Recently he caused a bit of a stir in blogging circles with a provocative article titled "Why Are You For Killing Bookstores?"
Though Shatzkin acknowledged that audiobooks are somewhat outside his area of expertise, he stated his belief that there is "a coming collision between the audiobook world and the e-book world."
The first major step in this direction, he said, came in February 2009 with the launch of Amazon's 2.0 version of the Kindle, featuring text-to-speech (T2S) capability. (I wrote about my own impressions of the T2S feature last March.)
Further integration of audio and text is coming very soon, said Shatzkin, via the Blio platform and other forms of “enhanced e-books.”
Shatzkin's conclusion is that this trend “doesn’t bode well for the freestanding audiobook community.”
What the digital age has shown time and time again, he said, is that “good enough drives out better.” He predicted a long battle on the part of audio publishers to maintain prices. Automation and partial automation, he said, will bring lots more competition, and content in general will, he believes, divide into “branded” and “unbranded” forms, creating a bifurcated marketplace with "a ton of content at low-tier prices."
Shatzkin believes audiobook CDs are partly tied to the existence of brick and mortar stores, but in the near future, he says, fewer than 1/2 of book sales will be in brick and mortar. This will hasten the demise of CDs in retail he said.
Shatzkin may be right about this, but in my opinion, libraries are a different story, and the future of audiobook formats will be determined by patrons and their preferences, rather than just by availability in stores.
Hundreds of thousands of books will be going into the Blio format and will have automatic T2S capabilities (if publishers allow it). Many books without corresponding audiobook editions will suddenly become available in T2S audio. For many, says Shatzkin, this type of content will be “good enough” and will compete with traditional audiobooks. (Shatzkin expects a Blio launch before the summer.)
“The digital age is not kindto libraries or bookstores.”
Regarding “enhanced e-book content,” Shatzkin feels it will be at least 3-4 years before we can really know what features consumers will pay for in e-books. He said that publishers will need to do “some real re-thinking” about rental and lending models. We’re going to see “an unpleasant conflict” playing out, he said. “The digital age is not kind to libraries or bookstores.”
In the digital world, says Shatzkin, the lines blur between buying, renting, and borrowing. If library borrowing becomes too easy, he asked, why would anyone pay for content? (One possible answer, in my opinion: because consumers might not want to wait.)
Obviously, no one has a crystal ball in the ever-changing world of digital publishing. What's your opinion? Leave your comment below.
P.S. The day of the APA conference call, Mike was fretting about whether volcanic ash would keep him from attending the London Book Fair. Turns out that, in fact, it did. You can read his 4-part series "What I Would Have Said in London" on his "Idealog" blog.
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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
