01/15/2025
The future of books
We all know about books. Amazon, the world’s biggest store, was built on selling books. We have books in our homes. Most of us own furniture designated as “bookshelves.” Books are ubiquitous; they’re everywhere in our lives, in our culture, and our consciousness. We worry that our kids won’t read enough books, and that we don’t read enough books ourselves. At the speed at which communications technology, Social Media, and the internet are overtaking our lives, some of us wonder if books will survive. Will they go extinct? Will they be preserved as cultural relics of our past, like vinyl records and VHS video tapes?
Many of us, like you, like most of the people who read my writings, plan on writing a book one day, or have written a book or two or a dozen. What do you think the future of your book(s) will look like?
Before we start to ponder if books, our books, will soon become obsolete, let’s back up and try to understand what a book really is.
In its most common understanding, a book is made of paper and ink, text and cover. It is a physical product: written, edited, designed, printed, bound, shipped, warehoused, distributed, sold, fulfilled, and finally read by its “consumer.”
Sure, there are ebooks. No paper, no ink, no printing, shipping, or warehousing, but even though ebooks are pretty mainstream today, they’ve only been around for about the last 20 years, and old-fashioned print books still outsell ebooks four to one. The emergence of ebooks, as previously speculated, did not make the printed book obsolete.
When we think of books today, we generally think of good printed books.
What we think of as a book, as we’ve just described, is really just a container and a medium to carry, disseminate, and transmit a message. In fact, the book, as the physical product we understand as a book, doesn’t intrinsically carry any more value than the paper it’s printed on; It’s the message this container holds that represents the true value of a book and, depending on the message, it’s a bargain!
So, what are readers really buying when they purchase a book? We’ve been trained through thousands of years of commerce that we must “receive” something tangible when we trade something of value (like money) for a good, like a book. That tangible thing that we can touch and hold and fan the pages is what we’ve come to know as a book comforts us in knowing we received some “thing” for our hard-earned cash.
But, in truth, we’re not buying ink and bound paper, the container; we’re buying the message inside. More precisely, we’re buying the promise the message makes us.
We’re buying the solution to our problem, the answer to our question, the fulfillment of a need, the promise of satisfaction that reading this book will provide.
So, as authors and publishers, if we can grow out of the idea that we’re “selling books” and grow into the idea that we are providing solutions and answers, fulfilling and satisfying needs through the ideas expressed in this container, our current culture understands as a book we can begin to understand the business we’re really in.
And once we understand that we’re in the business of sharing a message that makes a promise to our reader and keeps it, when and if some new technology comes along to take the place of this paper and ink container we call a book (and it eventually will) our message will not be solely dependent on its container. Messages, the good ones, transcend the containers the containers they come in.
When that day comes, we’ll be prepared to embrace whatever technology gives us as a container, and until that day comes, as a consequence of understanding our real product, we’ll sell a lot more books.
We publish great books in three important areas of Christian life: Faith, Business, and Life. Distributors don’t buy books – they just send them to bookstores.
