Steve Jobs to publishers: your time is up
Amid all the coverage of Apple’s new super-thin laptop and other plans, The New York Times highlights some choice comments from company founder Steve Jobs about the book industry. Apple is apparently looking to put the DVD industry out of business by offering virtual online movie rentals, but according to Jobs, the book business is beneath notice altogether.
Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
The question isn’t whether people are reading books but whether people are buying them. I have just counted 27 new books by my bedside. Over the last year I’ve read eight of them. In my case that’s the average result. Each year I buy more than I will ever read. I really want to read Bang Crunch by Neil Smith. I hope that happens. But I’m damn glad I own a copy just in case the moment arrives. Oh yeah I also quit on books. I have a pile from last year. Sixteen of them. They too are on stand by in case I have a change of heart.
I think a few things have to come together before DVDs are out of business. What you need is a situation where the TV in your living room is also hooked up to the web, so that instead of going out to your video store and renting a piece of plastic that you put in your DVD player, you just request the digital file online and play it. Companies such as netflixx in the US and zip.ca in Canada are a tentative step forward — at least they are eliminating the going-to-the-video-store part. As for books, well, some of us are still reading, and I do think what is needed is for a well-designed tool to do for ebooks what iPods did for digital music files: there is (or would be) a demand, if someone could just design the device.
As someone who read 38 books last year (http://www.blork.org/blorkblog/2008/01/03/reading-list-books-i-read-in-2007/) I find that statistic appalling.
Regarding the Kindle, I think it’s greatest potential lies not in books, but in periodicals. Newspapers, weeklies, magazines, etc., aren’t going away, but they are moving online. However, people want to be able to read them while commuting, in various rooms of the house, etc., and not just while sitting at their desks.
Book lovers tend to love the physical objects as well as the contents of books, which is one of the reasons why they’re generally not thrilled about the Kindle. But nobody coos over the physical object when holding a copy of the Montreal Gazette or McLean’s. There’s no nostalgic barrier, so that’s where Amazon should be focussing attention for the Kindle.
Oops. That should be “its greatest potential,” not “it’s greatest potential.”
a truly frightening stat. no wonder america and americans are so thoroughly f***ed up.