Cell phones are the new ebooks are the new books

Last night Michael Healy gave a guest lecture for the Pace Publishing students. Healy is the Executive Director of the Books Rights Registry, which basically means he's in the middle of the rights battles between Google Books, publishers, and authors. You can follow him on Twitter here and read some blog posts by him here. He's also British (no, really!). Last year he gave a lecture about the Google Books settlement (something I knew little to nothing about at the time), but this time around his speech, "The Google Book Contact in Context" focused mostly on speculating where the book industry was going...and he had some thought-provoking (and saddening, and frightening, and hopeful...) notions of where we're headed.

1. There's going to be an even bigger shift towards mobile phones: By 2014 there will be 6.5 million mobile connections and 90% of the world's population will have access to a mobile phone (my very nuanced and intellectual reaction: whoa like that's kinda a LOT). Basically Healy thinks that ereaders are going to seem like very silly and useless devices when our cell phone are going to be like the most bad-ass digital Swiss Army knife you can imagine. Considering Apple's awesome iPhone eReader application that lets you flip the pages is pretty much my ideal ereader (being tactile and intuitive), and using the Kindle's navigation was like my worst fears and nightmares realized, this makes complete sense to me. I also really liked the idea of buying books as Apps, but with open-source software this could get very crowded with duplicate books and general junk (like 6 million Pride and Prejudice apps). I wonder what the filtration system, if any, will be?

2. Netflix is the model of the Future!!!: Libraries and bookstores are going to go the way of the video and record store. Healy suggested that Netflix would be a great model for books, and that the future is in paying for subscriptions instead of content (i.e. like how you pay for cable, not for a TV show, you pay for Netflix for a month, not an individual movie...). I'm actually renting some books right now from Chegg, and although it's not quite the same idea (Chegg isn't a subscription service, and it's mostly for saving money on textbooks) I've loved it so far--books came on time and clean. There's already some sites that are trying to be like this: BookSwim and BooksFree both have subscription-based services but haven't really caught on yet (probably because, you know, libraries still exist).

3. Bookstores will be like vinyl record stores: for hipsters and middle aged nostalgic people. Hopefully this will happen way after I become a middle aged nostalgic person and am far away from hipster territory. Since all the books will be digital or print on demand, there won't be any bookstores anymore! There's going to be a shift in the production part of publishing from creating the digital book as the afterthought to creating the digital book as the main product. I would really like for publishers to start treating the digital book as--if not the main product--than an equally important one. One thing that really disappointed me about using ebooks for textbooks last semester was the lack of care and thought put into them, leading to so many missed opportunities. Right now most ebooks are just text copy/pasted into xml programs so that there's very little formatting, making them hard to read (for example, in one of my textbooks all the sidebars just got pasted right into the middle of the text). In the meantime, there were opportunities to link to outside sites and sources but no one had bothered to.

Healy obviously had tons of other stuff to say, but this was what stuck out to me and penetrated my migraine-fog (the same fog that rendered my quick-draw hand-raising skills useless). But! Here was the one worry that I really came away with. It goes like this:

1. If all of the textbooks will be digital
2. And all of the platforms for ebooks will be on mobile devices
3. Seriously, how will anyone ever learn anything ever again?

Our nation is doomed!