Although the functionality of digital books has largely remained the same for 10 years, technology has improved everything that goes into publishing a book
also common thread, Word :-)) Kevin Kelly / @kevin2kelly : The future of books never quite happened, at least the way we expected. In Wired @craigmod dissects their prospects with practical advice for those of us still trying to make “books.” http://www.wired.com/... Justin Jackson / @mijustin : This article is largely about how the future of publishing is email. However, I couldn't help but notice the similarities to podcasting. http://www.wired.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Craig Mod's Wired essay lands a decade into the ebook era with an uncomfortable diagnosis: the reading experience itself barely moved, while everything upstream of it — writing, editing, layout, production tooling — got dramatically better. Justin Jackson's read on the piece is that the real future of publishing isn't a new file format at all but email, a channel where writers own the reader relationship directly.
That argument arrives against a market backdrop the related coverage makes explicit: a year later, ebooks had settled at roughly ~20% of total book sales, often priced above print in the aftermath of Apple's price-fixing case, and Benedict Evans had already argued that corporations controlling music and ebooks watched those assets lose their strategic value to tech platforms. The format won the war and then stopped mattering.
First-order effects
- Authors and small publishers can now produce books with near-zero marginal cost using modern tooling, but the essay's practical advice points them toward email lists rather than ebook storefronts as the channel that actually reaches readers.
Second-order effects
- With ebook growth stalled at ~20% of sales and print frequently cheaper, retailers and platform owners have little pricing power left to fight over in books — consistent with Evans' point that tech companies stopped treating ebook catalogs as strategic assets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, publishing splits structurally in two: a commodified ebook format sold through stagnant storefronts, and direct-to-reader formats like email where creators capture the relationship and the margin — a shift whose pace depends on how many writers treat the list, not the book file, as the product.
The trend: Digital publishing is bifurcating between a functionally frozen ebook format and creator-owned channels like email, just as tech platforms lose strategic interest in books.