The Revolutionary Future of Publishing
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 8:30AM Here's an interesting, thoughtful, and even-handed analysis of the trends currently tearing apart the publishing world by Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books.
He gives a nice summary of what the optimists out there think (hope) is going to happen, and this is certainly the future I see as being most likely:
Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate—one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide Web. Titles will also be posted on authors' and publishers' own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper.
That said, he also raises some good points about all the down sides of this, including the problems of piracy, the transience of digital data, and the challenges for monetizing content. On the plus side, he points out how good e-books will be for back and mid-list titles. The whole thing is well worth a read.
One big question looms above all: will authors be able to live off writing novels and books. Maybe yes, but very much maybe no. It may well come to pass that fewer and fewer writers can live by novel alone, but I would submit that the number of people who do so is already vanishingly small. I can see the field of fiction becoming ever more semi-pro, or pro-am maybe, with just a few break out bestsellers out there living the literary high life. I can also show you math for a lot of people with just a few thousand dedicated readers who could make a fine living selling direct to their customers. Wherever it goes, it won't look like it does today.
Reader Comments (1)
I am totally sold on the e-book format but have no plans to buy any, other than my first purchase Black Hat Blues, because pricing is just too expensive. I have a back catalogue of tens of thousands of free books on Project Gutenberg, I can wait for prices to fall. Your next book may also get bought in ePub form, if only because your printed books have been so damned hard to buy in the UK and I am impatient.
I also wonder how long it will be before e-books actually usurp the written word, can't see it myself.
I would like to see an innovative publisher offer a code on the dust-jacket of hardback releases, linked to a single use download of the e-book. One for the shelf, one for the e-reader seems eminently sensible to me, I might even be prepared to pay an extra quid for the book as a result.
Meanwhile, if an e-book is going to cost me more than £5 ($7.50ish), then I'm just not going to buy it.