What’s going on?
Do we need to brace for worse?
Are ebooks taking over the world?
Of course something’s happening. We’ve been rabbiting on about the future of the book for most of this century. The discussion habitually mixes up the book as physical object, and the book as the content of that object, but the survival of the second doesn’t depend on the survival of the first.
The most positive angle I’ve heard on the book as container was offered by the keynote speaker at this month’s Interquest conference in New York City. Bob Young, founder of Lulu and Red Hat, asked us to think of the printed book as just another platform for the content. It’s a platform that has its advantages and its drawbacks, just like any other one. Its big advantage is its archivability. I have several books bought by my father about 80 years ago, and, unsurprisingly, I can still access their content. Do you really expect to be able to read the book you just downloaded to your Kindle or iPhone on that device in 2090? The one platform is not better than any other: it’s just different.
A certain amount of the conversation within our industry is not so much about the survival of the book, as about the survival of our jobs making those books. To put it mildly, book manufacturing controller is not a job category that is expanding. The economics of the business in the future are of course hard to predict, but it is probably unlikely that expenditures on design, copyediting, proofreading, composition etc. are going to increase. People in these jobs don’t have to panic, but they should probably consider the probability that they are going to need to make a career change at some point in their working lives (unless like me they have already put in over four decades in the game). Currently ebooks sell for less than printed books (usually) but of course they cost less to “make” though not to create. Publishers’ revenues are thus liable to decrease, as will their manufacturing and warehousing costs. No doubt ways will be found to shrink plant costs further. I expect people will figure out how to make a decent living off publishing electronic books. But it will be very different. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that because you do what you do very well, that means what you do is of vital importance. Everybody has to be ready to adapt to new conditions, and new conditions are hurtling towards us. Notice that the printers you deal with are getting into digital printing as fast as they can. I suspect offset is in roughly the same position today as letterpress was when I started in publishing — doomed but still widespread. One of the advantages of digital print technology is the ability to print very short runs, even down to ones and twos, all potentially automatically reordered not by a human, but by the computer.
This link from Shelf Awareness, April 29th, 2011 talks about changes in the way we read ebooks as against printed books. I do notice that I read The Economist differently on my iPod Touch than I do in the hard copy edition. The short items in “The World This Week” section look much more inviting on the iPod, where they more than fill the screen. On the printed page they tend to me to look too insubstantial to bother with. I am also less likely to skip when reading on the iPod, where the temptation to look at the last paragraph and leave it at that just isn’t there on the screen. I read books both on the iPod Touch and in hard copy, often switching from one to the other as I go. I find neither mode “better”. If the book’s good in the printed version, it also seems to be good in the electronic version.
Once upon a time publishing was a pretty low-key literary pursuit. Most people went into publishing for idealistic reasons, because they wanted to promote literature, not because they wanted to get rich. There have always been more aggressive, profit-motivated publishers, but in general the character of the business was less about money than about culture. It was a narrow-margin business, and people who really wanted to make money would be likely to have looked elsewhere. When I started working in publishing, it was a labor-intensive business. Although companies were comparatively small and book prices were low, most companies did fine. There was, it’s true, a post-war boom in publishing, and it often seemed that anything could be sold to libraries. Efficiencies didn’t seem important: as long as you didn’t actually lose money you could keep on publishing important books, and what more could an idealist want? Salaries were not high — they are notoriously hard to measure, but when I started it was believed that the differential between the top salary and the bottom salary was a factor of about 7. Quite a difference from today.
In the seventies or late sixties “business” woke up to the possibility that real money might be made from books. After all if you had a bestseller it could return huge sums in comparison with the origination cost and the reprint cost, and creating bestsellers couldn’t really be that hard, could it? You just needed to hire good people who could sign up the best authors, and sit back and wait for the tills to start ringing. This led to an orgy of mergers and acquisitions as almost all the general publishing companies were consolidated into a few giant corporations. Big corporations need to keep expanding in order to succeed — and acquisitions were a fast way to expand, as we found out that expanding the number of bestsellers wasn’t as easy as imagined. Soon after bookselling followed suit with expansion and consolidation, driven finally by the invention of Amazon.com and on-line retailing.
Bookselling had been even more genteel than publishing. Publishers fixed the discount at which booksellers could buy books, and thus had a lot of influence over the margin a bookstore could make. Bookstores tended to be library-like book-lined rooms tended by book-lovers whose motivation was once again not monetary. The small town where I grew up had two bookshops which closed before I reached adulthood: after years of having none, it has recently gotten a second-hand bookshop. With the development of chain bookstores, booksellers became more powerful and were able to negotiate higher discounts, special promotional payments and of course an ever-expanding stream of returns.
Can we be on our way back to the “good old days” of low turnover, low profitability, and satisfied survival? I’ve always thought that the attempt to make publishing more profitable was fundamentally misguided. Every book, a tiny item in the world marketplace, is a unique project requiring individual ingenuity to create and develop. Books just don’t lend themselves to commoditization and mass production. The best thing that could happen to us might be for the money guys to sour on the whole business, sell out, break up the conglomerates, allow some companies to close and others to shrink, and let a smaller industry get back to muddling along with the occasional best seller to perk up the otherwise uneventful scene. Whether the product gets sold as a print-on-demand book, an ebook or as part of a subscription to an online collection is ultimately much less important that that ideas keep getting into the hands of those who want to know about them. Are the current changes in the world of bookselling perhaps a harbinger of such a transformation?
Making Book 
All very wise. You might also, sometime, consider this from the author’s point of view. These radical changes have been ‘about a year away’ for as long as I can remember and maybe some of them actually are happening now, but most authors I know (a lot!) simply would not be motivated to make such huge efforts to write a book if they didn’t think there would be some identifiable (and prefereably attractive) separate physical object they could claim paternity of at the end of the process. They wouldn’t find it enough to have a flickering icon in their name in the index to some huge database. They want something they can point to, give to their mothers, put on the shelf, show their friends and colleagues, have a party to celebrate. Now, this may be all vanity, but they do put a lot of themselves, and often many years work, into their publications and they want them recognised as ‘theirs’ in some tangible sense. The reader may or may not come to care, as you say, about the format or delivery (though most still do), but I can’t see the author’s psychology changing any time soon.
I don’t doubt that almost all authors look forward to seeing their book in a nicely designed package, but I wonder how basic a motivation that physical object really is. Obviously every author is different, but I suspect there are three fundamental motivations. 1. the need/desire to communicate something. 2. money (or as appropriate, tenure, promotion). 3. the respect of one’s peers, and of course other people — shading into fame. I have to think D. H. Lawrence would have written Sons and Lovers even if he didn’t expect eventually to be unwrapping six advance copies, one of which he could present to his mum. To go further, surely every first novel is written “on spec” — the motivation has to be more basic than the physical object which comes at the end of the process. Also, were not “books” being written before there was any print in which to represent them physically — Homer (or the Homer committee) must have had other motivations.
I don’t doubt that there are authors who would refuse to write without the reward of a printed book*, but publishers are actually able to sign lots of authors to do lots of work which will only result in electronic publication. Oxford Bibliographies On-Line represents a huge amount of editorial work, and is, as its name implies, on-line. (True there was a launch party.) In a perhaps unguarded moment OUP’s chief executive recently said that the next edition of The Oxford English Dictionary would probably never be printed. The media made a lot of fuss about it, but the people working on the continuous revision of the Dictionary didn’t down tools as a result. If your audience wants heroic couplets recited to them, there are going to be authors who deliver that. If the audience wants a triple decker novel, writers are going to provide that. Electronic publication is going to have an effect on the shape of what’s written.
In a transitional world where some publishers continue in the old way while others forge ahead into the electronic world, you may be right to imply that getting authors may become harder for the electronic companies. When the author has an alternative, the traditional publisher may benefit. Maybe the universe will have room of both types of publisher for ever. If readers demand printed books, someone will give them what they want.
* In my defense I have to say my piece was not advocating a world without printed books. I thought I was “format agnostic”, actually saying that the printed book would co-exist with the alternative new media, though I do believe that what publishers think is going to be less important in this regard than what the future marketplace decides it wants.
Here is Margaret Atwood, brought to us by Shelf Awareness on 12 March 2011.
“When people say publishing is a business — actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, ‘Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,’ two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, ‘It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.’ You’re selling one book — not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, ‘Graham Greene’ almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.”
–Margaret Atwood in an interview with the Globe & Mail.