And, yes, only two or three: as the hard economics of the Internet makes clear, the Internet is not for wusses. It’s an undemocratic medium with a small number of companies lording it over the thousands of champions of the Long Tail. A safe prediction is that the multitude of book-related sites will be winnowed down to a small number in time. But what will those sites be and what will characterize a successful book-oriented service in the coming years?

The successful sites of the future will be those that either learn how to sell things or those that provide marketing support to those that sell things. There may be 10,000 authors of science fiction, but there will be only two or three sites that service the science fiction community. If we get a handle on where people go now to buy things and where they go to learn about things (aka discovery), we might be able to point our rocket ship into the future and get a picture of that emerging planet.

Hence the survey. We determined to ask just a few questions, but to keep a steady focus on where people buy things and where people go to learn about new things.

The results are in and they are intriguing; in some respects they are counterintuitive. Before I say another word, though, I have to erect a bulwark of caveats and qualifications. The survey was filled out by approximately 500 people, hardly enough to be considered to be representative of the book-buying population. And even if ten times that amount had responded, even if a thousand times the number, the respondents would not necessarily be representative of the world of book buyers. Add to this the skewing factor that this was an online survey (believe it or not, some people don’t live online), and you rightly ask yourself, What is this survey representative of, exactly?

The direct sales channel opportunity

The survey is thus not definitive or representative; what it is is suggestive. It suggests things that publishers can and should be thinking about. When a large portion of the respondents (11%) say that they bought books directly from a publisher, this should give pause to the many publishers who insist that you can’t sell books on a direct basis. And don’t let the unreliability of the 11% figure throw you.

Suppose the number is a tenth of that, suppose 1% of all books sold are purchased directly from the publisher, that’s 1% of around $35 billion (the total value of books at retail in the U.S.; trade books are around half of the total) or $350 million. And as a friend of mine likes to say, that ain’t chopped liver. So this survey suggests to publishers that they should be looking into selling books directly to consumers if they are not doing so already.

Discovery a bigger problem than switch from print to digital

What I was most curious about was whether or not there would be a disconnect between where people discover books and where they ultimately buy them. And yes, there is a disconnect. The respondents said they discovered books in both physical bookstores and in online bookstores, with the online venue being more important (39% as opposed to 32%), but they were twice as likely to purchase the books online.

This suggests to me that the phenomenon of “showrooming”–where a prospective consumer discovers something in a bricks-and-mortar store, but then buys it online–is even more prevalent than previously thought, at least by me. It also points to the great problem that the trade book sector now faces, that with the decline in the number of physical bookstores, books may play a smaller role in people’s lives, as the online venues have not yet replaced the lost discovery capability of your corner bookshop.

Let’s be careful to describe this problem properly: the challenge to traditional publishers is not the switch from print to digital books but the loss of the physical retail discovery channels, which online bookselling, whether of print or ebooks, makes possible.

Less surprising to me was the fact that 22% of the respondents said that they had learned about a book from a print publication. Print endures for many, many reasons. Partly this is because of the truism of the book business: older people buy more books, and people buy more books as they get older. My household still subscribes to three print publications, all of which are great forums for books: The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Those names say something to you, as they point to the cultural centrality of New York and the place the book business plays in that city. But the online venues are cutting into the hegemony of New York and print: online publications were cited by 27% of respondents, and social media sites such as Goodreads and LibraryThing accounted for another 14%. This suggests to me that San Francisco, with its proximity to Silicon Valley, may evolve into a new book center, rivalling New York, as digital media continues to erode the legacy print base.

Going digital, but not exclusively

The really interesting set of responses came to our question about format: Did you buy ebooks, print, or both? Print won this won at 40%, ebooks coming in at 26%. This is more evidence that the strongest trend is to buy online, not to read books in digital form. But the hybrid number–37% of respondents said that they purchased both print book and ebooks–really tells us a lot about the market. It’s not binary. While the share of ebooks is growing, print continues to play a large role in this industry, and it would play even a bigger one if anyone could figure out how to make money operating a physical bookstore.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that print books are part of an ecosystem, and the sale of print is threatened more by changes to the “habitat” than by consumer preferences for ebooks. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that the demand for print will persist long after any retailer can provide print books at a profit, which will in turn lessen demand for books in any format.

Goodreads, LibraryThing, et al, filled the void

Throughout this exercise I have been musing on what I regard as The Great Lost Opportunity of the Book Business. What would have happened if The New York Times Book Review (which, by the way, has nothing to do whatsoever with The New York Review of Books, which was founded when The New York Times was shut down by a labor strike) had a vigorous plan to dominate the online conversation about books as it historically had done in the print world? It would have been a tough brand to beat. I admire Goodreads, LibraryThing, and the many new services, but they would all have had a hard time getting started if the Times’s book people had more imagination.

I am writing this after just having finished reading the print version of The New York Times Book Review, as I have every Sunday for 40 years. I live online, but that one publication continues to exercise a hold over me. But it’s now a thin document, earnest but increasingly marginalized. How sad that we won’t have it with us as our books migrate to the digital future. It coulda been a contender.

What caught me by surprise after we moved is that I felt cut off from the book business. I no longer could find the new releases stacked in front of Bookshop SC, nor was I able to view the entire output of authors like Haruki Murakami or Italo Calvino in one place (Logos). I began to buy fewer books. That’s when I realized that I had not fully explored online book communities such as GoodReads very much because I had the luxury of great physical bookstores in California. Now that I am once again a New Yawker, however, I need to find new ways to find books.

This got me thinking about how people actually learn about the books that they ultimately purchased. This is a matter of great interest to publishers, of course, as they want to point their marketing dollars in the right direction. Previously, I was mostly discovering new books in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore–even when, I am ashamed to admit, I often bought the books as ebooks online. But now I am casting my net wider. I am reading The New York Times Book Review with greater interest, but I am also following book publishers on Twitter and may even reactivate my GoodReads account. There is a discovery gap to be filled in my life. How do people fill it in theirs as the number of local bookstores go into secular decline?

Hence this survey. The key stipulation of this survey is that it asks you to focus on books that you actually purchased for yourself. Gift books don’t count. Where did you first hear about these books? Which are the media organizations that publishers should be paying attention to? Publishers have a big stake in the success of any source of discovery. Are they smarter to support The New Yorker or Facebook?

We are living at a time of enormous innovation in all aspects of publishing. Well, almost all: the primacy of the distinctive author has not changed at all. But everywhere else–how we produce books, where we buy them, how we share them (if we can)–innovation and disruption are the norm. Not all of the new ventures in the book business will survive, but it is far too early to be predicting a shakeout. Some of the new engines of discovery will get out ahead of the others. Publishers will support them with advertising, which will push them even further ahead. At some point the basic rule of all media businesses will prevail: consolidation into a small number of well-trafficked sites and services.

In filling out this survey, you are casting a vote for how you will be reading years from now and you are making an investment in the media platform that will remain central to your life. That is, central to your life if you are among the bookish. And if you are not? God have mercy.

So please take a minute or two to share your discovery techniques and habits. I’ll compile the results and share them along with a summary of my findings in a follow-up TOC article.

TOC NY 2013— The publishing industry will gather at the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City, February 12-14, to explore the forces and solutions that are transforming publishing.Save 15% on registration with the code COMM15

Digital media do not necessarily lead to new markets, and in some situations, digital media may actually serve to shrink markets. For consumer or trade publishing in the developed world, finding a new market can be challenging. Our lives are full, our calendars are snug, and our attention is spread over a seemingly infinite number of media choices, ranging from old-fashioned books to social networks, music, movies, museums, and countless other things. To find a new market here requires opening up a crack in a broad, seamless facade.

Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with IMs and music and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That’s a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive.

This point was brought to mind by a mailgroup post by O’Reilly’s Andrew Savikas, who commented that he was stuck for an hour in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out his iPhone and check out mail, alerts, and Web sites. But he could have been reading, if publishers had provided formal material (formal here means “the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for”) to slip between the interstices of Andrew’s day.

An hour is a big crack in the day; to become a true interstitial publisher, you would have to aim smaller. How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing? Daydreams don’t count — because ultimately the aim of every media business is to colonize your mind’s every moment. (Dust off that old copy of the science fiction classic “The Space Merchants” by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth for a satiric vision of imperial marketing.) If you had something to read that you could sip in draughts of five minutes at a time or perhaps 10, you would participate in the growth of the new market for interstitial publishing. And this is genuine growth, as at this moment the total sales in the interstices is zero or close to it. The goal is to go from zero to 60 in five minutes.

For interstitial publishing to work, you need a handy device (PDA, iPhone, or something like that), which you carry with you all the time so that you can take advantage of the cracks in the day. For this kind of thing, a Kindle or any dedicated ebook reader won’t work, as it is more of an effort to pull such a device out of your bag as you wait in line in the supermarket. So if it’s growth you want (as distinct from market share), forget the Kindle. A smart phone is a different matter, however: How many times do you see someone yank a Blackberry from a belt clip and glance at incoming email? Instead of email, that could be the twenty-third chapter of the new micronovel by William Adama. The proper device is critical, and the software that runs on it must have sophisticated bookmarking capabilities.

You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting “Moby-Dick” for interstitial publishing simply won’t do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it’s entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in. Sorry, Tolstoy and Grisham, even William Gibson, but we need a new breed of writer, who is born digital, who is born in the interstices.

Often interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the “real thing,” a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what McLuhan meant by “understanding media”: it’s not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology.

Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology (“brief bursts about the new administration”; “101 short poems about transistors and current”) will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.

Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end–and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.

For “five-minute fiction” to catch on, we will need creative people who probe the nature of the interstitial medium. It’s easy to forget (or never to have known) that the linear narrative as we think of it today was in fact invented once upon a time when writers were faced with books that were inexpensively manufactured and distributed to wide audiences for the first time. Publishers will need to seek out writers who comprehend the new medium, who can engage a reader for fie minutes, who can make the many pieces of the work congeal in the reader’s mind. These writers will study readers, PDAs or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin. In all of this publishers will see growth.

The aim of digital media should not be (or should not only be) to substitute a screen for a printed page but to reinvent the text on the screen and, in so doing, to bring new readers into the marketplace.

Related Stories:

• New York Times: “Introducing the Twiller”
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Q&A with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit
• Q&A with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
• Daddy, Where’s Your Phone?
• Bezos Hopes for Longer Attention Spans
• Wired: “Snack Attack!”