hold on to the book for the sake of it. Jane, a senior trade publisher, described this as ‘disposable fiction’ – the kind of book that ‘you don’t need to put on your shelf’. On the other hand, there are some books that readers want to own, keep, put on their shelf, return to at a later date, perhaps even display in their living room as a signifier, a symbolic token of who they are and the kinds of books they like and value (or would like others to think that they like and value). These books have a much higher possession value for the reader. For books with a low possession value, the ebook is ideal: once the content has been consumed, the ebook can be deleted – or simply kept in a digital collection where it takes up no physical space, only a small amount of memory. For books with a high possession value, however, the printed book is much more attractive. Printed books have a kind of permanence that digital files lack: file formats and reading devices change with time, but a printed book can be read again at a future date regardless of whether technologies change; printed books can be shared, lent or given to others without restrictions; they can be displayed on a table or a shelf for others to see and pick up and admire; and they have a set of aesthetic traits – a beautiful cover, a well-designed interior, a sensuous materiality – that constitute the printed book as something more than simply a conveyor of content, that constitute it as an aesthetic object that is valued both for its content and for the material form in which that content is conveyed. ‘So the real question is going to be: which books do you need to own and which ones can you simply delete’, continued Jane; ‘and the real trick is going to be figuring out the distinction between the disposable books and the ones you want to keep on your shelf.’ Each reader will figure this out in his or her own way depending on a variety of factors that will affect individuals in different ways, from the extent to which they value certain books as signifiers to the amount of shelf space they have in their office, study or home.
Technology is also an important factor in explaining the different levels of ebook uptake. The categories of books that have high e/p ratios are categories where it is easy and relatively cheap to produce digital files for different devices and upload them into the relevant vendor systems. Older backlist titles can be converted relatively easily and cheaply by sending a hard copy to a third party who will scan the text and turn it into an XML file using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software – the whole process would cost under $200 for a book of 300 pages or less. In the case of new titles, most publishing houses now have a digital workflow that generates multiple file formats as standard outputs of the production process: ebooks are just another set of files that are stored alongside the PDFs and other files that are held by publishers and used by printers to print physical books. Once the systems are in place, it is very inexpensive to produce the ebook files as additional outputs of the production process. In the case of some non-linear and heavily illustrated books, however, it may be much more complicated and costly to produce the kind of digital version that makes for a positive user experience. It may be necessary to go back to the drawing board and recreate the book as a different kind of digital experience – for example, as an app that is organized in an altogether different way. This is not easy to do and success is by no means guaranteed, and this by itself has impeded the process of making available certain categories of books in suitable digital formats.
Figure 1.10 summarizes the main features of what we could call ‘the ebook uptake model’. According to this model, there are four key factors that explain the variations in the uptake of ebooks across different categories of books: textual character, user experience (or form factor), possession value and technology. Taken together, these four factors generate a spectrum of possibilities. At one end of the spectrum is fiction – both genre fiction (romance, mystery, sci-fi, etc.) and general fiction. Genre fiction displayed the most rapid and dramatic shift to digital. Books in these categories are characterized by narrative linear text; they are read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience where the e-reading form factor is good; there is a high turnover or consumption rate and the books are often not kept after they are read (or not kept as physical copies); and the digital files are easy and cheap to produce. These are the categories of books where ebooks as a percentage of total sales reached the highest levels at Olympic – between 40 and 60 per cent by 2014, although most have levelled off at between 30 and 40 per cent, with the exception of romance, which remains significantly higher, in the 50–60 per cent range.
Figure 1.10 The ebook uptake model
In the case of general fiction, the switch to digital was not quite so rapid and dramatic as it was with genre fiction, but it wasn’t far behind, and by 2014 the ebook percentage for general fiction at Olympic was very similar to that for sci-fi and fantasy and mystery, although still well below romance. The kinds of books that are included in the category of general fiction share many of the properties of genre fiction. As narrative linear text that is read continuously in an immersive reading experience, these books are easy to read on e-reading devices like the Kindle – the form factor is good. The digital files are also easy and cheap to produce. The one thing that might differentiate some forms of general fiction, like literary fiction, from genre fiction is their possession value. For some readers, literary fiction, and certain books and authors, may have more possession value than genre fiction has – that is, they may be more inclined to want to own these books, and to own books by these authors, and to keep them on their shelves, partly as a way of signalling who they are and of displaying their cultural tastes. They may also be more inclined to give these books as gifts, which is another way of showing their possession value, since a gift is an object that you think someone else might wish to possess, and a physical book functions as a gift in a way that an ebook does not – ebooks make terrible gifts. These factors help to explain why general fiction, which includes literary fiction, is a category where the shift to ebooks has been a little slower than it has been for genre fiction and where the percentage reached in 2015 – 38.7 per cent – was still well below romance.
At the other end of the spectrum are travel books, cookbooks and juvenile books. Books in these categories tend to be non-linear and/or heavily illustrated. They are commonly read more slowly and often discontinuously – in many cases, they are not read in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, but are used more like a reference book that you return to time and again. Turnover is low and the book may be re-used, re-read or consulted again at a later date. In the case of some heavily illustrated books, it may also be displayed on a shelf or a coffee table. Unlike straight narrative text, it is often more difficult and more costly to make the content of these books available in digital formats that are attractive and easy to use. These are the categories of books where ebooks as a percentage of total sales remain at the lowest levels – below 12 per cent for Olympic (excluding the anomalous figures for travel books in 2016).
Between these two extremes are the categories of narrative nonfiction. The label ‘narrative nonfiction’ is a loose notion that includes a diverse range of BISAC nonfiction subject headings, from history, biography and autobiography to health and fitness, religion and self-help. We should not expect all of these categories to display the same ebook pattern, and they don’t. Those categories that are made up of books that are mainly narrative linear text, like biographies, autobiographies and works of narrative history, would be expected to display a higher level of ebook uptake, and this is indeed the case – the speed of ebook uptake was slower for narrative nonfiction than it was for fiction, but by 2015 the percentages for biography/autobiography and history at Olympic were only 5–10 per cent below the percentages for some categories of fiction, including general fiction and sci-fi. It is likely that ‘big ideas’ books, like the books of Malcolm Gladwell or Jaron Lanier, will also display a relatively high level of ebook uptake since they consist mainly of straight narrative text, although they don’t fit neatly into the BISAC categories analysed above. On the other hand, books that are more like reference works that might be read discontinuously and consulted from time to time, such as self-help and family and relationships books, would be expected to display a lower level of ebook uptake – and, again, this is what we find. In most cases, however,
