Digital Book World tweeted this review of You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier. It is worth reading, if you are a writer, or if you’re a reader.

I know I’ve let my blog get hijacked by this Amazon-Macmillan blowup. I promise this is my last post on the subject for a while. But everything has made me think about the future of books, and e-books, specifically novels, which I write. It’s worth thinking about if you are a student (or victim) of history, too. Since the industrial revolution began, we have seen many changes wave over us in exactly the same way as a Tsunami: the first wave in a Tsunami is not usually the big destructo one. In fact, a Tsunami is actually a series of waves, according to the info I found here.

Here are signs of an impending Tsunami (an earthquake, a receding tide, a rising tide). Yeah, not much warning. But the key thing is, you have to react. If you sit around saying, “I wonder if it this might be a Tsu–” you’ve missed any opportunity to escape. If you try to gather up your belongings, your window closes.  And you have to escape away from any rivers or lakes, because a Tsunami can travel up through water that leads to the ocean. Most people just get swept up first, and then have to figure out how to survive.

Even before the industrial revolution, this is the way technological changes have hit human beings. First the invention. Then the signs of an impending massive social change. Then the scorn — “Who would want that wheel? Only weaklings who can’t carry their own weight.” or “Who needs fire, real men prefer sushi.” In just the last 100 years it has been “Who would want that newfangled auto/recorded music/desktop computer/laptop/cellphone/Blackberry/iPod etc.”

My current foray into the business world (marketing requires so much research, even before your product is ready to go out!) has shown me that a business that wants to stay in business needs to know its customer, and what its customer is willing to pay. A business that gets that delicate calculation wrong will die. It could be a slow and horrible death if the calculation is only slightly off, or a big catastrophic death if it is far off. The business, of course, always has the ability to notice and change to small customer signals, and stay in business. It is the Tsunami like changes, the ones that throw everything that’s been carefully tweaked to work to balance profit and customer satisfaction, that truly challenge businesses. And that’s what publishing is facing right now as it tries to decide the true value of an e-book.

The rise of e-books is a Tsunami shift in publishing (not that publishers seems to have noticed). The signals are clear to me: the entire newspaper industry is starving to death because there is so much free-to-the-consumer news content available; my local B. Dalton closed, leaving the mall without a bookstore; my local Borders has more non-book merchandise than ever before; independent bookstores are relying more and more on used books and carrying only the top selling or niche new books; publishers are trying to push back against discount sellers and control the shrinking hardcover market, claiming that low e-book prices would devalue the book. Anyone else flash back to the invention of the wheel and imagine how quickly the strong people had to drop the “only wimps use wheels” anti-wheel marketing? Most no doubt found a new marketing angle –”Hey, I’m so strong, I can pull a heavier cart than you can!” Or found a niche. “Hey, that cart’s wheels get stuck in mud, let me do that job.”

Right now we’re hearing a lot of “but e-books don’t have the heart/soul/zeitgeist of paper” defenses of the traditional book. It sounds exactly like the defenses of horse and buggy over automobile (before our time), old fashioned cash registers over beeper/scanner model (most of us remember that one, except young teens), and so on. It’s worth remembering that none of those defenses stopped the rapid and complete adoption of those newfangled inventions (and my supermarket just added those self-scanning checkouts — I loathe them, but I see the writing on the wall).

It’s not the first time publishing has had such a huge shift — when the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, the Catholic church considered requiring them to be licensed by the church (the first blockbuster was the Bible, as you may expect). Many of the wealthy disdained the printed books as lessening the value of their libraries, which contained books carefully hand lettered by monks (and often beautifully illustrated). The less wealthy, naturally, jumped on the chance to own their own copy of the Bible.

In some ways, Gutenberg, and the printers who came after him and perfected the technology of the printing press, are responsible for the rise of novelists like me. It used to be too expensive for people to buy and read one-time only entertainment reads. They used village story tellers for those tales, or told themselves to each other at the local alehouse or pub. Thanks to Gutenberg, the novel form eventually took hold (in about the early 1700s) and became popular enough to birth the mass market paperback in the 1930s. Another change that revolutionized publishing.

So novelists like me are about to find out exactly what the value of our e-words will be. It could be that we’ll be no more valuable to the consumer than free content. It could be that consumers are more than happy to pay mass market paperback prices for most novels and hardcover prices for the blockbusters (this seems likely to me). We’re going to find out. But not until after the e-book tsunami washes away all our previous expectations.

I suppose it is possible that the e-book tsunami will not come. If Wi-fi, the internet, electricity itself, were to become prohibitively expensive, then people would return to the cheaper paper alternative (cheaper always wins among the masses, which is why mass market paperbacks were such a success, despite the unhappy recalculating publishers had to do, and the subsequent sense of status loss from adding fleeting entertainment reads to their “important” books). A good apocalypse would prevent e-books from taking over the market. I don’t wish for it, despite my love of post-apocalyptic novels like Neville Chute’s On the Beach, or David Brin’s The Postman (both available in Kindle…check out the prices).

EDITED TO ADD (because I promised not to post on this topic any longer): Check out this excellent explanation of  the pricing problem e-book sellers and publisher face by David Pakman. It comes with a generic price elasticity graph and set of equations, which I am totally going to use in figuring out how to tweak the price for the products of my new business venture. A twofer!