The uneven progress of technology -- and the astounding path it will take us on -- were strikingly displayed by speakers at the 21st annual International Distribution and Supply Chain Specialists meeting on Tuesday.
At its meetings, the group, representing many countries, focuses on technical and logistical issues surrounding the book, which includes everything from new warehouse picking and packing systems and electronic data interchange standards to the latest developments in on-demand printing and online bookselling.
On one hand, keynote speaker Mike Shatzkin outlined what he called "the inevitable future of the book business...when the printed book will be an artifact or a rich person's toy." This should occur within the next two decades. ("By 2005 we'll still have the printed book, but everything surrounding the book will change more than it has since 1905. By 2020, the book will probably be gone.") On the other hand, some speakers described situations that were far removed from a high-tech future. For example, Peggy Yu Yu from CNBIP in China, lamented that she felt like "an antique" following Shatzkin's remarks because she is struggling with such old-fashioned transportation issues as "sending a book from the west side of China to the east side in 30 days."
In Shatzkin's brave new world, there will be no printing except for, say, art books, which will be printed one copy at a time. The "book" world infrastructure, which has yet to be fully invented, will put "printers and shipper in peril, and others must change form to serve the same purposes as they do today."
The changes will come about because of the expansion of e-book readers and related electronic readers (a current example is the Palm Pilot). Within 10 years, cultural barriers against the e-book will be weakened, in large part because schools and corporations will spread the use of e-books by giving them to employees as a cheaper way to communicate with them. At a certain point, there will be more material available on e-books than print, leading to what Shatzkin calls an "e-book flip."
The next five years, as the book business prepares for this "inevitable future," will "not be highly profitable." Costs will include digitizing existing texts, investing in new systems and technology while maintaining the old. And for the moment, there are many challenges: to send digital files faster, to improve the quality of on-demand printing, to make e-books cheaper, better, and lighter. And the business has "no idea of how to handle pricing and rights [for e-books," Shatzkin added.
He predicted, among other things, that print on demand will soon become routine; that there will be more cross-border commerce; that more titles will be "in print"; that the sale of English-language titles will grow in non-English-speaking markets while more non-English-language books will be sold in pockets of the English-speaking world; and that most book business transactions, including editorial and marketing functions, will be made on the Internet.
