A number of my friends have returned from their Thanksgiving holidays with their families with a general complaint. It goes something like this:

There was a complete lack of face-to-face communication. Family members seemed far more interested in communicating with their electronic devices and the teenagers, especially, spent their time texting, poring over their apps, watching TV shows or playing computer games. There was little or no face-to-face communication. We began to feel as if we, in person, were completely irrelevant to the lives of some of our family members, especially the younger folks; and had the distinct feeling that we were drifting away from them on a sea of indifference. All in all, it was a very discouraging family gathering.

I do understand that from the perspective of a teenager, older people might appear boring and clueless. Admittedly, many of us of mature years do not understand their music, their cultural world, their figures of speech, their morals, or their worldview. Most teenagers are immersed in a celebrity culture, which has neither interest nor relevance to many of us and their zeitgeist is tethered to their machines. My instinct is to give them a pass, at least for now.

But my anecdotal observations go beyond the teenage generation into people perhaps one or two generations beyond, who are becoming increasingly addicted to these machines. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see people of mature years pull out their smart phones to review their current e-mails or texts or phone calls as if present company was irrelevant to the moment.

I keep wondering if the sense of urgency has been upgraded to an emergency level. It indicates to me that present company, especially at the dinner table or in what is passing for conversation, is less relevant to what is currently being communicated to them via smart phone babble. Aside from the sheer rudeness of the act, it describes the one who cannot resist consulting his or her device as a personality with a severe addiction. One such friend of mine consults his smart phone every 10 minutes as if he were waiting for the latest report on what time the world is slated to implode.

I am beginning to notice other odd phenomena. In restaurants, two people, presumably on a date, will place their phones next to their silverware as if it were part of the regular display of utensils poised for immediate use. Another baffling oddity is what I observe going up and down the elevator to my apartment on the 20th floor, a trip to ground floor of about 10 seconds. Invariably, an entering tenant will consult his or her phone immediately and for the entire ride, barely a blink in time. People who have misplaced their phones tell me that without them in hand they feel naked, deprived and increasingly anxious.

I am well aware that children are tethered to these machines from the age of two and, for them, the machine becomes their principal tool of communication for a lifetime. Soon, as the non-computer generation passes on, the machine will dominate, if it does not already, every phase of our lives from the cradle to the grave.

Researchers on the brain have begun to imagine theories that postulate that the brain, the organism itself, is somehow becoming dependent on the machine as if it were an auxiliary attachment becoming essential to its functioning. Frankly, it sounds bizarre, although my own observations have indicated a dependency that appears deeply embedded in many of the people I encounter in my daily life.

There are many places I inhabit in that have a strict rule about no cell phones. Most are clubs and organizations devoted to conversation, requiring face-to-face communication. Auditoriums presenting movies and other theatrical events ban the use of phones. Even in these places, I see patrons sneaking a peak at the cell phones during performances, akin to what I observed years ago in Madison Square Garden as people lit up their cigarettes, an addiction that is still in the process of being eradicated.

I acknowledge that these devices are indeed amazing and enormously useful to most of us, a communication miracle. I am hardly a Luddite on the subject.

I am merely suggesting that like all good things, there is a hidden downside. Will they inhibit the development of conversational skills? Will they result in a vulgarization of language? Will something be lost between the fading older generation and the younger one, something of historical importance that can only be gleaned from face-to-face social discourse? Will we have to re-imagine the rules of courtesy and politeness and redefine the difference between emergency and urgency? Will the loss of these machines by some man-made breakdown have psychological implications that profoundly affect our sense of anxiety and cause depression?

Will there be rehab centers devoted to smart phone addiction? Perhaps they are functioning as I write.

As for the complaints of my Thanksgiving family reunion-attending friends, I can offer only what was once called tea and sympathy. As they say, it is what it is.

After years of agony, the demise of Borders was as predictable as the sunset.  It was like the horse and buggy murdered by the horseless carriage. It is sad and hurtful to many people who worked there but no crystal ball was needed. Its time had come.

The brick and mortar chain stores are probably doomed and what remains will contract and eventually succumb as more and more readers morph to screen reading on devices.

Nevertheless, there exists a hardcore of print readers that will hold on to their attachment to the paper book as long as they are produced and viable economically. The smart people at Barnes and Noble know this and will balance their print business while they leverage their Nook business,  meaning they will contract their brick and mortar stores as they build their online business.

The fact is that the publishing industry and its suppliers of content, the hardy band of authors without whom the industry would collapse, are going through a massive revolution, the outcome of which is uncertain but will surely bring innovations that will satisfy the vast reading public that, contrary to faulty popular conception, will continue to proliferate worldwide.

Things change. It is the primary fact of life. We can rail against it, beat our fists helplessly against the tsunami of transformation. It is useless to protest. Unfortunately, transformations are messy.

After all, the paper book business has been fairly constant over the years and what changes did come first were matters of scale. The conglomerates began to take over the business in the seventies, and then came the chains and the slow demise of the smaller book stores, and then the foreign conglomerates who bought up the choice American publishers.

Now comes the inevitable rule of unintended consequences. E-book devices will very soon be able to serve more than fifty percent of readers. At some point the hardcore print readers will constitute a smaller and small percentage of the reading public. My guess is that within five years the percentage of paper book readers will constitute no more than twenty-five percent of the potential reading public. The impact on publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, schools and libraries will be profound.

As an author, my primary interest is the serious mainstream novel and how its marketing and distribution will be affected by the ongoing changes. To fully understand its future, I try to monitor and understand the totality of what is happening in the trade book area. Admittedly my interest is narrow and often self-serving but the survival of our authorial brand depends on a keen understanding of how an author of such novels copes with the changes.

For genre readers, meaning people who read romances, mysteries, thrillers, fantasy, zombie, vampire and other genres and their subdivisions, the future prospects seem to be robust, although with a giant wave of self published genre books now hitting the e-book marketplace the situation could get difficult for every author of this material. Celebrity and scandal books will have their brief and probably significant money making opportunity, but they will be short-lived.

For readers of non-fiction political and historical books, they too will be impacted, but not as hard as mainstream serious novels whose authors will come up against a wild- west type of filtering system that will be tough on new writers in this field who have not been able to establish an audience. Even the prospects for serious and well published writers of long standing will require some very fancy footwork to keep them financially viable.

For the author, whatever his or her category, self-motivated marketing will be the key to sales. There have already been some much heralded results, but they have been rare, with much success dependent on price point maneuvering.  Entrepreneurs who snap up available backlists of authors who still have some favorable imprint on the memory of readers might do well for awhile but they will have to be dealing in volume to make their venture financially feasible.

For the author of the mainstream novel, developing an enduring readership and legacy will be a challenge. Of course, my bias is that such an art form is a cultural necessity for a civilized society and provides essential insight into the human condition. Authors of such novels are compelled by mysterious and elemental forces to devote their lives to their creation just as visual artists and music composers are motivated by their own inner compulsions.

Like all artists the author seeks, above all, connection and communication with readers. For the committed author such connection has always been a challenge. It is now doubly problematic, especially for the self-published author except that he or she will now be able to “show” their work on all reading device platforms. Such work will soon be competing for the attention with a giant pool of millions of other works, both self-published and those offered by still surviving traditional publishers.

Of course, there is bound to be the inevitable innovation, the brainstorm of someone sitting out there alone in left field who concocts a scenario that changes everything. In the meantime it will be up to the author to find his or her way to the reader’s attention.

As in all enterprises where luck, talent, enterprise and imagination is involved, the outcome is in the hands of the Gods.

While I have often patted myself on the back for recognizing more than fifteen years ago that e-books would one day surpass the printed book as the ultimate first choice of dedicated readers everywhere, I had not reckoned on the unintended consequences of an unfiltered tsunami of self-published books that would one day overtake the traditional distribution patterns of the publishing industry.

The number of self-published e-books has surpassed and will continue to surpass, by far, books published through the time-honored process of editing and distribution that has been the practice of publishing companies for centuries.

A cottage industry that was once denigrated as an exercise in vanity for wannabe writers who could not get published through established channels, has become a burgeoning industry for entrepreneurs who produce, promote, publish and sell marketing services to those authors who choose to go this route.

Online bookstores such as Amazon, Nook and iPad are eager to publish these efforts looking to increase the volume of sales through betting that every book published will garner some sales, however miniscule. If every author of a self-published book, for example, sold 25 copies to relatives and friends, that would result in sales of millions of which the online bookstore would get a piece.

Believe me, I am in no way insulting the efforts of such authors who choose this mode of self-expression. There is a lot to say for the psychic joys of creating and publishing a book and hopefully getting it in the hands of a reader. Many of these authors have spent sweat, treasure and time writing and then trying to market their work to agents, editors, publishers, film producers and whoever is in the business of monetizing their efforts. The overwhelming majority have not succeeded in attracting their attention for reasons that are often obscure and baffling.

And while there are countless categories of books being offered within non-fiction and fiction areas, my own authorial interest is in the fate of the mainstream novel, a long form work of the imagination that cannot be defined by any established genre.

Having grown up on a rich diet of reading, studying and writing mainstream novels, a process that I personally consider among the highest forms of artistic expression, I worry that the ever growing glut of novels thrown into cyberspace will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the reader to differentiate between authors and find those who reach into the heart of their understanding, insight and pleasure.

With the shrinking output of traditional sources of book information and reviews in newspapers and magazines, the fractionalizing of online sites dealing with reviewing books and the collapse of the usual so called quality filters, the methods of book selection, particularly serious mainstream fiction is severely restricted.

The great breakout books by serious authors that gained attention in the last century like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Joyce, Greene, Maugham, Waugh, O’Hara and numerous others that transcend my personal bias will be tough acts to follow simply because they will be difficult to cut from the giant pack of novel offerings. Authors will be hard put to get their books noticed, reviewed and honestly recommended.

Of course, traditional publishers are attempting a wide variety of marketing experiments and strategies to extend the public reach of their authors, but the impact on advances and sales will be profound. Authors already well branded in the age before e-books will survive, of course, but their readership will diminish in the future as the marketing funnels become clogged and their original enthusiastic fans die out.

There will be opportunities in the film and television markets if authors are lucky enough to have their books adapted to those mediums, especially if the producers keep the book titles intact. But even that will be no guarantee of crossover sales.

Since most things are transitory and unintended consequences can morph into other unintended consequences and corrections, the chances are that authors, publishers, Internet innovators, or various consultants and deep thinkers will find a way to create “differentiation” methods so that readers can find their most meaningful personal reading choices, I am forever optimistic.

For those authors who see this essay as portending gloom and doom, take heart. At the very least the serious author of imaginative fiction will no longer have to see his or her work live a life of perpetual exile in a computer file or in the bottom drawer of his or her home desk.

Warren Adler is the author of 32 novels and short story collections published in numerous languages. Films adapted from his books include “The War of the Roses”, “Random Hearts” and the PBS trilogy “The Sunset Gang.” He is a pioneer in digital publishing.

It should now be obvious to anyone who reads books on a regular basis that digitized versions of books will dominate the marketplace for dedicated readers far sooner than anyone had predicted.

Having made the entry into digital publishing of my own works of fiction ten years ago, I have never lost faith in the idea that content was king no matter how it was delivered. Admittedly, the early days were a rocky road indeed. Many visionaries who believed in this technology in those early days have fallen by the wayside.

Thankfully, for those authors of fiction like myself, our day has finally arrived. Digital publishing on e-reading devices and print-on-demand technology will finally give the author his or her freedom from the traditional publishing industry’s monopoly on content and distribution.

The introduction of the iPad and other tablets with their vast array of offerings of TV shows, movies and games, as well as books, will, in my opinion, not be the first choice of the dedicated reader, although the Apps offered make dedicated reading fare from Amazon, the Sony reader, Nook and Kobo available on such devices. Still, I believe that the truly committed reader will opt for the dedicated reading device itself while using the tablets for other entertainment forms.

There are, nevertheless, challenges ahead for both the author and the reader, especially in the realm of fiction. The well regulated and tight-fisted control of the traditional publisher as the gatekeeper of books and talent served the public well for centuries. They kept their inventories in check through out-of-print methodology which cleared unsold books from their warehouses and limited their sales efforts strictly to those books that were instantly promotable and could be marketed swiftly and be off the shelves of bookstores to make way for other books coming off their presses.

Books that didn’t move quickly were withdrawn and eventually declared out-of-print based strictly on their sales potential, handicapped by a deliberately held back lack of advertising and promotion. Authors who were caught in the cut, saw their careers aborted and their hopes and dreams demolished while their work moldered on book shelves awaiting withdrawal from libraries or left to rot on home bookshelves and eventually discarded.

Many frustrated authors took to publishing their books via what was dubbed vanity publishing, once a by-word for schlock based on ego mania. The process was generally considered, perhaps unfairly, as a kind of last resort for the frustrated and self-delusional. This by no means discounts what might have been fine material published by talented authors through this process.

That day is over. Self-publishing has become respectable and allows an author to take control of his or her own destiny, especially those authors who have once published through the traditional system.  A self-published author can easily join his traditionally published fellow authors on every digital venue. The stigma of an author going that route is quickly disappearing.

Granted that many self-published books are, arguably, hardly worth one’s reading time, there are, nevertheless, many of considerable worth, written by talented authors who have, for one reason or another, been shut out of the shrinking traditional publishing offerings.

The dedicated reader will have to choose carefully. Indeed, the e-readers like Kindle, Nook, iPad and Kobo and others still to come allow potential readers to browse, read excerpts or chapters before making their purchasing decisions. Beware of reviews which represent clashing opinions by readers who can preserve their anonymity and often are suspect as plants. Dedicated readers hungry for new material should carefully assess the various works presented and make up their own minds.

In general, book reviews and special sections in the print press featuring celebrated critics are shrinking rapidly, unable to be supported by advertising. Reviewing sites are springing up on the Internet but the fractured nature of cyberspace inhibits mass influence. Author and title identification will have an increasingly tough time rising above the competitive chatter.

With fewer and fewer books going out of print and self-publishing authors accelerating to the point that they have actually surpassed in volume books by traditional publishers, both the dedicated reader  and author will be challenged to wade through the huge offerings in an effort to find  the perfect fit between reader and author.

This new paradigm could lead to a reader’s finding a favorite author and buying into a body of work instead of merely reading a single offering. The way in which the cyber bookstores present an author’s work and the lower price points could change the single book purchase and entice the reader to buy multi volumes of an author’s output.

Such an outcome is pure speculation at this point. The crystal ball gets pretty clouded when it comes to technology, although it is a no-brainer that in an astonishing short time most books will available to the dedicated reader in cyberspace and the big brick and mortar bookstores will eventually implode.

Authors, like myself, who take control of their own marketing in cyberspace will be challenged to find ways to attract a reader’s attention in a world in which millions of books will be easily available.

Other like-minded authors will certainly be devising strategies to solve this dilemma. The harvesting of dedicated fiction readers that are on the same wavelength as the author, who are attracted to his or her stories and who gain pleasure and insight from his or her works will require an understanding of the marketing challenges posed by the ever-changing technological environment and the creation of a message that resonates with those who could be enticed to enter the parallel world of the imagination created by the writer.

That and an abundant serving of luck might keep the fiction writer’s authorial name alive in a spinning merry-go-round of fame and fortune where most participants are more likely to fall off than stay on.

One of the joys and curses of being an obsessive and compulsive writer of long form works of the imagination, meaning the novel, is the inability to cut off the flow. In other words the greedy muse must be served.

Most of my work is stand alone non-genre stories although I have among my published books written a six book mystery series about a female detective in Washington D.C. My stories are character and theme driven and deal with human conflict in mostly contemporary settings in some ways similar to The War of the Roses, and Random Hearts, which have been made into movies, and The Sunset Gang which became a trilogy on PBS.

Some are cast as thrillers or novels of suspense, intrigue and romance or whatever classification comes to mind. None are traditional genres.   A primary element in my work is the mysterious nature of love and attraction. Every story stands by itself. They are all different.

For the past five decades I have been writing stories, long and short, pretty much every day of my life. Considering the pace of about three to five pages a day every day the result is a considerable build-up of manuscripts that could not possibly be marketed in the accepted way under traditional publishing marketing.

The publishing business as it has been constituted for years is locked into marketing one book at a time, which has worked for them and for some authors, but not all. What the new e-book reading devices have done is changed that paradigm.

As an author of my output I am offering a body of work. Why not five novels out of my inventory to be introduced by the largest bookseller in the world? Amazon offered me the opportunity to assist in the global promotion of these five books in exchange for exclusivity. And I took it, gleefully, happily. The new titles now join the 27 non-exclusive books on Kindle and all other venues where electronic books and print on demand trade fiction copies are sold.

Additionally, Kindle and Amazon apps on iPad, Blackberry, iPhone  and whatever mobile device that allows the software increases the availability to any reader who taps into their vast inventory of books. Kindle and Amazon’s reach is ubiquitous.

My goals are clear. I want to keep my authorial name alive in my lifetime and beyond. I want readers to be introduced to my entire body of work, not one book.  E-books will never go out of print and the competition will be fierce in the future with millions of books available in cyberspace.

The time is fast arriving when all writers, especially novelists, will have to take charge of their own destiny as the marketing of books morphs to the Internet. The old paradigms of publishing and big box book stores as their major outlet are shrinking precipitously. Book display space, even in major outlets like Walmart, will no longer equate with a profitable cost per square foot. Less space, less physical books to display, less foot traffic, less opportunity for print book sales.

For the author that means less advances, less print run, less promotion by traditional publishers. Everyone connected to traditional publishing will have to rethink their day job and that includes, agents, publicity people, backpack and bookcase manufacturers, libraries, and on and on.

To get one’s authorial identity above the chatter on the net will take resourcefulness, creativity, cunning and above all luck. The filters for getting known and read are gone. Everybody is a reviewer. Everybody has an opinion.

Fiction book pickers like Oprah will lose their influence as others compete and proliferate.  Self-promoting talking heads on TV will have their moment but competition will make their manufactured large ghost written book products ebb with their ratings.

The paper book will survive but will be reduced in scope and marketed in new and innovative ways, but never in the mass numbers as before.

When the first stirring of the e-book possibilities began more than a decade ago, it struck me that here was an opportunity to liberate an author from total dependence on the traditional publishers and take one’s future destiny as a novelist into my own hands. I quickly got my novel rights reversed, set up my own publishing umbrella and digitized all of my books.

The early days of the e-book invention were a disaster and finding a commercial outlet for my digitized books was nearly impossible.  Many an entrepreneur bit the dust. In those early years I was an evangelist for the process and was usually met with ridicule and disdain.  Barnes & Noble entered the field and after years of financial failure abandoned it only to return to the fray to play catch-up.

Then came the SONY Reader in 2007. To celebrate this entry into the field, SONY asked me to speak for it at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. Still skeptics abounded.

It wasn’t until the Kindle was introduced that I felt certain that the future had arrived. Un-tethered to a computer, the Kindle seemed to me the most compelling hardware to connect the reader to book content ever devised.

I bought one of the first and saw for myself that while the printed books had served its purpose for centuries, the Kindle offered the dedicated reader a new way to read content that in no way impinged on the one-on-one communication system that connects reader to author. Other devices will follow and compete, but at this moment in time Amazon’s Kindle is the leading product of choice for the dedicated reader.

Hence my decision.

Now that technology has made it possible for anything those of us commit to writing in cyberspace to be monitored and read by others, we are confronted with a ubiquitous dilemma.

How much privacy can we expect?  Can it ever be foolproof? What are the consequences of total transparency as they affect governments and individuals?

One aspect of the dangers posed by this technology is the Wikileak phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of classified United States government information was released. It appears to suggest that a complete blocking mechanism has yet to be achieved. Beyond the embarrassment and the feckless response by those in charge of protecting this vast trove, the motive for releasing them was clearly sinister and a viciously clever use of what can only be characterized as enemy weaponry.

The material released was meant to portray America as cynical, ruthless and inhumane. That is the propaganda mantra of our enemies.

Obviously our country has been betrayed. An American spy provided classified information to the enemy who used it to attack us. This was a specific, planned and targeted attack against the United States.

The idea being propagated by some that equates this conduct as an exercise in moral courage is a dangerous distortion. This was clearly an enemy act designed to defame us and weaken our defenses. Our intelligence has been compromised. It should be looked upon as a wake up call to tighten up our cyber defenses.

Note that the self-righteous demons who run Wikileak did not target the classified secrets of other countries e.g. Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Lebanon and the thousands of terror groups and cells all over the world operating to bring us down. It is a dead certainty that many people loyal to us were put at risk with these revelations.

What I don’t understand is where is the outrage? Where is the quick response?  Is this not the worst display of American weakness in recent history?  Where is the punishment? Are we now to be seen as a paper tiger? Who is protecting us? Do we have a deficit in strong leadership?

The Wikileak attack has revealed a chink in our armor. Human error and neglect or cyber-ignorance?

It should be obvious to most of us that America is involved in a global war against implacable enemies. Whatever our faults as a nation, we do have a cadre of dedicated public servants, civilians and military, who are in the front lines taking risks and making decisions to protect us. They are not perfect but many fully understand and are sincerely devoted to their mission.

The term “classified” means that it should be shielded from the eyes of the enemy. It is a human judgment and sometimes wrong-headed and overly cautious. As the saying goes, “better safe than sorry.”

Transparency in general may seem like a desirable moral goal, but in warfare it is a dangerous weapon. Protecting intelligence is crucial to our defenses. If we don’t know what is in the mind of the enemy we put ourselves in mortal danger.

Whatever our political stance and despite the heated rhetoric of our positions, we must band together on the issue of defending our turf. Denial is not an option.

This will probably be the last good Christmas for the big box bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders and many of the book chains that one encounters in major airports.

I say this with a sincere sense of regret and sadness. The love of books, both as a writer, a reader and a collector has dominated my life. As a young man my greatest joy was to browse through bookstores, especially those second hand bookstores that once lined the streets not far from New York University, my alma mater, where I now teach novel writing.

Indeed, to this day I can still recall the wonderful disorder of those bookstores and the strangely exhilarating musty odor of their aging books. I gaze fondly at my special companions, the books that line my apartment shelves that seem to reach out with their intangible inducements to savor again the exhilarating wonders of their contents.

Unfortunately, like the buggy, the chaise, the four-in-hand, the sulky and the surrey, the big box bookstores will pass into glorious oblivion, along with the implosion of the printed book. Perhaps a new kind of bookstore, a specialized boutique might emerge out of the chaos of change. Courage and creativity have won battles before.

Happily though, contents, meaning the word in all its various manifestations will not only survive in its new technological trappings but will undoubtedly proliferate. The facts are inescapable. The age of digitization has left the traditional publishing world in its wake. The old methods of getting content to readers are in its twilight.

It has been ten years since I first digitized my then twenty odd published novels, all of which I acquired through reversals of my original publishing contracts with traditional publishers. My goals were simple. The technology for reading on screens was developing and being embraced by the upcoming younger generation brought up on computers.  My novels would never go out of print and always be available to be purchased and read, hopefully beyond my lifetime. The delivery method was changing radically and one needed to prepare for the future or be forever lost in the past.

Frankly, I had hoped that the movement from paper to screens and the development of reader friendly devices would happen at a more rapid pace. My overzealous optimism was a case of enthusiasm over reality.  But anyone with even a modicum of vision could see that one day it would happen and when it did it would gather traction at warp speed and it has.

I recall addressing many groups on the coming reading revolution. Most of those who took the time to listen were doubtful and militantly hopeful that the time would never come when the paper book would lose its dominance. Although I was patient and tolerant as I listed to their critiques, I knew in my gut they were wrong.

When Sony introduced the first reader at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in 2007, I was enlisted to speak on their behalf and continued to find a cautious and restrained response. Then came the first Kindle a year later. The Sony Reader was still tethered to the computer but the Kindle raced forward with a wireless connection that led the way for others to discover the screen reader’s possibilities.

Unfortunately, the traditional publishers, most of them part of giant publishing conglomerates were too slow to understand the power of this revolution. Indeed, even Barnes and Noble with its numerous stores gave up its entry into the electronic book market, a hiatus which cost them dearly. They are now playing catch up with their Nook device, but the impact on its stories will be profound and perhaps fatal.

Few people in the publishing industry and beyond believed that e-books would grow as a consumer choice at such tremendous speed. The traditional publishers dismissed the possibility that it would be a major factor in sales and marketing, perhaps gaining a small percentage of the market. They were dead wrong.

By my own seat of the pants calculation, I believe that electronic books will dominate the marketplace within the next three years. The e-book technology which crosses numerous mobile platforms where books can be read on every possible portable device covering smart phones, tablets, and dedicated devices like Kindle and the Sony Reader and Kobo will proliferate at an astonishing pace.

Big box stores, which will no longer need the space for book sales will be hard hit. Traditional publishers are scrambling for ways to continue to profit from the notoriety of their writing stars as they switch from print to digitization. Attempts to jack up the prices of e-books now being tried by publishers for popular titles like Ken Follett’s and Patterson’s new factory novel will, in my opinion, surrender to public avoidance. In any event the windows on the apparatus of celebrity promotion are closing as the outlets for building image and popularity clog the pipelines required to gain overwhelming attention.

The road ahead for authors will be challenging. The old paradigm of generous advances will eventually shrink largely due to proliferating competition, the uncertainty of marketability and the inability to predict future revenues. But then one can never underestimate the possibilities of invention in the commercial zeitgeist and, like all predictions they are subject to change.

With digitized books no longer going out of print and the staggering growth of self-published books rushing headlong into the cyberspace pipeline, authors will have an increasingly tough time to identify themselves and rise above the chatter. In the years ahead the number of books available, both in fiction and non-fiction could easily run into the multi-millions with publishers and authors scrambling to get readers to notice their wares. Even the stars in their fields will risk losing their status and authors will have to be creative to devise ways to be heard above the din.

An author and publisher in this world of digitization will have to be imaginative, fleet footed and creative and be willing to experiment with new ways to present his or her content to the reading public. My instincts at this stage tell me that vast numbers of dedicated readers will latch on to dedicated devices with fewer distractions to compete for his or her individual concentration.

While some will see social networking as the road to notoriety, others will choose coalitions of websites, advertising, keywords on search engines and methods yet to be devised to gain the attention of readers.

At this stage I am inclined to believe that Amazon and Kindle will be the leader in the bookselling business, at least in the near term. Their vast content and their ability to employ every other portable device to deliver their wares is an enormous plus for the future of reading content of every type, although to keep this lead will require an ever galloping imagination and perpetual technological creativity.

Other providers will be snapping at their heels in this super charged competitive environment that digitization has spawned. Whatever the future brings it is dead certain that the electronic book will be at the heart of what comes next.

Authors and publishers will have to be nimble and adventurous if they are to survive a revolution that will surely lay waste to the old ways of delivering content. Still, few understand how to deal with the big waves of change that have gathered and are rolling toward us with ever advancing power and speed.

Sorry to be such a scrooge about the book business in this upcoming Christmas. But remember old Scrooge was a character in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a published fiction that has survived more than one hundred and fifty years and can currently be downloaded in less than a minute as an e-book.

The recent announcement that sales volume on Kindle has just exceeded the sales of hardcover books on Amazon comes as no surprise to me. It simply shows that dedicated readers see the value of reading content on screens that are exclusive to that content with no other distractions. I’m sure there is a price point issue as well but it means that dedicated readers are quite comfortable reading on screens.

When the iPad hit the market, I pointed out that this remarkable device will be wildly successful but won’t capture the bulk of the market for the dedicated reader. One might argue that while it does provide the reader with an excellent format for the experience, there are too many divisive distractions embedded in the device to compete with the dedicated reader’s primary motive, which is to absorb the content offered by the author.

On the other hand, the device is available to Kindle and other device brand owners to download digital books they have purchased from their respective online book stores and read them on the iPad in the Apple device’s format. Kindle has a huge pool of digital books, and a record of longevity that gives it a distinct advantage over other online bookstores.

Whether or not Barnes and Noble’s new Nook digital device will catch up to Kindle in sheer volume is still in play. Sony, too is in the digital race, having been the first to introduce a portable screen reading device. Kobo, a Borders partner is now in the game as well and Google is next in line.

Another argument in favor of the dedicated reader choosing an exclusive device concerns the habits of the traditional book buyer. When a reader enters a brick and mortar bookstore, he is seeking reading material exclusively, words on paper. Normally he will sample a few pages to determine whether the book suits his interest. This sampling aspect has been dealt with by Kindle, Nook, Sony and other digital reading device makers. They allow sampling before purchase.

Content aside, there is also the matter of price and portability where Kindle shines. It is much less expensive than the iPad and because of its size easily portable. It can fit easily into a woman’s pocketbook or the side pocket of a man’s jacket.

In my various blogs on the subject I cited, too, that dedicated readers are not a dying species as some alarmist commentators have alleged. Yes, it is true that younger readers who have grown up on a diet of television apparently are more interested in visual media these days than the written word. I have argued that sooner or later they will discover that the world of the imagination, the imagery concocted by the human brain, is more powerful than anything that can be served up in the visual media.

I do, by the way, love movies, but comparing the emotional kick of a good book over a movie, I think a book wins hands down. Call it a personal prejudice for obvious reasons.

Perhaps as a writer of the imagination I am too prejudiced about the power of the written word to make anything but a purely subjective judgment on this subject. Nevertheless I will stick with the idea that expanding world-wide literacy will increase the population of dedicated readers and render the prevailing opinion that “people are reading less” a false premise.

There is another strange phenomenon occurring that might be characterized as unintended consequences and that is the explosion of self-published books that can be easily transported to electronic readers and be available on the internet. There are statistics available that self-published books are approaching an astounding 300,oo0 a year in the United States alone. The world-wide statistic is unknown but must be at least equal to that number.

Traditional publishers in the United States publish about 275,000 books a year, which means that in the US alone nearly a half a million books are being published. With self-publishing exploding one can envision a backlist that will soon approach many millions of books, eventually billions. In cyberspace nothing will ever go out of print.

For the serious author who hopes for a respectable readership, whether self-published or traditionally published, the challenges are enormous.

This tells me that the passion for authordom, both fiction and non-fiction in all the various genres is accelerating at an enormous rate. Of course this does not mean that readers are rushing to absorb the content of these self-published authors, but it does tell me that the appetite for creating reading material is growing exponentially. Such offerings have got to result in attracting readers, even if the response to the self-published offerings may be too fractionalized for breakout sales possibilities.

Indeed, there is a growing industry of alleged facilitators who for a price, believe they have the answer for authors who wish to rise above the chatter and build an audience on the Internet. So far I am rather cynical about their efficacy. No one has as yet come close to finding that answer.

Nevertheless what all this implies is that the written word is far from expiring and the appetite for reading is growing.

Within the next few years numerous reading devices will hit the market. With the ability to read books on smart phones and this proliferating electronic book explosion the traditional publishing industry will be stood on its head. Granted, readers will lose the professional screening and mediation of editors which could make the offerings of book less interesting and appealing. On the other hand the market will expand to bring in talented writers who were often rejected by publishers for purely market reasons based upon fickle sales histories. It will be up to the reader to discriminate and carefully choose his material.

As for me, a lover of books, to whom reading is one of the most profound experiences available to human beings, I find I am reading more books on screens than I had read in paper versions. Apparently, others are agreeing in droves.

I am a great fan of Apple products, own an Apple computer and an iPhone, but I am not yet convinced that the upcoming iPad will dominate as the reading device of choice for e-books. This does not mean that it won’t find its place for all the other applications, especially games and movies and the avalanche of coming iPad apps. Indeed, the technical aspects of the reading experience might even be somewhat superior, albeit temporary, to what is now available in reading devices exclusive to e-books e.g. Kindle and the SONY reader.

The iPad has certain distinct disadvantages for the dedicated reader of books.

Continue Reading

I’ve just attended a three day conference in Manhattan, titled “Tools of Change”. Its objective was to bring interested parties together to assess the impact of e-books on the future of publishing.

I have been attending various meetings of this sort for the past ten years, ever since I committed my authorial presence to the technology of reading on screens. Ten years ago, through rights reversals, I put all my previously published English language books on every digitized platform I could find.

Even after ten years, I appear to be the only author with my output that attends these conferences. Indeed, I did attend what was billed as a major conference on e-books sponsored by The Authors Guild. The house was packed. The lack of knowledge was overwhelming.

Continue Reading