In a recent interview, Andy Weissberg, Vice President of Identifier Services and Corporate Marketing for R.R.Bowker gave his opinion on this subject.  Bowker is a central player in the entire book industry due to the company’s status as the U.S. Agency of the International Standard Book Numbering Convention, as approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).  Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

I firmly believe that the e-book market will continue to demonstrate explosive growth across all major segments of the industry. In addition to Kindle, the iPAD, Nook, Sony Reader and Google Editions, new devices and channels will continue to emerge. Business models will continue to diversify themselves from their legacy counterparts. Consumers will have more choices for how they can read as part of new “e-book experiences” – some segments like academic publishing continue to publish and commercialize chapters and fragments as e-books and provide these options at low costs. e-books will continue to become more interactive with cross-media capabilities built into them – links to videos for example. The mobile market creates for exciting distribution opportunities. Publishers will continue to create their own applications and diversified subscription/access models. Eventually, the cost of the devices will come down while the channels grow their catalogues and earn more profits on the content sales themselves. I believe we will continue to see more proprietary channels/devices emerge, although the Google Editions “cloud model” sets forth an interesting precedent which will likely be replicated and provides users with anytime, anywhere, any device access to the content they seek.

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We authors need to keep up with the technological changes as we move into a new era for books and publishing.

At the recent Digital Book World Conference, a panel of two publishers and two agents discussed the future of publishing.  One of the most interesting topics to me was when the two publishers explained their motivation to find a new publishing model that would “avoid unearned advances, huge returns, and little return on big investment.”  One of the publishers  represented (HarpoStudios) offers its authors 50/50 profit share and a low advance, while the other publisher on the panel (Vanguard) offers no advance, but pays high royalties and guarantees a substantial marketing budget with each contract.   No matter what model eventually becomes the norm, you can be sure that there will be a dramatic change from what has been done in the past.    Let’s hope the change is good for everyone involved.  

Learn more about the conference here.