Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Looks like the book journos are twiddling their thumbs till some new volumes hit their desks. We've had advice for would-be authors yesterday, they're debating why don't critics like SF over at The Guardian Unlimited prompting quite a lively comment thread if you're at a loose end.

Then there's 15 Trends to Watch in 2008 by Mike Shatzkin in Publishers Weekly.

Here are the essentials - go and read the fuller entries if you're curious.

1. The popularity of e-books will increase, with titles formatted for Amazon’s Kindle leading the way.
2. Sales of books in electronic form to public libraries will continue to grow
3. This will be the Year of the Author. Initiatives ... all reflect the growing understanding of what publishing “brands” really matter. Look for a self-publishing effort by a major author; it’s been too long—eight years—since Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet project.
4. Publishers will start acquiring specialized Web sites to get content for their books and to target niche audiences. By year-end, every major publisher will need to have an understanding of how to put a value on Web sites.
5. Christmas 2008 will be the first one in which sales of customized books, enabled by the Internet and print-on-demand, will become substantial.
6. XML will no longer be considered optional. Increasing sales of customized books will make publishers turn to their backlists for “repurposing.”
7. Apple, seeing the growth in use of Kindle and Sony Reader, will move to turn the iPhone and iPod into e-book readers.
8. B&N will continue to leverage the book trade’s most sophisticated supply chain to lengthen its lead over Borders and all other bricks-and-mortar retailers.
9. The lack of a competitive supply-chain infrastructure will continue to handicap Borders, hurting both sales and profits.
10. Although overall sales will remain paltry, increased activity by publishers selling direct to consumers from their Web sites, particularly digital downloads, will lead to “read and listen” bundles of e-books and digital audio and other pricing experiments.
11. Literary agents will begin to experience the same kind of consolidation that has hit other parts of the book business, as the shrinking of advances below the very top tier of authors and the growing need for agents to provide editing, marketing and increasingly detailed rights management make it hard for smaller agencies to bring in enough money to cover their overhead costs.
12. Publishers will rethink the traditional sales conference and begin to move toward a continuous publishing model.
13. Some publishers will begin producing a hardcover edition of every paperback and a large-print edition of every title.
14. Publishers will push harder to publicize books through the Internet channels as print and broadcast media continue to lose audience to the Web, in particular subject-specific sites.
15. In addition to being the Year of the Author, 2008 will be the Year of the Experiment. What’s an experiment? We’ll define it as a commercial effort undertaken without any real conviction as to how it will work out, and with the expectation that learning from failure is a more likely benefit than success.

Overall? I'm really not convinced...