At the end of 2011 the ebook looked like a rocket fired into the sky and the death of the book was more than announced. In late 2014 James Daunt, spokesman for the booksellers, declared "The ebook is dead". What happened in three years? Has an old technology driven out the new? Have publishers and booksellers repelled Amazon's onslaught? None of this, according to Mario Mancini, an expert on the intersection between publishing and technology and editor of the essay Specchiocracy.
Book or ebook? just published by goWare, a publishing house in which he has been involved since 2009 and which is experimenting with the new publishing at 360 degrees. The book is one of the most loved and preserved artifacts, while the ebook, a perceived inferior product, encounters formidable barriers to its development, Mancini tells us. The ebook is nothing but the evolution of the book artifact, but this simple state of affairs seems to go unrecognized.
The point is therefore not "book or ebook", the point is book and ebook against everyone in the digital space. Here all types of media – songs, movies, video games, newspapers and books – compete in the same environment: on a screen – from 5 to 72 inches – connected to the Internet. Data on the trend of the Italian market confirm this view: the book market in Italy has lost almost a quarter of its value in 5 years.
The lost value (almost 630 million euros) was not taken by the ebook, which in 2014 was worth 60 million euros in Italy, but was simply lost to competing activities. Globally, sales of ebooks as digital alternatives to books were stagnant throughout 2014. The essay, available as an ebook in online bookstores and soon to be purchased on Amazon also in print on demand, photographs the state of the art and discusses possible ongoing developments and evolutions: the audio renaissance, the convergence between audiobooks and ebooks, the spamodic search for the bestseller. It also traces the stages of the modern book: paperbacks, bestsellers, audiobooks, self-published books. In closing an inimitable writing by Jonathan Franzen that tells us why all this is wrong. But is it really wrong?
