Former Editorial
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The Trouble With Books (part two) |
24th January 2010 |
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With bookstore closures, shifts in the traditions of commercial publishing; print-on-demand and increasingly consume-on-demand, the creators and distributors of content face change. In one way there isn’t an impact on the commercial publishing industry. They need to remain focused on the popular and mass marketed. Cross-overs from console games, films, television, and music; targeting celebrity, entertainment, self-help and themed topics. In other ways there’s an impact for all of us creators of content (writers), for all distributors and resellers. The information technology not only provides multiple ways to produce, put out and access content, it also begins to make mass or even single print runs appear extravagant, wasteful and uneconomic. Why print and bind on any scale when you can download in any shape (audio-visual), form (pdf, mp3, mpg) or fashion (browser, mobile, ereader). This kind of ethought soon begins to put a higher premium on the single use printed object – that humble book we’ve come to know as inexpensive and widely available. Why on earth would you buy a bound book when you could download the content and print the chapter you wanted or however you want to consume it – you’d retain the digital content and could search or browse or reference – so much more than you can do with the BOOK. True, there is an aesthetic thing going on here. An historical thing. A what we’re used to. A culture . Though the common way of enjoying literature today, does not mean permanent resistance to change. Generation next won’t be straightjacketed by the rules of generation now and certainly not by generation past. Let me turn again (see part one) back to the unheard-words. My early understanding of writers (beyond myself) and publishing (circa 2000s), imagined authors of published books as a highly select group. However, I soon discovered that thousands of people were writing and publishing books – and that cash and celebrity were rarely the motive or the likely reward. People loved to write or had to write. If there was a simple principle it was, how do I write, get my work seen and get paid. The how to get your work out there, get yourself known and possibly earn some money to pay yourself to do what you loved or desired, was much more conventionally limited, even then. Now, there aren’t the limits, but there’s even more competition. Thousands shouting to get heard online every hour of every day, thanks to the virtually barrier-free gateway that is the Internet. Self-publishing is bigger than ever but the economics of a new writer paying to have their material printed in an online world, no longer stack up. The printed book doesn’t have the power that it once had. There are other mediums across which to push things. I said it before and I say it again, everything’s changing. |
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