Part 2: Don't Panic
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens' description of 18th-century Europe serves as an uncannily accurate description of the twenty-first century cultural zeitgeist – because, like much great literature, it articulates truths that are timeless and universal.
Publishers of consumer books, in particular, will recognise the sentiments. Theirs has long been a high-risk, low-margin business, mainly because they have ended up holding one of the most commoditised, and therefore least attractive, parts of the long and winding chain that joins authors to readers. On top of that, during the last decade or two the people formerly known as readers have been abandoning books (as well as magazines and newspapers) in droves. And now we face the most serious economic crisis for two generations. Crisis upon crisis upon crisis: it is hard to escape the fact that publishing as we know it is in peril. Truly these are the worst of times.
Yet people are not reading less, they are reading more. They are not spending any less time or money on entertainment or education, they are spending ever greater amounts. And despite wails of despair about the dumbing-down of society, we are not getting any less intelligent, discerning or cultured, but only more so. (The evidence is everywhere: museums are among the most popular public attractions, attendance at literary festivals is booming, intelligent television programmes like The Wire achieve mass appeal, and in Britain the most popular commercial radio station plays wall-to-wall classical music.) Above all, publishing is the original information industry – and is this not the Information Age? So why are these not the best of times, and where did it all go so wrong?
With the rise of information technology, of course: first the electronic digital computer, then the Internet, and within the last two decades the web. The last time that publishing had to pay close attention to technology was well over 500 years ago. Since then it has been mostly concerned with things like law, marketing, economics, logistics, and ocassionally artistic creativity. But not with technology. At least not in the profound, life-threatening way that it had to when Gutenberg swept onto the scene – and that it must now repeat.
What's more, things are about to get worse, for many of us now carry in our pockets networked multimedia devices that are only a few Moore's Law cycles away from having the processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth to deliver any film, TV programme, radio show, news article, website or computer game that we might desire, at any time of day or night and from pretty much every inhabited corner of the globe. How ever will books compete?
They won't. As the computer programmer Paul Graham has pointed outΦ:
About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers.
And as journalist Joe Poz has observedΦ, the iPhone is already in the process of replacing newspapers with something a lot better:
When I was growing up, newspapers were everything... just about every single thing anyone wanted to know, they found in the newspaper... Now, as I go through each of [my iPhone] apps, I want you to think about this: How much BETTER is this than what newspapers used to give me? And how can newspapers compete with it?
As for TVs and computers, so with books and computers (for that's what our new reading devices are). But even if books are threatened, the same need not necessarily be true of book publishers. On the contrary, by embracing the possibilities of the new medium, and learning how to use it to entertain and enlighten their readers, they might discover an opportunity to escape their current wretched and worsening situation.
So if you are a publisher then – both literally and metaphorically – the future is in your hands.