Over the last few days, most recently on The New Yorker website, I have read several blog posts heralding the end of the publishing industry, the death of the humble book, and the triumph of the electronic reader. I find all of this to be hooey and all the wheezing and ranting going on to be nothing other than Henny-Pennyish panicking.
This is not to say that the publishing industry isn’t changing and morphing into a new entity that will include fully digitized books as part of their wares. Of course it is changing, and I think there’s a chance that it might even improve. Of course, the first canard in the “Death of Publishing” bag is the idea that these folks are talking, truly, about publishing as an industry. These doomsayers all seem to be New York publishing professionals who confuse the occupants of certain office buildings in Manhattan as being “the publishing industry,” and, in fact, to be literature itself. This is, of course, nonsense and is nothing more than egotism evolving into paranoia. Random House and Bertelsmann can go the way of the do-do and publishing will continue very nicely thank you. It just won’t be happening as much in the usual midtown Manhattan locations.
But before I go further with that thought, let me address a couple of the arguments that get made concerning “the death of publishing.” (If I had any business sense, I’d come up with a way to trademark “the death of publishing.” There’s a fortune to be made from this over the next several years. Maybe I can form a corporation to be the owner and publisher of this blog. I can then make the slogan for the company “The Death of Publishing Since 2008.” I would go see my lawyer about this, only I don’t have one.) The main argument that gets made is that electronic readers, such as the Kindle or the Sony Reader, will soon displace the forlorn hardcover and paperback book, just as the iPod has eliminated the CD, which it hasn’t. In fact, every post I come across addressing this subject makes an analogy between the Kindle and the iPod, which would be fine if they were analogous. But they’re not.
Let’s think about this. What are the technological advantages of the iPod over portable CD players, which is what the iPod really replaced? It eliminates skipping and other playback problems that occured with portable CD players. This has never been a problem with books, and it isn’t improved by any electronic reader. You can put your CD collection on the iPod and sample from your entire collection in a moment. Although on its face this might seem to have an analogue in the Kindle, it really doesn’t. You see, the dozens and dozens of books I already own, unlike the dozens and dozens of CDs I own, are not downloadable. In order to get that content on a Kindle or other device, I would have to purchase each one anew. The brilliance of the iPod is that it sprang from a fully digitized world. It did not have to create one from scratch.
The other big advantage that I find with the iPod is that you can put it on shuffle and listen to an unexpected selection of music from a collection the listener already approves of in random order. This adds the element of occasional small surprises. Would you want to put a Kindle on shuffle even if you could? Of course not. What would that be anyway? Random chapters or even pages of books thrown at you one after another, each out of context and therefore without meaning? No. That’s an absurd process, even though I am sure that there are a few people out there who would find it quite keen.
So there you have it. The iPod and the Kindle are not in any way analogous. And further, the humble book has certain other advantages over electronic readers that just aren’t going to go away. For example, if you leave your book on a bus, your entire library doesn’t go with it. You can run over a book with a car, and it will probably still be readable. And your book is never going to run out of electricity when you’re trying to read at the beach or on the bus or at the airport or on a plane or in a park or in any of another thousand sorts of places where recharging a battery is difficult or impossible.
No, the humble book is a sturdier piece of technology than the publishing paranoiacs would have you believe.
But back to the development of the publishing industry. Unlike the newspaper industry, whose future is going to end up almost entirely online, publishing houses have a future in producing traditional books. The publishers who are in for trouble in the coming years are the giants. They are the dinosaurs of the industry and a meteor is heading for the Gulf of Mexico. They will die because they have become corporatized and are run by nimrods with business degrees instead of people who are passionate about books. Like the owners of baseball teams, they compete with each other by spending too much money up front on talents whose past performances are no guarantee of future success. They tie up too much money in paying advances–even to lower-tier authors–that will take them years to recoup in an industry where every book published is a crapshoot. They have become moribund and top-heavy and too dependent on bestsellers. They have no idea what readers want or how to attract new customers. Every now and then, they get lucky and publish something new that strikes a chord with the populace at large, such as the Harry Potter series or The Da Vinci Code, and then they proceed to flog the living daylights out of it and start trying to find every clone of that thing that they can in order to publish it, regardless of its value. They look at the community of readers as a bunch of suckers instead of as a pool of customers. And hucksterism is not replacement for knowledge, passion, and guts.
And so the big houses may die, one-by-one. Perhaps some of the imprints that have been gobbled up by conglomerates will be spun off again, and Viking and Knopf and others of the old vanguard will be left to roam the landscape unfettered. It’s the smart way for these companies to go, to break up their conglomerations and to let what are now known as imprints go back to being smaller, independent publishing houses.
Because the future of publishing is with the independents. That’s where its past was, too, and the era of these huge firms is an anomaly and not the norm. The smaller publishers can’t throw around money, but they do have flexibility. Since they cannot pay large advances, they must work with their authors as partners, rather than as pets or possessions, and since they cannot afford a large number of failures, they have to work that much harder to make of each title a success. They do what they do for love, not for prestige or an expense account or for a meeting with a high-powered parasite who calls himself an agent. They know that publishing is not a business, but a quest, that it is not an industry, but a calling.
Even venerable Random House started as a couple of guys who “were going to publish a few books on the side at random” and not as a publishing titan. It is a business that has been left a hulking shadow of itself by mere corporatism, and it shall be reclaimed by those who should be running it: the lovers.
