『繼唱片業(yè)以及報紙產(chǎn)業(yè)之后，紙質(zhì)出版物也將迎來電子化時代，這一趨勢是否真的勢不可擋？其中又有何利弊？且看本文作者如何解讀』

　　Great Digital Expectations

　　出版物的電子化

　　Sep 10th, 2011 | from The Economist

　　

　　 Having started rather late, books are swiftly  following music and newspapers into the digital world. Publishers believe their journey will be different, and that they will not suffer the fate of those industries by going into slow decline.  Publishers’ experience will, indeed, be different—but not necessarily better.

　　In some ways the transition from paper to digital distribution is a boon . E-books currently have high profit margins , and are free from many of the drawbacks  of print. Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books, says the biggest challenge small publishers face is managing their inventories . Print too many books, and lots of them will be returned by stores. Print too few and publishers will forgo  sales while they order reprints. None of these problems exists when distributing books digitally.

　　Romance novels and crime blockbusters  have proved particularly popular on e-readers, perhaps because it is difficult to tell from across the aisle of a bus whether someone is reading a bodice-ripper  or Dostoevsky  on their Kindle. Serialised  romance novels generally have a shelf life of just four weeks. Now many are easily available as digital version.

　　Yet these advantages are outweighed by several looming  hazards . The first is piracy . Digital-book files are tiny—much smaller than a film, and not even as big as a music album. Book readers may be an unusually honest lot, but they are not above getting stuff for nothing.  E-books routinely pop up  on file-sharing websites like the Pirate Bay, both in their own right and as part of vast anthologies  with names like “2,500 Retail Quality E-books”.

　　Piracy is a particular threat because of a second, bigger problem: the apparently arbitrary  nature of e-book pricing. When Amazon began selling e-books, it charged $9.99 for many of them, often selling at a loss to fire Kindle sales. Gradually it became clear that Amazon was undermining the perceived value of all books, digital and paper alike. So, last year, the biggest publishers used the release of Apple’s iPad to push Amazon into “agency” pricing. Publishers now set their own prices and give about 30% of the sale to Amazon.

　　That has meant higher prices for many new e-books. As some prices rise, though, a tide of free and cheap product is flooding the market. Self-published novelists, keen for attention and without agents or publishers to share the proceeds with, often sell their works extremely cheaply.  Meanwhile publishers have moved to offer introductory discounts on some books.

　　Another problem is Amazon’s market dominance. The firm accounts for less than a quarter of physical book sales. But Amazon sells 60-70% of e-books in America and perhaps 90% in Britain. Amazon appears set to launch a tablet computer  to take on the iPad. And Amazon is becoming a publisher in its own right. It has a romance imprint, and has signed big writers like Timothy Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”. This tightens its grip  over the e-book market.

　　Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Publishers rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to  books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet.

　　Efforts are under way. This week a British outfit called aNobii released a trial version of a website that it hopes will become a Wikipedia-style community of book lovers, with an option to buy. The idea has potential.

　　The book business has long been suffused with  gloom but this time the challenges are really daunting . Publishers have to confront many of the problems that have afflicted  other media industries that have gone digital, as well as a few entirely new ones. The next few years will be a thriller . (628 words)