Neither people are reading less, nor piracy is eating the sector, nor even e-books are cannibalizing enough to explain the drop in sales of printed books in the world. Yes, in the world. Because this is not a local phenomenon due to our particular domestic crisis.
The data is convoluted, especially when trying to have a global vision, but we can get an idea with an interesting statistic for the USA:
The red curve shows annual dollar sales in 2011. We see that they drop from 20 billion to 15.5 billion in seven years. Obviously, there are less pessimistic studies, but, for the sake of argument, suffice it to say that the most optimistic industry statistics say that e-books are offsetting the decline in print books and that sales curves have been flat in recent years. Considering that the world is moving from a hoe culture to a knowledge culture, and that it continues to grow demographically, this is not at all encouraging for the book.
The book and our decision making
Surely there are multiple reasons that contribute to explain this phenomenon, but I am going to talk about the most unknown and, in my opinion, the one that is really conditioning the future of the book.
Let’s reflect for a moment on how we usually make our decisions, for example when deciding how we want to solve a professional problem, what we want to do next summer or what exactly Caesar said when he recognized Brutus among his assassins. Nowadays our answer will be, almost unanimously, we look it up on the Internet.
And what will appear? A lot of information. Websites, blogs, wikis, forums and videos, some of them moderately specialized, most of them, however, with superficial and little contrasted information.
What about the book? Where are the carefully written texts of our best specialists? Where is the king of content? Shouldn’t it appear in the first place in almost any search?
Do a test. Enter in a search engine, for example, the word “Titanic”, and surprise, in Google Spain you will not find a single book among the first hundred results. However, Casa del Libro alone has more than twenty books on the market that contain “Titanic” in their title: “Rescaten el Titanic”, “Los diez del Titanic”, etc.
The book is not on the Internet, unless you search expressly with the full title or by adding “book” (or, of course, by going to specialized pages). You’ll almost never come across it by chance. And that’s the problem…
The book and the Internet
Before the Internet, the library or the bookstore was the first place to go to find information. There, books came to us naturally and offered us their services: technical treatises, travelogues or Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” answered our questions. That no longer happens today; the Internet provides us with that service. But the quality alternative, the book, does not appear. And since it does not appear, we do not buy it when we would be more willing to make an effort to acquire it.
If you want to know what the book’s real competition is, forget the e-book, the TV or the little machines and look at websites, blogs, forums and other accessible and free content. These are the ones that are taking the book, both printed and electronic, by storm.
In short, the book does not appear when we need it and, as a result, it is used and sold less and less every day. And no one seems to have noticed the problem.
But why don’t books appear on the Internet?
I will try to answer that in the next article: 5 reasons why books don’t appear on the Internet.
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