I don’t read many laments for the publishing industry. (I hear many silent laments, however.)
Longtime observers say, “Quit your whining.”
Insiders left standing soldier on.
Not entirely stunned and still somewhat sanguine is Ballantine editor Mark Tavani, who writes a guest post on the blog of one of his authors:
Obviously, the industry’s recent troubles did not begin with the faltering economy, or the credit crisis, or whatever catchphrase of economic desperation CNN is tossing around this week. In fact, I think the changes that have left the industry in its current condition began to take shape a number of years back, when large media corporations began acquiring publishing houses. Of course much good came of the presence of these corporations—and no author who ever took a big advance can tell you otherwise. There was more money to be spent on books, and there were more books being published. At the same time, the distribution side of the industry was changing, with the superstores of Barnes & Noble and Borders taking the lead in keeping readers happy. All of which—the changes on both the publishing side and the distribution side—greatly expanded the industry’s infrastructure.
Then, as it is wont to do, technology changed things. Ask yourself a question: How much actual reading does the average office worker do today as compared to what the average office worker did twenty years ago? Twenty years ago, there was the newspaper, letters, faxes…and that covers most of it. Today, who among us doesn’t spend at least a third of the day staring at a computer screen, pushing our eyeballs to the limits—not to mention the other reading we do, like the good old newspaper, and good old letters, and good old faxes. I can certainly understand that the idea of coming home at the end of a work day and reading seems less fun than it used to. But technology got in the way not only by exhausting our retinas but also by more directly distracting us from reading. T.V. has been around a long time (though Reality T.V. is a more recent sign of the coming Apocalypse), but get on a plane these days and compare the ratio of people reading books to people listening to iPods or watching movies on tiny screens. In my experience, the ratio is not favorable, and it’s getting worse every day. And that’s not to mention blogs, MySpace, Friendster, blah, blah, or blah.
One thought above all keeps me sane just now: books are a mere format.
And perhaps because, being retired from his last post as editorial director of Random House, he is untouched by the Sturm und Drang, Jason Epstein, currently the chairman of On Demand Books, sees a happier future for books:
Today as the Gutenberg era ends and the digital age begins the future is as unclear to us as the momentous future awaiting them and their successors had been to Gutenberg’s generation. But when one considers the revolutionary impact of Gutenberg’s primitive press five centuries ago, one must gasp at the far greater cultural, political and scientific implications of our digital technologies whose components are not futuristic dreams but exist here and now, requiring only small technological adjustments and the inevitable, if currently over-cautious, cooperation of publishers to bring their authors’ files fully into play, as they discover the greater profitably for themselves and their authors of low cost, worldwide digital distribution of expanded backlists to a radically decentralized marketplace.
Epstein’s entire speech is well worth reading.
