Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

Introduction

The ground beneath the publishing industry trembled in 2007, when Amazon released the Kindle and Apple released the iPhone. Digital—which had wrought havoc on the music and newspaper industries—was finally coming to the consumer market for books. Certainly digital had been reshaping reading, and much of what we call “publishing” since at least the 1970s, but for the mass market, 2007 was when the general population started to consider that “books” might come in pixels rather than pages. In the few years since, these devices and their spawn have brought digital reading of long-form text from the realm of “it might happen sometime” to “it is happening right now,” and faster than anyone predicted. Many questions have been answered, resoundingly: Will readers read ebooks? Yes. Lots? Yes. Dedicated reading devices, or smartphones, or tablets? Doesn’t matter, as long as there is cross-device accessibility. Browser reading? See previous. Shakeup in publishing? Sorta, but the sky is still overhead.

That rapid shakeup—from print to digital buying and reading—has been massive, but it’s really only a transitional phase to a radically different future.

Just a Shift?

We used to live in a paper-based model: Publishers sent print books to distributors and retailers, who sold print books to readers, who took those books home or to work and read them when and where they liked.

We are now effectively replicating this model for digital: Publishers send digital files to distributors ...