The ebook revolution may be on its way. Amazon released the Kindle ebook reader last year, and estimates are that it has sold more units than Apple sold iPods in their first year of release. Amazon brought out Kindle 2 last week, with a specially written story by Stephen King to celebrate.
Among people I talk to in the world of publishing – authors, agents, editors and digital publishers – there's some interest and a great deal of trepidation about what an ebook revolution may mean. Publishers worry about the potential for piracy. Comparisons with the music industry suggest this would be a legitimate concern. It's not too hard to find illegally pirated ebooks: Googling "Stephen King ebook" brings up many links. This isn't a huge problem at the moment because most people don't like to read long books on computer screens. If there were wide ownership of a device that was easier to read on – and even the Kindle allows users to read PDFs via "experimental" conversion – that would quickly change.
But concerns about piracy may be a red herring. The ebook reader could have a far more immediate and profound effect on the way books are published and sold, and Stephen King handily provides a good example of it. In 2000, he published his novel The Plant as an ebook in instalments. He put it on his own website, circumventing the need for a publisher. Broadly, the experiment failed: you can read some interesting analyses on Salon, Wikipedia and Another Sky Press. It had a very idiosyncratic business model, and most people simply didn't own devices that made reading a long ebook pleasant.
But if ebook readers took off, big-name authors such as King may be able to move to self-publishing. And that could mean the end of our current publishing system. Because of the way the publishing business is structured, big-name authors who sell millions of books are, in effect, supporting the industry. I've heard various estimates of the percentage of books that actually turn a profit. One agent I spoke to said 95% of published books make a loss. Others have put the figure lower. Either way, everyone agrees that a large majority of profits come from a small minority of authors.
If King, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and Patricia Cornwell were all to decide to move to selling their books online themselves, rather than going through a publisher, they'd certainly benefit financially. Typically, an author only receives about £1 for every copy of their book sold. Rather than relying on a publisher, big-name authors could afford to simply employ an editor, a PR person, a typesetter and a designer. They could price their books at only £2 or £3 and still make much more money than under the current system.
But without the revenue from these authors underpinning the publishers, the current system would be unworkable. And what would happen then? It's hard to know. Clearly publishing houses would have to become much smaller, and authors who aren't international bestsellers wouldn't be able to benefit from the useful upfront advances. It would be harder to keep writing as a midlist author if you didn't have a private income. People would still want to seek out great new writers, and so the brands of well-known publishers would still be valuable, enabling readers to sort the wheat from the chaff. But Penguin, Harper Collins and Random House could just become badges on ebook aggregator channels rather than the book-production engines they are today.
As an author, I talk a lot about the virtues of ebooks and my interest in the new creative opportunities they hold. And I don't doubt that readers will always want to read great books. But any massive upheaval is terrifying and this one could be as frightening as any Stephen King story.