settings. My students, even those born in 1996, who grew up with electronic media since they were old enough to touch a screen, still seem to prefer paper textbooks. For one thing, they like to physically mark the text with their highlighters to give them a sense of accomplishment in studying—and the highlighting function in eBooks just doesn’t seem the same. Many like to go lie out on the campus lawn or their dorm balcony when doing their reading, and have trouble reading eBook screens in that bright glare. Some like to flip back and forth between the index or glossary and different sections, a much easier thing to do between paper pages than when trying to scroll up and down.
Some books, such as novels and trade books, tend to be just plain text with no illustration, and they are by far the most popular sellers as eBooks. Simple high-contrast black and white text works fine on a computer screen. But other books simply don’t work very well in electronic form. My textbooks are full of color photographs and diagrams, and halftone photographs, which rarely look as clear or bright or vibrantly colorful on a typical tablet screen, compared to the pages of a book. This is even more true for large-format color books such as those Daniel Loxton writes, or large “coffee-table books” which are intended almost as works of art to be admired and studied, not just something to read. As long as those books remain popular, there will a need to print them in paper.
In addition, there is research indicating that reading eBooks is not the same as reading paper books. One study showed that students tended to absorb less from reading eBooks because they were distracted by the other interactive features. Another study showed that Kindle readers absorbed considerably less from their reading than those with analog books, possibly because of the tactile sensation of touching a book and its pages, and knowing where you are relative to the beginning or end of the book by the page thickness. Another study suggests that reading digital books is not as effective as analog books when it comes to reading deeply and thoughtfully. These are just a few preliminary studies, but they are suggestive that reading experiences are not equivalent. Even more importantly, the popularity of paper books among the younger generation weaned on electronic media does not seem to be declining, so there is no clear evidence that generational change will drive paper books extinct.
As author Stephen King (who has sold millions of books in both formats) said in an interview for the Huffington Post, “I think books are going to be there for a long, long time to come.” King compares books’ prospects positively with those of CDs and vinyl. “[A]udio recordings of music have only been around for, I’m going to say, 120 years at the most,” he said. “Books have been around for three, four centuries … There’s a deeply implanted desire and understanding and wanting of books that isn’t there with music.”