We have no idea what’s around the corner: part 5 of an interview with Tami Heim

This post continues our partnership with Ethix, a publication of the Center for Integrity in Business in the School of Business and Economics at Seattle Pacific University.  Ethix has conducted many inspiring interviews with business leaders, and we’re excited to feature them here from time to time!  Read the previous parts of our interview with Tami Heim, who has worked for both Thomas Nelson Publishers and Borders.

1. The business of books in a digital era
2. Ambushed by Amazon
3. Not very hopeful about the future of bookstores
4. Word-of-mouth reigns supreme

There is another threat to books. People seem to have shorter attention spans than they had before this age of the Internet. So the idea of reading a whole book is not as common as it once was. I have read about a book per week over the last 15 years or so. But I realize I’m not the norm.

No. You’re not the norm. And every bookstore owner would love you.

And people tend to read shorter and shorter segments. It’s characterized by what we often call McNews, like USA Today, where they have short articles, summaries almost. What is this trend doing to books?

We are definitely seeing shorter books as well. A trade book in the past may have had 60,000 words, but today people get by with 25,000. Further, a lot of books today are “pumped with air.” They made to be easy to read. They have more illustrations, shorter chapters, if they have chapters at all. I love the book Rework that came out from the 37 signals group. It’s a business book in this new model. It communicates ideas simply with lots of illustrations.

I admit I didn’t like the book Who Moved My Cheese, though I recognize the world loved it. I found it overly simplistic, and the ideas were not well developed, yet it sold millions.

Simple books often sell well. Ideas that can be easily digested tend to catch on fast. I believe that is why Seth Godin’s Tribe has done so well. It is about 150 pages, no chapters, and would take about an airplane flight to read. He did a brilliant job of laying out the impact of the Internet, social media influence, and why we need leaders to lead them.

We live in a world that is visually simulated. We live in sound bites and communicate our inner most feelings in 140 characters or less. People barely have the endurance to sit through a YouTube video that is longer than three minutes.

Pull out your crystal ball and tell me what the world of books looks like in 2025?

Here’s an interesting factoid that starts us down this path. There are predictions that between the growth of mobile devices and satellite placement every inch of the earth will be wired in 15 years. Now, to put that in perspective today, there are 7 billion people in the world and only about 1.9 billion are wired and online. That’s a lot of growth and the opportunity for more people to join the worldwide Internet conversation is immense.

People say that the earth is going to right-size itself between 8 billion and 9 billion people. The implications of that are enormous. My husband and I do missionary work in Haiti, where we go several times a year. These people have nothing but they do have a cell phone. And they will walk for hours to get clean water and charge their phones.

We are on the verge of an enormous tipping point regarding how we will communicate in the future. When you include mobile translation capabilities, even language barriers will be eliminated.

With all of this capability, we have no idea what’s around the corner. It’s exciting and hard to think through all the ramifications of being this globally connected. When you say, it’s a small world – it will be a small world. Think about when Osama Bin Laden was shot. There were 5,000 Twitter releases immediately after he was killed. News is breaking all the time because of the social networks. The news media can’t even figure it out and keep up. How many times have you watched the news and heard them say, “We want to thank everybody for sending us the pictures.” People in earthquakes are filming live. We can be all around the world at any time.

Stay tuned for future posts about Borders going bankrupt, technology eliminating jobs, and what keeps Heim awake at night. Kind permission is granted by Seattle Pacific University and the Institute for Business, Technology, and Ethics for the use of this material from Ethix magazine, where it first appeared January 2012.  Image: Pixabay.