Dan Wagstaff, publicist extraordinaire over at the Raincoast blog, and I have been having an ongoing conversation about books and technology. In this series, Better Books, we’re looking at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.

Here’s what you missed:
Introduction
Part 1

New this week:

Question 2
There have been comparisons between the music industry and the book industry,- diminishing placement, payment for placement, digitalization of content — in your opinion is this an accurate assessment?

I say sure. But I also say compare apples to apples. The music industry has seen much more dramatic change in the last 100 years than book publishing. Cory Doctorow talks about the music wars and how each stage of technical advancement had some type of cannibalizing effect on the old format. (I’m paraphrasing and likely missing a lot of steps here. Old Doctorow article with some of these thoughts.)

He rightly points out that the music industry was mainly sheet-music publishers.
Hiring a live pianist gave way to the piano roll.

Quote: From Doctorow: The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands — the hundreds of thousands — the millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!

Composers and music publishers were in an uproar, and this repeats every 10 or 15 years (the uproar part, but also the technology shifts).

– Records, 8-track, tape, cd, mp3
– Live music, sheet music, piano roll, radio, iTunes

The motion picture industry is a better comparison to the music industry: vaudeville theatre to theatre house to home movie to BitTorrent.

With books — we have books. I know there are ebooks, there are digital downloads. But for whatever reason we are still cutting down trees, making paper and buying bound formats instead of digital books.

So can we compare the music industry to the book publishing industry. Sure, but there are complications and historical parallels and divergences. We should be careful about only comparing the apple bits to the apple bits. (Subtle plug for Mac and bits and bytes.)

I think Dan agrees with me. I should have let him go first.

Quote: The similarities between the music industry and the book industry tend to be overstated. Sure, there are some superficial similarities – they are both creative industries right? But I’m sure part of the reason this has become a popular notion is that HMV owns Waterstones bookstores in the UK. Admittedly HMV often behave as if there is no difference between music and books, but it’s not exactly working out for them and in general I kind of think it is a slightly sloppy comparison.

Dan’s British. He says things like sloppy and rubbish.

There are far smarter people who’ve compared music and books. I’m going to go read them and we’ll be back next week with more about download formats for books. I’ll make slightly sloppy references to other smart people and Dan will say smart things. You’ll love it. Please come back.

Happy BC Book and Magazine Week.