The Digital World and Books

Just about fifteen years ago, the publishing sector was deep in thought about what would happen with the irruption of the digital book. There were those who predicted that the paper book had a very complicated future and that the e-book would displace it within a decade. There were also those who had many doubts about this happening. The current situation is that the e-book has arrived to stay, but it has not displaced, nor does it seem it will replace, the prominence of the paper book. In the Spanish State, data tells us that e-book revenue in the overall market is approximately 5%.

However, new technologies, networks, and the Internet have changed the publishing world. Now, publishers have to be aware of social networks to know what is being talked about, what is moving, or what trends exist to create products that satisfy readers' expectations. Networks have also created new popularities that have entered the world of books as authors. We see how influencers or YouTubers also end up publishing their works and achieve significant sales.

And networks also end up playing an important role in prescription. Traditionally, publishers were focused on getting interviews with our authors on radio, television, newspapers, and hoped to get good reviews of the works they published. This prescription was extremely important for the promotion of our books. Now we also have to look at networks and choose which prescribers we can find to get them to talk about our books.

Publishers have to be very much publishers, in the sense of taking great care of the works we publish

The book has been, since the invention of the printing press, the main tool for transmitting knowledge. With the advent of the Internet, this has changed, and on networks there is a lot, a lot of knowledge, so much so that it is often difficult to choose and know if we can trust the knowledge that reaches us. In this sense, it is important that publishers do our job well because the book, which I believe has a lot ofprestigeas a reliable tool for knowledge transmission, continue to have it. We publishers have to do a lot of publishing in the sense of taking great care of the works we publish. Today, an author, both of fiction and non-fiction, can self-publish on the Internet without any difficulty. I remember an article I read a few years ago where it was said that the difference between a work that has gone through a publisher and one that has not could be similar to that of food before or after passing through a cook. That is, if it is raw or cooked food. It made the simile in the sense that a raw work reaches us publishers so that, after cooking it, we can achieve a final result that is more palatable for the potential reader.

Another actor linked to the Internet that has also changed the book chain has been online sales and especially the appearance of Amazon, which has become an important sales channel and a threat to traditional bookstore sales. Here too, it has been necessary to react. And some have done so, so that there are distributors who deliver orders to bookstores within 24 hours. A service similar to Amazon's. Whether we like it or not, we live in the society of immediacy: when we want something, we want it now. Waiting does not have a good reputation. This is the main virtue of online sales portals. And the point of sale of bookstores needs to face this challenge. On the other hand, booksellers have in their favor their capacity for reliable recommendation, the direct relationship with the reader, whom they know, and whom they can advise on books that may interest them.

Finally, I would like to comment on a piece of information that has reached us about the reading habits of Generation Z, a completely digital native population. There is a significant trend among members of this generation, who, contrary to what might be expected, prefer reading physical books, for different reasons. It is a generation that spends many hours connected to screens, and reading on paper ends up representing a digital break and, furthermore, it moves away from the constant distractions of being connected in the digital world with messages constantly coming and going. Another issue is that, according to these studies, there is a certain tendency in this generation to value what is physical, the object, what can be touched, smelled. This last trend means that the prediction that the world of paper would have little future is far from being fulfilled. Long live, then, the paper book.