Page 2.
Fatal Revolution
To get a
sense of how market trends are affecting publishing, it’s important to
understand how those trends break from, but also mirror, those of the
past. In the 1700s, when booksellers came to replace the aristocracy as
the primary patrons of the literary arts in England, writers such as
Henry Fielding and the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith decried the
phenomenon as a “fatal revolution.”
Fielding wrote a
dramatic satire on the subject called
The Author’s Farce,
and Goldsmith railed ceaselessly against book merchants even as he
profited by them. To wit: “You cannot but be sensible, gentlemen, that a
reformation in literature was never more necessary than at the present
juncture, when wit is sold by the yard, and a journeyman-author paid
like a journeyman-tailor.” Goldsmith argued that, while booksellers
commissioned a greater number of works than did the aristocrats, the
quality of writing was deeply compromised by the process of
commercialization; literature was suffering a spiritual death as a
result.
Today’s fatal
revolution takes the opposite form. Publishers are concerned that market
forces will hurt their ability to sell carefully edited and packaged
material, or compel them to relinquish editorial control to
readers—essentially outsourcing their jobs to the masses. According to
Sara Nelson of
Publishers Weekly,
giving up
control will be a hard sell. “There’s a lot of snobbery in the book
business,” she said. “Book publishers are used to being the people who
decide what others get to read. That’s breaking down against their
will.”
Recent data shows
just how resistant publishers are to today’s trends. While the world of
online content is expanding (more content coming from more people all
the time), the world of published books is contracting. Book publishers
are finding it harder to back first-time authors, authors who aren’t
already famous, or even established writers who aren’t selling. In June
2007, U.S. publishers reported a 3% increase in the number of titles
released for 2006, but that followed double-digit declines in titles
released during 2004 and 2005. Extrapolate those numbers forward and you
arrive at a future where the books that are brought to print serve not
to bring new authors and ideas to the public but to commemorate the
already famous in book form.
Seth Godin,
marketing expert and author of
Survival Is Not
Enough
and Free
Prize Inside,
contends that that
future is already here. “The book is a souvenir,” he excitedly told his
Monday morning audience. “Once you realize you’re in the souvenir
business, you’ll play by different rules.”
To
Douglas Rushkoff,
best-selling author of
Media Virus
and
Innovation
from the
Inside Out,
the key to book
publishing in the future is recognizing that readers are after more than
information. They’re seeking an intellectual connection with an author
and a community experience organized around an idea. Publishers have to
look at what is still scarce, says Rushkoff. “While the book isn’t
scarce, I’m scarce. I can only be in so many places. So there are a lot
of different experiences that attend the book that [readers] should be
participating in, to think about the book as a way to promote a set of
ideas. How to work with those ideas is limited.”
Those attendant
experiences can include lectures, classes, even parties. The more
personal the experience, the more people are willing to pay for it. The
book party is hardly a new invention. The trick, said Rushkoff, is to
think of the books as marketing materials for the event and the author,
not the event as marketing for the book. “Every time I do a big talk, I
have to arm wrestle the publisher to help me sell a thousand, five
thousand books to the people who want them… They want them at a discount
because they want 5,000 copies. In reality, if I’m going to get $5,000
on a talk, my publisher should get half of that money and should help me
administrate the talk and get books out.”
Frank Daniels, COO of Ingram’s
digital group, believes U.S. publishers have a bright future, but only
if they think of themselves as purveyors of information packages rather
than printers.
“Right now, when you
say ‘book’ you’re thinking of 300 pages bound in something, delivered,
and consumed in one period of time,” said Daniels. “What is the new
metaphor for the book? Is it something that exists more like a TV show?
That’s episodic? That’s consumed in one sitting, or later? Or is it
something more like a Web site and a Web environment? You both own it
and sub scribe to it? As we create a platform where editors can be
creative in their thinking process, then we will truly begin to break
the metaphor for the book and have an experience for our consumers that
they will consume and continue to consume.”
According to
Daniels, textbooks (hardly the most glamorous fiefdom in the book
kingdom) actually represent the best opportunity to bring a wide variety
of talents—audio creation, film, even acting—to bear on the job of
publishing, leading to a variety of possible monetary transactions that
can occur around a single product or “book.”
“The beauty about
the Kindle,” Daniels said of Amazon’s newest handheld e-reader, “isn’t
that the device is great. The device is terrible. But the buying
experience is wonderful.… We want to make it so that it’s as easy to do
digital stuff as it is to buy a book. As we get that done, publishers
will say, ‘Yes. There is a market there. I now want to add some video
and audio and create a truly different metaphor.’”
O’Reilly agrees that
transcending the traditional concept of the book will be essential for
publishers in the decades ahead. “A lot of people think of publishing as
printing books on paper, paper between covers, those objects in
bookstores,” he said. “I always thought that publishing was about, first
of all, understanding what matters, figuring out how to gather
information, and then gathering readers who that information matters to.
There’s a kind of curation process. What the Internet has done is bring
us new methods of curation,” meaning, presumably, finding publishable
material and refining it. “A lot of publishers are fighting those models
instead of saying ‘This is new stuff that helps us do what we do
better.’”
The first step for
publishers, according to O’Reilly, is to realize that the information
coming from readers is as valuable as the information they give to
readers in book form. The next step is to involve the reader in the
publishing process.
“A really great
example,” he said, “is a session here from a company called Logos Bible
Software. Who would think of these guys as doing really cool stuff? They
basically publish electronic editions of really obscure religious texts
or scholarly texts that are used by people in religion. Would you like
your
Liddell and
Scott’s
Greek–English Lexicon
online? Guess how
they do it? They basically have community pricing software where they
have people vote on whether or not they would buy the book.… They’re
actually harnessing the community to set prices and to tell them which
products to publish. That’s cutting edge.”
Stephen Abram, a
past president of the Canadian Library Association, took the argument a
step further.
Publishers, he said,
need to “stop telling and start listening, to start working from the
reader’s, the user ’s, the experiencer ’s contact in. Then they can
start creating the products that actually match the behaviors of their
user base. In many markets, the traditional publishing formats are
misaligned with what needs to happen.”
The reading of
static text is a poor substitute for a visceral experience and always
has been, said Abram. Plain text sufficed because there was no
alternative, no superior way to convey complex data. That’s changed.
Abram argued that it’s up to publishers to pick among the available
media tools—including video clips, audio files, even virtual reality—and
pull them together into a package that facilitates learning, not just
reading.
“Do you want your
cardiac surgeon to walk into your room before he does your surgery and
say, ‘I read the article last night’? No, you want him to have had a
thousand experiences putting his hand in someone’s chest and know what
it feels like. It should be just like an experience a car mechanic has
where he can put his hand on the hood of your car and say it’s the
manifold because he’s seen it, heard it, smelled it a thousand times.”
The future of the
book as conjured by O’Reilly, Abram, and Daniels is one where the
end-users (what used to be called “readers”) give specifications to an
editor for the product they want—a combination of movie clips,
animations, software applications, possibly even games functioning in a
multifaceted learning product accessible across platforms.
The question becomes, who does the writing?
pages
1, 2, 3.