Industrial Revolution in reading - Creative Futurism

Mark Lefebvre, director of author relations for Kobo, one of the largest eBook readers and distributors, talks about the dramatic shift in reading, publishing, and bookselling with the advent of electronic books and eReaders like Kobo. It’s the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in reading.

Kevin: Welcome to the Creative Futurism podcast, bringing together the worlds of business, technology, and creativity. This is Kevin J. Anderson.

John: And this is John Best. You’ll look at the world and the future in a whole new way. Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Creative Futurism. My name is John Best. And we’re here to talk about cool stuff about the world, the future, business, weapons I guess in our past episodes. Pretty much anything’s game, right?

Kevin: uh...Creativity.

John: Creativity, the future, thus the name. And who do we got today? I know we’ve got something exciting going on here.

Kevin: Well most of you people I assume know how to read. And I’m a writer so I like people who read. But you never thought that the technology of reading a book was going to completely dramatically change the entire world that we live in. We’re always used to picking up a paperback and flipping the pages. But something in about 2007, when the first Kindle came out. And it sort of changed everything. And people started reading on electronic readers. And you might have heard of Kindles or iPads but they’re not the only game in town. And in fact, there are several. There’s a Barnes & Noble Nook and there is the Kobo. Which is by Rakuten, it’s a company mainly based in Canada. And the guest that we have today is the director of self-publishing and chief of author relations for Kobo. And in fact, I have a Kindle, I have an iPad. But the one that I actually read my books on is my Kobo. I just kind of like the interface and I enjoy it. Mark Leslie Lefebvre, whose been a friend of mine for quite a while. And he’s also a really interesting guy with a lot of up to date stuff. He helped develop the Kobo writing life self-publishing platform. And he’s an expert on e-book publishing, e-book industry in general as well as national publishing. He’s also the President of the Canadian Book Seller’s Association. And Mark, welcome to our podcast.

Mark: I’m delighted to be here Kevin. Thanks for having me.

Kevin: Yeah, you thought I was going to keep reading paragraphs of his bio.

John: I was expecting another half hour but it’s all good.

Kevin: We’ve got lots of stuff to talk about. I think our audience is sort of a general audience. People that have probably their own Kindle or Kobo, read e-books and things. But maybe from the outside they don’t quite understand the absolute Hurricane Katrina or watershed that’s happening in the publishing industry since e-books have appeared.

John: And by e-books you mean the e-book itself in terms of the actual book or do you mean the self-publishing format? Or both?

Kevin: Well that’s I think both of the projects. I can certainly talk about it but we’ve got Mark as a guest.

John: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to understand.

Kevin: Let’s turn Mark loose. Tell us about the changes in the industry. Because we authors who did all this thing felt like we had invested greatly in like Blockbuster video stores. And certainly it all vanished under us.

John: You mean like those guys at Borders? Because that didn’t go well for them either.

Mark: No, it didn’t go well. I mean so the funny thing about it, so when you think about digital reading and e-books it wasn’t really popular until maybe it was the Fall of 2006. The Sony PSR 500 came out that was the first really good e-book reader. The Kindle followed that the following year. And ironically,