Super Thursday for books – so what’s the password?

It’s Super Thursday – the day when book publishers announce the titles they hope will ensure them a happy Christmas of high sales figures.

It’s also raised the inevitable debate about the future of paper books in the face of the electronic publishing boom. Waterstones managing director James Daunt argued this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme  that when we purchase e-books we do not own them, we simply take out a very long loan.

He’s right of course; the model of media consumption has shifted from ownership to access. In times past we would buy the record, the CD, the newspaper or the book. Now we simply pay for a password to access the media.

The win for the consumer is twofold: convenience and choice – after all, why lug the entire library around when you can simply carry the key to the library door?

The win for media owners is also twofold: they can accumulate valuable data on consumers’ habits, which in turn allows them to target advertising and marketing (consumers want to pay less for access than they do for ownership – media owners hope that ad revenues etc will fill the shortfall).

The second benefit for media owners is control; when we sign up to these access models we do so on terms over which we have little say. If, as Daunt suggests, we are moving from a world of owners to a world of borrowers, we are inevitably ceding power to the lenders.

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