Physical Media is Doomed. Blame Oil.

Here is a portion of an interview I did with Colin Barnes, a very talented up-and-coming writer from the U.K. The first question has to do with whether or not the exploding popularity of eBooks is temporary. As you'll see, I don't think so, but not just because they've ignited an indie publishing boom. I wanted to highlight a portion of the interview here that gives you an idea why I feel physical media such as printed books, DVD's, CD's and such are totally doomed.

Being a proponent of indie-publishing, do you think we are in a bubble (of ebook popularity) or the beginnings of a long-term publishing paradigm?

This is no bubble. Thanks the staggering proliferation of devices that can access eBooks including smartphones, tablets and of course devices such as the Kindle or Nook, we are in a golden era of change in the publishing industry. Sure, it may not seem that way to major publishers struggling to understand how to survive in a world where their bloated and antiquated methods of business feel as archaic today as Edison's hand-crank Gramophone, but the winds of change, they are a blowing.

eBooks offer a tremendous amount of opportunities for enterprising writers, mostly because by cutting out the cost of the middlemen (publisher, distributor, retailer), you can lower your price points in order to be competitive which helps level the playing field. Other than maybe specific genre writing, I don't think there's any kind of "brand loyalty" that book consumers have to a publisher. People just want to read good stuff and don't want to pay too much for the privilege.

Obviously you can point to how mp3s changed the music industry, and how they quickly eroded the market for physical media as a parallel. I won't argue with you that reading a printed page is in many ways a superior way to enjoy a book, but just because something offers a superior media experience doesn't mean it will survive over a content delivery method that offers better access and massive proliferation. (see "Betamax, CDs, DVDs").

Look at vinyl, I love the warm sound of music on vinyl, but since there's no mass market for them anymore. It's a collector/enthusiast/music fetishist/ thing now, mostly created by indie companies and sold at a premium. The same thing will happen to physical books within two generations. By the time my grandkids are ready to read, they'll view the dead-tree book as quaint as we view a black and white TV set or a 78 RPM record. eBooks are here to stay.

Ultimately though, if you want a culprit to blame for the future demise of dead tree books, blame oil. The undeniable fact that petroleum supplies will continue to dwindle means the paper book is doomed. Every step of the process of book manufacture and transport relies on this non-renewable resource. As fuel costs continue to rise dramatically, which then drives up the cost of bringing physical media to market, thus lowering profit margins, shareholders of these publicly traded companies will demand the abandonment of physical media to meet the bottom line.

Check out the rest of the interview on Colin Barnes' Blog.