'Book Trailer' - oxygen for the book business

My favourite quote, above, popped up in my head when I was reading an article about an innovative advertisement for the hard-copy book business. Currently i-books is a growing business due to people’s lifestyles and beliefs. I-book lovers believe that it can make them green. Yes, it saves paper from forests and farmed trees but, more or less, reading i-books consumes electricity, which indirectly effects global warming anyway. I admit that I love reading hard-copy books and I don’t think I will be familiar with i-books in the next few years.
As fewer people are buying hard-copy books, this business is struggling to survive. An innovative advertisement for promoting books, which is becoming more popular, is a “book trailer”.
We are familiar with a “movie trailer”, a short advertisement showing highlights from a movie to attract people walking into theatres. Similarly, a book trailer is like a short video advertisement (15 to 30 seconds) for a book that employs similar techniques as movie trailers. It is a commercial spot in digital video format aired on cable channels, the Internet such as Google TV, and in movie theatres. One bestseller trailer costs as much as US$50,000 (Bt1.6 million), which involves a full complement of actors, computer-generated effects, costumes and sets.
This is a new way for publishers to market their new books, as fewer people are buying physical copies of books and book chains are closing down. Publishers have to excite people prior to the book’s publication by giving readers a chance to visualise what the characters look like and get a sense of the tone of the book.
Some book trailers have generated more than 200,000 hits on YouTube.
In Thailand, I have never seen any Thai book trailers on air. One of the reasons is the limited circulation. Even for bestsellers, it is not worth paying to produce a book trailer. However, for me, a book trailer is still an interesting channel to drive book sales.
You don’t have to make a fancy video. The authors just have to tell what inspired them when they were writing the book and give an idea of the tone of the book. Simple book trailers like this can help.
Human beings are struggling to live longer and so too businesses because behind the business scene are human beings. Book trailers make me think of two angles.
The first one is “surviving in the hard-copy book business by promot-ing through a new channel” like book trailers, which is also creating a new business for book trailer producers.
The second one is “surviving in the hard-copy book business by find-ing a new alternative material replacing paper from forests and farmed trees”. The second one is always tick-ling my imagination. With today’s technology, I wonder why we cannot find any alternative material for paper. We still use the same raw material as ancient Egyptians did 5,000 years ago!
There is a conspiracy theory saying that actually we already have a good technology for hydrogen cars but if we use it today, it will be a disaster for the whole transportation supply chain. Is this the same for the paper business?
Do you believe that i-books is a sustainable growth business? For me, I am still in doubt.
A bookworm like me is still in love with underlining impressive sentences/quotes and making handwritten notes wherever he wants in the book. I-books cannot satisfy me in that way. If you think I have no experience with i-books, you are wrong because I have an iPad. I still believe that there is always a big world for hard-copy books so I am happy seeing this business struggling to survive. Let us celebrate the struggle.

Jirat Sirichalermpong is customer and marketing analysis manager at Siam City Cement.