Apple iPad: will it lead a reading revolution?
 Posted by  Stephen Page, CEO - Faber & Faber
 Friday 28 May 2010 -  guardian.co.uk  
The Apple iPad has finally hit the UK – but will it transform the way we read and write books, and will publishers be able to keep up?

The Apple iPad is now on sale in the UK, but what does it mean for readers, writers and publishers? Photograph: Paul Faith/PA

Here comes the Apple iPad, and it's making straight for the publishing industry. But are publishers diving for the dugout or leading a potential revolution in reading? The first part of Nicholas Mosley's 1990 Whitbread novel of the year Hopeful Monsters is entitled "We Know the Predicament", the second "So What do We Do?" Publishers might find Mosley's novel instructive right now, not least for its brilliant imagining of an evolutionary process completed within a single generation. All publishers are now experiencing accelerated change – what should we contribute to the shock of the (not so) new?

The iPad's arrival is unlikely in itself to create a revolution in ebook sales but, like Amazon's Kindle electronic reader before, it will accelerate the reading universe that's coming. That's great news for readers. It should also be good news for writers, as these are genuinely new ways for their work to be discovered, paid for and read. But what about publishers?

It's clear that publishers must move faster to establish our compelling and useful role in the modern life of reading. While acquiring new expertise, we must assert the best of our traditional strengths; providing capital (in the form of advance payments), offering editorial expertise, and creating a readership by designing, creating, storing, promoting and selling the works of writers. But that's not enough. Publishers also have to explain what value they are bringing to the relationship between writers and readers, a conversation that is made far more transparent through digital media and digital texts.

What do they need to learn? Two shifts seem particularly apparent. The recent history of publishing has been dominated by the creation of mass-market success via booksellers and traditional media, not through a direct relationship with the reader. But new technology has challenged this. Digital publishing and marketing do not work to the rhythm of the trade and publishers need to respond to this. Second, the certainties of price in the print world, despite heavy discounting in the UK, have underpinned confidence in the creation of value for books. In the digital age these notions of value are yet to be established in relation to written works. Sustaining value across print and digital is vital to writers – who rarely have the opportunity that musicians have to make money from performance – and therefore to readers, and publishers must balance these worlds fairly for reader and writer.

Thoughtful stuff from the Faber boss, read the rest here.