Why pay for an e-book? ---- Part IV: Will books survive?

In parts I and II we have discovered that because e-books are expensive, many people are trying to find ways to avoid paying for them. In part III it was shown that bookstores are already disappearing, and publishers will follow. So if there are no bookstores and no publishers will there still be books? Will we need authors to write them?

We can look at these questions in various ways. The most immediate one is to notice that it's not that books are not being read or not being written. The army of middlemen is disappearing. On an average $15 book, the author makes $1.50, the bookstore $5 and the publisher (who does the editing, the printing, transportation, storage and takes the risk) the remainder. But nowadays an author may write a book on his computer, transfer it to a server, sell it to a customer through his website who will then read the book on his e-reader.
In the world of e-books, if the author is content with his $1.50, even if he pays to do the cover, editing and server rental, his book will hit the marketplace at $3 or less. How many people will prefer to pay five times as much and carry around a heavy brick just so they can read a printed book and smell paper? So printed books will become an anachronism just like film cameras and photo albums or LP records and Cds. Printers, warehouses, transportation trucks and bookstores will not be required for books.

Authors don't necessarily write for the money. When I wrote my first novel at fifteen, I had no plans to publish or sell it. I simply gave it to my buddies to read and that was that. I wrote it for fun. (I also got a little fame out of it when word got around that I had written an entire book.) In Britain there's not more than forty people who make a livelihood out of writing fiction. Authors write because they want to entertain or educate and make themselves known in the process. Most authors of fiction have a need to express themselves or tell a story. They have to “get it out” and they will do it even if no one throws them a penny. There will always be authors!

Books are here to stay as well. You might think that as technology becomes cheaper, films might replace books for the masses because they require less thinking or imagination. When films were invented, many people speculated that the theatre would disappear. Theatre today is very much alive. When television invaded every home, we thought cinemas would be demolished. We have moved on to multiplexes instead. Books are unique. Only in a book can you easily go from inside one person's head and into another's and make thoughts as easily available as dialogue. And you can do it all alone with nothing more fancy than pen and paper! Plays, film and television require an army of people and equipment as well as buildings. By writing a book, a single person may communicate to the world. Statistics show us that the number of books being written and read is always increasing. There will always be books!

What we are seeing today is that books are becoming cheaper. I have already explained that a $15 book will be selling for $3 or less in a few years. Because authors are not writing for the money, and they now have the publishing means for free, this price can only decrease. The disappearance of publishers makes it easier for authors to make themselves available but harder to spotlight themselves. New authors will try to attract attention by selling their books at lower prices. There is a myriad of authors selling their books at $0.99, which is the minimum allowable price on Amazon's Kindle store. I have heard unknown authors brag that their work is available as a torrent file, right up there with Steinbeck and Hemingway. Many authors are already giving away their older works. The day that all books will be available for free, with perhaps advertising on the download page, is not far.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, someone predicted that if London horses kept increasing at the same rate, within 30 years all London streets would be covered by two feet of horse dung. But by then automobiles had filled the atmosphere with smog. We don't know what will happen tomorrow. But the way things look now, in a few years we will all have the world's largest library in our back pocket for free!