We scoff at prophecies of Mayans
And offer toasts to healthy buy-ins.
So what if 2012 draws nigh?
Prognostications? Mike’s our guy.
Seers of yore are mere ersatz kin
Compared to clairvoyant Mike Shatzkin.
We hope his crystal ball discloses
A featherbed of ruby roses.
Richard Curtis

Mike Shatzkin’s name was a challenge to find a rhyme for, but challenging imagination is what Shatzkin, the publishing industry’s oracle in residence, is all about. He’s done it again in a year-end blog posted on his Shatzkin Files website.

“It is customary,” he writes, “for those of us who do crystal-ball gazing to make some calls about the year ahead at around the time the celebrants head for Times Square. I am not a man to flout custom.” Shatzkin then offers us a baker’s dozen of predictions for the coming year. Here’s an abstract. For the fully fleshed out version click here. You might want to take a tranquilizer first. The unprepared or unaware tend to manifest symptoms of airsickness.

• At least one major book will have several different enhanced ebook editions.
• The growing incidence of bookstore-less cities will provoke the mass merchants to explore a greatly increased title selection inside their stores as a magnet to attract disenfranchised bookstore customers.
• Ebooks that are too short to be print books will become a real factor in ebook sales, opening up new opportunities for publishers but even more for authors.
• Driven by new entrants in the field, self-publishing, and unbundled aggregations of print books, the gap between the items listed in “Books in Print” and the items that should be listed in a directory of “Ebooks Available” will continue to grow.
• The rearrangement of the big publishers’ IP portfolios will begin in 2010 as they emphasize what they do best: deliver narrative-writing and children’s books to multiple outlets in large quantities.
• By the end of 2010, ebook sales will routinely constitute at least 20% of the units moved for midlist and the lower tier of bestsellers and at least 10% of the units for really big bestsellers.
• By the end of 2010, the experiment with “windowing” ebooks — withholding them from release when the hardcover comes out — will end as increasing evidence persuades publishers and agents that ebook sales (at any price) spur print book sales (at any price), not cannibalize or discourage them and, furthermore, that this withholding effort does nothing to restrain Amazon’s proclivity for discounting.
• Managing territorial rights for ebooks will be a growing problem the industry will have to deal with.
• Some authors who have developed huge followings on Facebook and Twitter and their own blogs start to demonstrate that they can have a serious positive impact on the books of other authors they favor.
• With the arrival of Google Editions in the first or second quarter of 2010, there will be multiple channels to the ebook market through a variety of players: Google, Amazon, Apple, Baker & Taylor’s Blio, Kobo (formerly Indigo), and Sony will not be alone!
• Because there are so many players fighting for a foothold in ebooks, discounting them deeply will be the “new normal.”
• The merchandising challenge for ebooks will ultimately be met web page by web page over the entire Internet. This future paradigm will be tipped in 2010 when we start to see ebook stores on more and more non-book web sites, each trying to deliver some sort of value-add with curation or follow-on products.
• The big meme coming out of 2010 will be “what is a book?”) Publishers will increasingly be releasing productions that contain video, audio, animation, slide shows, and interactive game elements. Movie, TV, and game producers will see an alternate marketing and revenue channel available through “ebookifying” content they have and moving it through book channels like a “tie-in.” Where one stops and the other begins will become increasingly difficult to see (and increasingly irrelevant).

Richard Curtis
Poem excerpt from “The Year of the Tweet” by Richard Curtis,(c) Richard Curtis reprinted from Publishers Weekly, December 21 2009 Reed Elsevier Magazines.