As you may have noticed, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time lately considering the future of the publishing industry. Over the weekend I happened across a great article by Boris Kachka published on the New York Magazine website titled The End. It’s long, but well worth the time to read. The question I’ve been pondering most often is whether Hardbound books are about to go the way of Vinyl LP’s.
From where I sit, based upon the Kachka article and many others, the publishing industry sits at a dangerous intersection with traffic bearing down from every direction. My fear is that publishing will react too slowly and will be the victim of a runaway ebook.
The problems are obvious: while hoping for a commercial home run, one publisher or another seems to step up with a ridiculous seven-figure advance, only to be disappointed when the book fails to make a profit. Next, an editor is fired, a new one is hired, and the game begins anew. I’m reminded of the signing bonuses and huge contracts paid to professional sports athletes. Everyone knows the salaries and bonuses are too high, but everyone also knows that if one club refuses to put up the money, another will happily do so. In other words, there’s always another idiot. To a degree it works in sports. It won’t in publishing, yet it seems there are more than a few idiots there as well.
In a perfect world—the one I would run if given a chance—advances, if any would be small, perhaps enough to cover moderate expenses incurred while writing, perhaps not. Writers would be expected to write well enough to be able to make a profit and would therefore share those profits equally with a publisher. Advertising and promotional expenses would likewise be shared. Simple, right? Is it too much to ask that an author believe in his or her book enough to take such a risk? It shouldn’t be.
Next is the question of how a book should be published, that is, should it be hardbound, trade paperback, paperback, audio, or ebook on first release? And I have to say here that I absolutely love the look and feel of a hardbound book. I also love the feel of extracting a real cork from a wine bottle rather than twisting off a screw-top. Then there’s the romance of a needle gliding over a vinyl LP, and the togetherness of the family gathered around the radio, and the thrill of the arrival of the Wells Fargo wagon. I think you get my point: at certain times in the history of mankind, a decision is made that it might be time to move on. We might very well be at such a point with books and how we read them.
Imagine a world where all the books you want to read are stored on a handy hand-held device. Imagine being able to update your reading list whenever a new book is released, and being able to subscribe to all your favorite newspapers and magazines and have them “delivered” to the same device. What if you were in an airport, waiting for your flight to depart and wanted to buy a good book to read on the flight. In the convenience kiosk or shop all you could find was a stand crammed with currently released trash, but what you really wanted was a classic. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a device where with a push of a button you could download whatever classic you had in mind?
Well, the device is here already. It’s called the Amazon Kindle. And the publishing industry, rather than embracing it, has instead put out the word that if the Kindle catches on with fewer than 20% of the book readers, publishing as an industry will vanish. Come on, now. Who in their right mind will believe that? Where’s the entrepreneurial spirit in that?
Publishers need to step back and take a look at their business model—and, admittedly, some are doing so. It’s a new century, with new ideas. Instead of signaling an end, why not signal a beginning? What if everyone had a Kindle? What if by means of a Kindle subscription to Publisher’s Weekly, everyone learned that at a certain time, on a certain day, a particular book would be released. What if everyone was convinced they needed to read this new book. One click! Each! Kabam! Sounds like a bundle of money to me.
And by the way, the truth is that not everyone will have a Kindle. Not everyone will embrace the new technology. Some will continue to want hardbound books. Good for them! Some folks still insist on listening to Vinyl records, some even listen to old radio shows while leaning close to a vintage Zenith. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 am
I think you point up a significant change in the world of publishing, a new and varied diversity of getting creative works to an audience. The days of the writer, editor, publisher, bookseller are fast disappearing. And in place of that rigid publishing reality we now have what appears to be a chaos of money-making ploys in which the writer has become low man on the proverbial totem. Publishing is going to be a very messy business in the decades to come, but eventually something worthwhile may emerge. We can’t keep going in the present literary rat race.