When the death knell of newspapers was but an echo in the valleys of the Internet along comes Apple. Apple doing the Apple thing by at once re-inventing a market and resurrecting its potential. The print world – itself in shambles – was the first Apple courtier. As an independent publisher, we’re still waiting for our seat at the table. Until then, we have Kindle; we have PDF. But the real winner here are consumers.
Whether you’re Tina Brown pitting the Daily Beast against The Establishment or Gina Trapani giving completely in to the idea of copyleft, consumers are clearly getting better, faster, cheaper access to high quality written work. This is the point that publishers and the literary world lament the most. We saw what consumers did to network news – they brought us Twitter and Chelsea Lately, where low brow rules.
I understand the highbrow lament. Or at least I think I do. In a world where anyone can publish, then who’s to decide what deserves our attention? That’s the lament, right? Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books puts it better:
Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.
The argument can be made that readers don’t give a crap either way. They want Aunt Mary and Keats both. Each is creative in their own right. There is a time for everything, after all. But where does that leave the industry? First, we can agree that even from a supplier perspective, the printed word is in a kind of free-fall. Here’s a graph for US print revenue growth in the last five years:
Even still, I see some hope for printed matter. We have a bias here because we are publishers. Our book is available in both electronic and dead tree formats. One is decidedly more expensive than the other. But both are imminently sharable. Whether you’re downloading or thumbing through the content we’ve got, we want you to share it. Indeed, to compete with Daily Beast, we need both a good product AND open access to it. We just don’t have the eyeballs they do. Nor do we have the distribution of The Establishment.
Which brings me back to Apple. It’s great that they’re breathing some life back into The Establishment. I love my LA Times and will buy the iPad subscription as soon as it’s available. I love the books I get at Borders but I may find myself buying fewer of them at Borders after all. Which is only fair. Did you know that Borders and Amazon get 50% of every book sold? Are they adding equal value as the publisher? What about the writer – whose revenues are only a portion of the half the publisher receives. Apple Bookstore and Kindle Editions take a smaller percentage, which is a start, but not what makes publishing really valuable for the writer today.
What makes publishing interesting for the writer is that there are fewer barriers to entry. And with fewer obstructions also come fewer ass-kissers. Not fewer fans. But fewer people who are paid to prop up the talent and prove the industry experience. Ask any writer not named Steven King and they’ll tell you they love having a publisher but wish they weren’t at their mercy. Which is to say, they want the marketing and distribution a publisher can offer. But do they have to make so little money?
And there are academics. If anyone can self-publish, then is the “publish or perish” model still valid?
So many questions not even the likes of Steve Jobs can answer. What we do know for certain is that where there is disruption there will be innovation. Not just technical innovation either. I mean literary innovation. I foresee the rise of flash fiction (i.e. very, very short stories) and poetry in this new digital paradigm. I see writers taking distribution into their own hands – spending more time on Amazon, Goodreads, and Apple’s iBookstore interacting with readers. I see them tweeting. Even if it is low-brow.