Interview With An E-Book Pioneer & One Of Publishing’s Leading Literary Agents, Richard Curtis, On His New Book About The Digital Book Revolution

  

1. Digital Inc. your new book, is considered one of the most important chronicles of 21^st century publishing. As you look back, what role do you claim in the e-book revolution? While everyone else was dedicated to developing the technology, I focused on content, inspired by Bill Gates’s famous dictum “Content is King.” I cleared digital rights to numerous out of print books and warehoused them in anticipation of the coming e-book revolution. Though we lost money for several years, I kept saying to myself “They’re going to need books.” I had them, lots and lots of them, and they were the kinds of books that early adopters were hungry for: science fiction, thrillers, horror, romance. When the Kindle, Nook and iPod were at last released (2007-2010), everyone clamored for our content, and my e-book company, E-Reads, prospered.

 

2. You were one of the first commercial e-book publishers who launched a business seven years before e-readers like kindle were invented. You are seen as an e-book pioneer. What do you say in your new book, Digital, Inc., about the inside story of how the book industry was transformed?  Science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The last decades of the 20^th century produced so many technological miracles, you couldn’t be sure if they were science or magic: The Internet, microprocessing, circuit integration and miniaturization, electromatic ink, wireless communication, HTML, personal websites, word processing programs, desktop publishing and many more breakthroughs set the stage for a new way to read books.  I had been tracking these developments since 1985, and when all of them came together at last in 1998, I realized the time had come for me to launch what turned out to be one of the very first commercial e-book publishers in the world.

 

3. What inspired you to write it now? Two things motivated me to write Digital Inc. In the more than 20 years since the paradigm shifted, no one had satisfactorily explained how the book industry transformed from a mechanical, analog operation to a virtual, digital one. People took for granted that one day they were reading paper books and the next they were scanning e-books.  I wanted to demonstrate that evolution step by step.  How had digitization transformed writers?  How had it transformed readers? The other motivation was the advent of AI.  Though it is being promoted as revolutionary, I recognized numerous similarities to the way the digital revolution was promoted, and I wanted readers to keep things in perspective. In many ways, AI is old wine in new bottles.

 

4. You were ahead of Jeff Bezos in recognizing the coming technological earthquake and began converting printed books into digital ones. Why were you so quick to embrace a paradigm shift in publishing? I saw it all in a single light-bulb moment.  One day in 1985 as I was listening to music on a Walkman music player, I had this fantasy of inserting a book cartridge into a device and reading it on the screen. Obviously, a primitive concept, but I nevertheless foresaw that something like it could upend everything we take for granted about the acts of writing and reading books.  But there was no paradigm shift to embrace until until the Kindle was released in 2007, and then the whole world embraced it.  And yes, I humbly confirm I was ahead of Jeff Bezos. But once he recognized it was happening he threw all of his mighty resources into developing his e-book reader.  Not only did he have the money, he had the content – millions and millions of books. I had a thousand, but it was enough.

 

5. A few decades ago, clinging to a 500-year tradition of books printed on paper, the publishing industry was suddenly confronted by digital upheaval. E-books, print-on-demand, piracy, desktop printing, online commerce and dozens of other bewildering challenges transformed a cottage industry into a high-tech enterprise almost overnight. What were those colossal disruptions like?  The disruptions manifested themselves in many ways. The first was failure of imagination. The print way of life was so deeply embedded in the hearts and souls of publishing people that they could not imagine an alternative, no matter how thoroughly it was explained to them and how efficient, elegant and profitable digital technology promised to be.  Another was a stubborn clinging to tradition. “The old ways are the best ways” was a phrase I heard often.  Still another was arrogant snobbery.  “E-books aren’t real books. The only book is a bound volume printed in ink on paper and sold in a bookshop.” Many authors and agents thought of e-books as a form of slumming and refused to tarnish their dignity with electronic editions of their masterpieces.

 

6. What happened in the book industry was a microcosm of a vast paradigm shift impacting every business large and small in the new century. Who were the winners and losers in the book world? When you boil down (as I did) publishing to its essence, it’s simply a writer, a reader, and a delivery system.  The old delivery system for books was impossibly complex – destruction of millions of trees, manufacture of bound paper volumes, delivery by fossil fuel vehicles to brick-and-mortar stores. Digital technology wiped that system clean and replaced it with simple, instant, frictionless delivery of content by means of a computer (my publishing company was the server under my desk). Publishers that couldn’t grasp the change went out of business, but in time, every commercial enterprise recognized they must employ digital delivery of their products or they too would die. And die they did, as witness all the retail shops shuttered when shoppers chose to buy their products online.

 

7. Digital technology disintermediated every obstacle between producer and consumer. That is why travel agencies, employment agencies and stock brokers, to name just a few, were hammered or driven out of business altogether. Above all, brick and mortar retail stores were shoved aside in favor of direct relationships between manufacturers and customers.  Did the book industry come through this revolution better or worse than other industries and businesses? Because of economic forces, the book industry had been shrinking long before the digital revolution. By the time e-books arrived, the number of viable trade book publishers had dwindled from hundreds to half a dozen, with another handful of underfinanced presses struggling to stay alive. Brick and mortar bookstores were sustained by giant chains like Barnes & Noble.  The advent of digital delivery of books radically changed the game. Authors realized they could deliver their books directly – that is, via the simple and transparent Amazon KDP delivery system.  Suddenly there was a viable alternative to the Big Six trade publisher titans and the chain bookstores. Now we had independent (indie) authors and publishers like my own company, E-Reads.

 

8. E-book sales growth has stalled. Printed books still account for the majority of publishing revenues, and now audio books are the second most common form of book consumption. Why do you think that is so? The e-book phenomenon began to peak around 2013. A whole generation that grew up reading printed books with their parents or at the library, matured, and their preference for print carried over to adult reading. Older readers who had originally embraced e-books revisited the many pleasures and benefits of printed books. Today, e-books have taken their place as an option rather than a necessity, good for some kinds of reading but not the device of choice for settling in with an immersive story. Audiobooks use has soared as publishers recognized that commuters and travelers – and of course drivers – prefer to listen to books rather than read them.

 

9. You served as the first president of the Independent Literary Agents Association and subsequently as president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives. How have literary agents fared in a digital revolution that saw an enormous explosion in the number of books published, who did the publishing, an alteration in a book’s format, and changes in who sells the books? Unfortunately, even with me goading them to recognize that the ground was violently shifting beneath their feet, most literary agents – out of fear, indolence, arrogance or denial - were fatally slow to get with the program. As early as 1993 I published articles in the agents’ newsletter and Publishers Weekly urging fellow agents to aggressively get the rights back to their clients’ out of print books, so they would have content ready for the e-book revolution when it hit. To no avail. In the absence of strong resistance by the agents, publishers seized the high ground, forcing authors and agents to accept a 25% cut of e-book income instead of the 50% I had advocated.

 

10. Richard, you are a leading New York literary agent, a publishing authority, an e-book pioneer, and an authors’ advocate. What impact do you see AI having on the writing, editing, researching, and publishing of books? AI has already had a tremendous impact on authors and publishers, almost all of it negative. It started with the blatant and unlawful “scraping” of copyrighted books in order to train AI systems to function effectively. Authors have discovered AI’s astounding capability to produce a novel in moments, but unfortunately, some publishers have been duped into believing that AI-authored books were created by humans. What concerns me most of all is that a generation of students who think nothing of cheating on their term papers and theses are entering the work force. Some of them will become authors. The harm to literature will be incalculable.

 

11. What trends are you seeing in the book publishing world today? Which ones concern or even alarm you?  The biggest threat by far is AI, not just for the damage it does to the publishing process but for its ruin of authorial integrity. Consider this analogy: You can gaze for hours at a painting by Rembrandt, but as soon as you are told it’s fake you will scarcely glance at it. By the same token, if you believe a book has been written by an artificial source, you will be completely disinclined to read it or anything else by that author. I am also gravely concerned about censorship.  Our government’s violations of first amendment rights is distressing enough, but it is also causing authors to self-censor, inhibiting them from writing truthfully out of fear they will offend their government or politically correct interest groups.

 

About The Author: Richard Curtis is a leading New York literary agent who has brought over 10,000 books to publication. He is a leading publishing authority, an e-book pioneer, and an authors’ advocate. He was the first president of the Independent Literary Agents Association and subsequently president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives. Publishers Weekly called him “the poet laureate of book publishing” https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96670-four-decades-of-book-publishing-history-in-poetry.html.. Curtis’s fascination with emerging media and technology led to his founding one of the first commercial e-book publishers – seven years prior to the introduction of the Kindle. He developed e-book business and royalty accounting models that are still used today. His popular blog, Publishing in The Twenty-First Century, describing the wonders and challenges of the digital paradigm, was followed by professionals and lay audiences. Curtis is also the author of dozens of works of fiction and nonfiction. For more information, please consult: https://richard-curtis.com/media/

 

 

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About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 5,850,000 page views. With 5,600+ posts over the past 14 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs  by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum