We’ve been looking for new ways to share words since the very concept of writing was invented. The Sumerians used clay tablets for their cuneiform script, the Egyptians innovated with papyrus but also inscribed their hieroglyphs in stone. The scholars of the ancient world used parchment or vellum – a form of paper made from animal skins, which was still used in the UK until this year to inscribe new laws passed by parliament.
With the move to digital technologies, the form words take has changed again. From the dream of the ‘paperless office’ so beloved of technology companies (and which has never quite happened, funnily enough), we have moved at lightning speed to the concept of the paperless book. Suddenly, paper – that staple of the booky world for countless centuries – looks as outmoded as the Sumerians’ clay tablets.
People are reading using three main classes of digital device: mobile phones, ‘general purpose’ tablets and dedicated e-readers. And sometimes they’re using all three. The change this means for the business model of traditional publishing is nothing less than cataclysmic.
Let’s take a good old fashioned book. The business model of traditional publishing is centred around the cost of physical production and distribution of a book. Retailers take 50% of the cover price, leaving the other 50% to pay the author’s royalty (10% of cover price), print (Another 10% of the cover price), the cost of wastage and returns (another 10%, easily) and you have the publisher left with something like 10-20% of the cover price to cover editing, design, marketing and their profit. Everything is calculated as a percentage of the cover price, but that model is based on the sheer inefficiency of print and distribution of physical books. When we take away the need for a physical book to be printed, we take away huge inefficiencies in the management of the supply chain. The risk of printing books and hoping they will sell disappears, as do the cost of stocking, distribution and paying retailers.
A new cost comes to the market at this stage – the ‘platform’ retailing ebooks takes a percentage, typically 30% of the ebook’s price. This means it’s possible for an ebook to be sold for a fraction of the price required to cover the cost of paperback books – in fact, with a paperback costing $9.99 and an ebook priced at $2.99, the publisher makes more money from the ebook.
The consumer, clearly, is now $7 better off. The publisher has a much larger potential audience for its books because of the reach of the Internet and there’s less waste all round. This new book sales model has become particularly powerful for a new breed of author – self-published authors now make up fully half of the top 100 books sold on Amazon and literally tens of thousands of books are now being sold by self-published authors every single day. While many only sell a few books each month (it’s an uncomfortable fact that 98% of conventionally published books around the world sell less than 500 copies each), some do very well indeed and can make millions of dollars without ever having to trouble a publisher.
In fact, this movement towards self-publishing has become problematic for conventional publishers, who struggle to maintain their relevance in a world where buyers can go online and download any book they like, when they like, for a price that opens up reading to anybody at any time.
Sadly, here in the Middle East, we have seen a much slower uptake of this transformational new technology. Arabic support has been slow in coming for the most important platforms in the book sales ecosystem – Apple, Google and Amazon. Of the two standards for e-reader devices, only one currently supports Arabic (ePub 3) and that standard is not fully supported by all of the ebook platforms. Amazon’s Kindle does not currently support Arabic at all – although that situation is rumoured to be changing as Amazon enters the Middle East market through its recent acquisition of souq.com.
Most Arabic ebook readers are using the PDF document interchange format, which has a lot to be desired. It is not resizeable, often gives jagged or ‘bitty’ characters and file sizes can become unfeasibly large. The advent of Epub3 readers using highly stable e-ink screens, together with Kindle readers supported on Amazon’s huge global platform will mean anyone in the Arab world will be able to have any book their like, in their hands in an instant. It potentially opens up a huge new market of self published authors, who can reach their readers without a publisher – and without being asked to pay expensive print bills. It means the actual cost of a book can go down, making books and reading them more accessible to anyone around the region. And it means any Arabic speaking author can reach a book made up of the whole Arab world for their book, rather than just their country of residence.
The revolution in Arabic ebooks is just around the corner. And just about everyone is set to benefit.