roachboy

i've stumbled across two articles about the "digitial revolution" in book publishing. the two go in quite different directions and i thought that juxtaposing them might make for an interesting discussion. it was less than entirely obvious where to put this thread. i decided here.


Publishing: The Revolutionary Future - The New York Review of Books

this guy's position is pretty straightforward: digitization is the coming thing, it's already more or less here. traditional publishing is largely a thing of the past or soon will be.
the net presents options of a radically decentralized space of text production and dissemination in the context of which, seemingly, no-one will make a whole lot of money (so is this the end of the writer as a profession and a return to writer-as-hobbyist or writer-as-artist with a day job be it academic or other?) and which will present readers/consumers with real problems in terms of evaluation of the quality of information.

the entry costs to declare oneself a publisher will drop and so...basically this is a proliferation of options and a contracting of intermediaries story, which is a story of a radical decentralization of a cultural space told from a viewpoint accustomed to a high degree of centralized control.

there's more in the article--particularly about the 80s demise of the bookstore (a bit summary, but still interesting---feel free to talk about it)...

The New Math of Poetry - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

this article touches on many of the same points, but from a quite different angle.
taking poetry as a microcosm (the author's a poet...) the multiplication of publishing options enabled by the net is taken to be of a piece with the professionalization of writing programs, the standardizing of the mfa, and so of a professionalization of poetry. behind the veneer of increased openness, this piece argues that you find an increase on control by professional networks and a corresponding narrowing of stylistic range. alpaugh sees in this a constricting of options...his point seems to be that with all this stuff to sort through generated by all these networks most of which talk to themselves, what happens to the Outsider? and what happens to the maybe Great?

these are the barest of outlines of these pieces---they're not meant to substitute for reading them.


anyway, i think there are two quite different stories about the decentralization not just of production of texts, but also of intermediary functions...the roles of critics for example...both pieces converge on the same basic question:

with all this proliferation of publishing options and textual production, with ALL THESE WRITERS all over the place, how are "we" supposed to know what's good? who's onna tell us what's good? who's gonna sort through all this stuff and tell us what we should do, what we should read? and what's gonna happen if no-one does steps up to do this?

it's kinda interesting to think about where these two pieces are published in which regard.

what do you think of these pieces?
how do you see the transition into electronic publishing?
do you think it's a bad thing that more people see themselves as writers? that there are more publications?

how do you determine what stuff you read is and is not "good" or "important"?
do you have people who tell you?
do you figure it out for yourself?

which of these articles do you think best outlines the situation? both? neither?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ASU2003

I think Apple and Amazon will be the publishers of the future. Or instead of publishing with a company they will promote your book like an agent.

I have no doubt that there is a market for ebooks, emagazines, and enewspapers once the hardware is in place (and there are a few free sources of news on them). And Apple needs to get an agreement with the cell phone companies to allow the users to download for free (books, newspapers, & magazines at least) from iTunes. Magazines and newspapers can be downloaded overnight even.

Willravel

I will always want real books, I can't imagine that ever changing. It's more than just words on a page, it's the feel of the paper, the smell, getting it in the sunlight in one hand as you turn the page with the other. It's almost romantic. Moreover, I have a few rather old books that I treasure, too. But I don't have them due to "stylistic range", and I don't think the digital print revolution will threaten anything like that.

Go to a Tower Records and then go to the iTunes gift store. Shoot, go to some old record store, your very favorite, and then go do Amazon music. There's simply no comparison in stylistic range. None. The great digital libraries of music are legion and they are all truly massive. I cannot imagine that won't soon apply to the millions and millions of books out there.

As much as I adore my books, and books in general, I have no doubt somewhere down the road I'll be using an iPad for it's electronic books. It's incredibly convenient—I can have a hundred libraries worth of books on one small pad—and we've already seen it happen with music, and to a lesser extent movies.

What do I think of these pieces? They're interesting, I suppose. I disagree the assertion that there's no money to be made in online publishing. That's already rubbish. As for the totalitarian concerns of the second, I'd again offer online music as an example. It's very, very easy to get your music on iTunes (there are indi distributers that will do it for you).

How do I see the transition into electronic publishing? It will probably happen over the next year or two to begin with. The iPad and other readers are doing that job well enough.

Do I think it's a bad thing that more people see themselves as writers? That there are more publications? Nah. There have been myriad shit books since the beginning of publishing. Sarah Palin wrote (or had written) a book for christ's sake. As far as I'm concerned, shitty books don't take anything away from good books. Goin' Rogue doesn't make Old Man and the Sea and less incredible.

How do I determine what stuff I read is and is not "good" or "important"? By reading it? You can't judge a book by its cover, after all, and you can't really judge a book by someone else's opinion. I've read good books and bad books. That's kinda how it works.

Neither of the articles seems like anything but "eBooks are hot right now, try to make controversy out of them." I'm surprised they don't include information about Tiger Woods. Sensationalism is rarely sensational.

Baraka_Guru

For those who don't know, I'm a book editor for the trade industry---more specifically, for the small-press industry.

The book industry has been in transition for years now. The first indication was that the traditional distribution channel has been collapsing. That, and the bookseller industry has been consolidating. That was the first step.

Next, we have the digitization of books. With the advent of the Sony Reader, Amazon's Kindle, and now Apple's iPad, reading digital books is hitting the mainstream. The small publisher I work for has already digitized its entire backlist. We've signed multiple digital distribution agreements, and much of our revenue now comes from selling digital products into libraries.

Self-publishing is booming. The technology of print-on-demand is now so advanced that even major publishers are using it. So big corporations and individual author/publishers alike can have books printed at a reasonable cost and at as little as one copy at a time. Offset printing is quite expensive, making print runs of less than 500 virtually impossible.

Digital distribution can now be done easily. If I wanted to, I could publish a book in under an hour. I just need to set up a PDF and post it on a website. But that's not the whole issue. The issue, still, and always, is making sure you have a readership. The audience is the key. To monetize publishing, you need to find a way to get someone along the line to pay for what you're doing with publishing, and this is now the focus.

Not all books are affected equally. Nonfiction is affected the greatest. Fiction, the least. The informational nature of nonfiction makes digital products a prime vehicle. The ability to search, reorganize, pare down, redistribute, etc., is a high priority with this type of material. Fiction, on the other hand, is typically digested intact.

It might seem natural to compare the book industry to the music industry in this regard, but looking at the newspaper industry is important. There is a multitude of new business models that newspapers have adopted to keep their revenue stream intact. I won't go into detail, but the book industry needs to borrow some of these models, especially where nonfiction is concerned.

Even in the music industry, it has been proven that many people are still willing to pay directly for digital products. iTunes sells single tracks for $1 each. Even with current digital book models, people are buying digital books for as much as $7.50 and even as high as $15.

I think that many are willing to pay for quality, which is what it comes down to. Free stuff on the Internet isn't always the best stuff---your mileage varies. When digital products are produced by reputable companies along with celebrated creators, people are still willing to pay for that.

At this point, I am willing to admit that the biggest impact right now is the democratization of creation, publication, distribution, critique, and even consumption. But this doesn't necessarily mean everything is free. People are willing to pay for things even within a democratized system. Lulu.com is a prime example of that. As is a number of other web companies that act as agents to this kind of creation/distribution, etc.

Sure there are more writers accessing the field of publishing. But, remember, there are also more readers (arguably, due to reach) and, probably most important, more filters. Filters can be both human and technological. How does one find things they like on the Internet? There are many ways. TFP is one of them, as is Amazon.com. Both function in their unique ways, both have virtually limitless possibilities, yet one may still fairly easily find what they're looking for, and there are various ways to do it. And here are just two examples. The Internet is filled with wonderful ways to filter cultural content: niche is the new mainstream.

I'm going to stop here, because this is such a big and multifaceted issue. I just wanted to throw out some of my initial reactions to the ideas/questions posted in the OP. There are many threads that can be taken from it.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

interesting.

i put this in philosophy because i think legitimation of information is a sociological matter the implications of which get written into philosophical (and other) work. so the mechanisms are social but the outcomes aren't directly so. for example, a conceptual universe in which there's some transcendent god presupposes a community that accepts this premise as legitimate, even as the workings that happen on the basis of that premise don't need to reference the community. quite the contrary. but it's like this in every register.

think about the gap which separates professional philosophy from the idea you get of it from a barnes and noble bookshelf.
professional philo is for better or worse largely a commentary game; b&n philosophy bookshelves a 3-d version of a pot-thot ("what's it all about, man?" "woah, dude" "you think there's like a god?" "what?")

this entails that we are in general information consumers who depend upon intermediaries in order to determine the basic information that enables us to get oriented about what we're reading.
orientation precedes and conditions reading, btw (you find what you're looking for)....
these intermediaries---critics, reviews, syllabii---you know, lists---what's in what's out what's hot what's not---these are modes of exercising cultural power. this exercise presupposes institutional infrastructures (patterns of distributing commodities like "philosophy" or "poetry"; patterns of distributing cultural competences to play the games of "philosophy" or "poetry" and patterns distributing the lists that help those with the competences to play the game figure out which games are happening at any given time.)

(btw this is all straight pierre bourdieu, but compressed for messageboard fun).

if that's the case, then what happens if these systems mutate?

it seems to me that what the articles are pointing to is an anxiety or problem that runs deeper than who's gonna make the money from books (which aren't gonna disappear, btw....there's a proliferation of small presses that are doing books which are very much about the specific materiality of paper and print and glue or string etc.---just as vinyl didnt exactly go away)

it's who's gonna come to control the sifting processes, if those were tied (as they were) to an outmoded system of book production?

more basically, the problem/anxiety seems to be: how are we going to figure out what information is an is not legitimate?

price? what you pay more for must be better?

more basic: how are we gonna know what kind of information is what? how are we gonna evaluate information? who's going to tell us what's what and what to do?
that's not a real democratic question, is it?

are we collectively going to have to rely on our own competencies?

this gets to the real problem:
do we collectively have these competences?

well....do we?

in a way we're back in the problem that spooked alot of ethicists. look around at history. people left to themselves can decide all kinds of stupid shit is true. lots of death and destruction can follow. how do we deal with this? argue that there are transcendent standards (this was one strong argument inside of ethics---of course it doesn't really solve the problem of what they are or where they come from)....same thing here.

this strikes me as odd.
there's something about it that rankles, that bugs my inner marxist which prefers to think that people are basically smart and interesting but are lulled into some passive morass by a system that allows them no power and treats them as consumers to be herded about and otherwise managed....
but what if that's wrong?


i'll stop for the moment, but like baraka noted above there's alot that could be spun out of this.
just thought i'd start with an explanation for why it's in philo...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

See, this is the thing: the bestseller is dead.

Okay, I just wrote that for effect. The bestseller isn't dead, but the bestseller is no longer as potent and exclusive as it once was. The thing with top selling books is that they were typically manageable in that they could be wrung through a system that worked on a profit model and they could be, in turn, slogged to the masses in a way not unlike you described above, rb, in your reference to herding consumers, telling them what's hot and what's not.

Well, this has changed in that it's entirely possible for small presses and even self-publishers to eek out a living. I've seen it happen. What makes this possible is knowing where to go to find a readership. The model that everyone is accustomed to----the stacks of Dan Browns in warehouse-style bookstores----is now rivaled, if not surpassed, by niche distribution made possible by digitization and the Internet. The collective book sales of titles that are in no way bestsellers now outweighs the collective book sales of bestsellers. The sheer volume of titles, and the sheer volume of readers with wide interests, makes this possible.

So you basically have two models now: the bestseller model and the niche model. With the latter model, you don't herd consumers; instead you try your darned best to go where they go. The power of choice is in their hands, and so you serve these markets; you don't create them. Heck, many of those in these markets are the creators. You get this subset of consumers who are author/publisher/critic/readers or any mixture thereof.

Basically, what legitimizes "information" (I prefer the word "content") is it being chosen for consumption. Period. You can play the numbers game and say that Harry Potter is more important/legitimate than Don DeLillo's Falling Man or Otep Shamaya's Caught Screaming (Lulu.com's current poetry bestseller), but where does that get us?

Our experiences with texts---their creation, distribution, and consumption---are now largely fragmented. I've never read Dan Brown or J. K. Rowling, nor will I ever. Where does that leave me in the culture of books/texts?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

The Bestselling Books in Your City - The Daily Beast

this showed up in my inbox earlier. kismet-y maybe. it's interesting, the lists of books that folk are buying/reading across the cities of the us.

the data:

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

It's nice to see the usual suspects: Brown, Patterson, King, Grisham. It's nice to know they're still getting paid.

An interesting contrast:

This is the current top 5 in Fiction/Literature on Sony's ebook list. I think it's interesting.

• Knitting Under the Influence by Claire LaZebnik ($1.99)
• Dear John by Nicholas Sparks ($9.99)
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett ($9.99)
• The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club by Jessica Morrison ($1.99)
• The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown ($20.97)

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ARTelevision

Just read both pieces, roachboy. I don't think it matters, really. Both pieces recount inevitable trends. Both of them start with the “Let one thousand flowers bloom," hypothesis.

The first one is celebratory of the wild anarchic joy-of-the-jungle-to-a-lover-of-exotic-flowers metaphor. I like that. It's true. A lot of good stuff will be seen and read. A lot of good stuff will get missed. That's OK too.

The second reminds us that there are silly and sinister power structures like silly and sinister professorial types who tend to horde the best available vases and spaces in the greenhouse for their ass-kissing petal-pushing favorite flowers. What else is new? That means a lot will be lost. Imagine missing Ginsberg, Blake, Dickinson.

I think we already miss a thousand of them a decade and always have. There's nothing new to see here, I think. Power corrupts, narrows the field, and jerks off a lot. Let's move on.

For myself however, I prefer the vision of the first article and the Maoist approach to jungle aesthetics...

The second one can get tossed and ignored along with the stuffy/elitist rag in which it resides.

__________________
create evolution

roachboy

well, insofar as book objects are concerned, this site is an interesting enough and kinda pretty (in layout terms) statement of what alot of folk i know have been saying for some time is the central impact of electronic publishing on print---a vaporization of the space for shitty design, the opening up of maybe new spaces in the context of which people will write and publishers publish with attention to the physicality of the medium:

Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod

when i started the thread, i was interested in a wide range of implications mostly because it happened that the two main articles talked about a wide range of implications.

the central question that interested me was about the sociology of cultural consumption if you like---the system of critics/intermediaries who's function was to sort through cultural goods in the context of a relatively centralized production/distribution system in order to stratify reception by class across the operation of telling folk what is good and what is not...the ability to act as intermediary was for folk like pierre bourdieu a basic aspect of cultural power...if you have power in this area, you are in a position to impose your lists of favorites not only on producers of cultural goods but also on other critics working in the same area/space who have to use your list as a reference point (say) relative to which they differentiate themselves and their lists. both articles agree that this older system of cultural power is breaking down in part because of a decentralization of both production and distribution engendered by the web/electronic publishing. but it also goes further than that to a decentralization of the capacity to define areas of "legitimate" knowledge. this is the point at which i think things become interesting, and was the direction i initially had in mind for the thread.

who gets to say what philosophy is in this decentralized context for example?
what is literature in this context?

personally, i am interested in the possibilities this decentralization offers for blowing up outmoded, threadbare separations between types of knowledge, types of activity....but it's clear from the articles that not everyone sees the old ways of thinking as outmoded and even less the old modes of sorting information. at bottom, these worries seem to come down to personal matters for the authors of each of the two pieces...if x happens, what will become of my work? epstein is not worried about this so much; alpaugh is.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite