Good news and bad for the world of books.
Seth Godin, the marketing genius who has published half-a-dozen bestselling books, sees the price of books plunging to commodity levels. No one should plan to make a living making books, he warns. Why? Too many books: eight times as many this year as last!
I love movies and this strikes terror in me:
The only reason that movies still cost so much to make is the finite number of movie screens available to the studios (this choke point enforces the scarcity of the short head). Once the world is 100% Netflix, don’t expect to see many more $200 million movies.
But at IBM I learned a trick that might help.
I spoke to groups when I was at IBM, though in high school I would sooner throw myself under a bus than walk to the front of the room and talk about Ayn Rand or The Brothers Karamazov. I dealt with my terror in two ways.
First, I made sure to know more about the topic than anyone else in the room.
Second, I turned the hot spotlight on my listeners at the beginning and throughout.
“Let’s go around the room,” I would say. “Say your name, where you’re from, and what you hope to accomplish here today.”
Now I am not the only name they know, not the only person who must speak up and make sense, and not the only person who will succeed or fail here today. They feel peer pressure. They don’t want to look bad to one another.
I call on them early and often. They are less likely to roast me if I can roast them back. I have the advantage: I am standing over them with the microphone, deciding who speaks and when.
Thereafter I am kind, and so are they.
How could that trick help eBooks, or give eBooks a better future?
My trick did not always work. Later I trained coaches and led groups of a hundred or more. Anything can happen in business coaching and life coaching (they run together). If someone stood up for coaching about an eating disorder, could I expect to know more about the topic than anyone else in the room? Could I put the hot spotlight on each person, or could some people hide from me in a group that size?
Well, yes, the topic is always coaching, not eating disorders or lost love or whatever, and yes, after you put two or three people under your hot spotlight, the rest sit up straight and pay attention. They want to be ready if your spotlight falls on them.
What’s the equivalent for an eBook, where you never see your readers?
Look again at that flood of eBooks Godin mentioned. Don’t most of them consist entirely of text? How often does an eBook do anything a printed book can’t do? Often the eBook does less. It drops the illustrations.
Sure, I can see the price of such eBooks falling to almost nothing.
Text is not enough.
True, in the Internet era more people will see our words than hear them, and more people will see our words than see us. But words seen on the screen are not enough. There are too many: too many of us, and too many words.
Can the eBook do what I did when speaking to groups? Put the hot spotlight on the reader, and call the reader to attention with a jolt of alarm?
Remember the tiny list of questions at the end of textbook chapter? A lazy teacher would make those questions your homework.
Suppose in an eBook those we add illustrations to those questions? And animate the illustrations? And make the animations interactive, responding to the reader? And make those interactive animations a game? Now the eBook reader can win or lose at the end of each chapter; can win or lose against other readers of the same eBook; maybe against other readers by the dozens or the hundreds, other readers at the same moment, far across the Internet. Peer pressure calls the reader to attention. The hot spotlight falls on the reader. We know who that reader is, and we keep score. We start the eBook by asking the reader a few questions about himself.
This turns the textbook chapter inside out. The tiny questions at the end of the chapter swallow up the chapter. Each chapter is a game, and you get the text of the chapter in the course of the game, in the form of clues and instructions for winning the game.
Now eBooks sell the way games sell.
Now eBooks sell big.
###