An interview with Pascal Fouché, a noted French historian of the book, is translated and republished from the French review Esprit in Eurozine (www.eurozine.com).
“It’s true,” he says, “that the most important question is what will happen to the publishing process that links the writer to the reader. As I’ve already said, the paper book is not going to disappear overnight. Part of that chain will automatically be preserved in order to meet the need to distribute paper books. So, more than ever, we need bookshops to sell and libraries to lend. It would be tempting to tell ourselves that if everything were digital, we would no longer need intermediaries. Why would we need to go to a bookshop to buy an electronic book and why would we go to the library to consult electronic books? Since we are still at a stage where we don’t quite know how things are going to develop, publishers are, quite obviously, motivated to defend booksellers so that they can continue to sell their paper production. Even though, they think – but hesitate to say – that, in the long term, they might be able to do without them ...
“Publishers are ... all lining up in battle formation so that, as soon as the market comes into being, they will have a catalogue that is already well stocked. And once that has happened, what will be its market share by comparison with physical books? A recent government report on digital books put forward two hypotheses, each as peculiar as the other. One was that digital books would have no impact on sales of physical books. The other was that, between now and 2050, digital books would seize 50 per cent of the book market. The second of these hypotheses is based on the fact that, as we said earlier, in the US it is the big readers who buy most electronic books. Speculating as far ahead as 2050 on that basis is strange, to say the least. At the same time, there are Australian academics who are forecasting that, in five years’ time, one third of books will be read in digital form. In all these cases we are simply in the realms of conjecture.”
Read the whole interview here: