… the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.
There is an interesting piece in the London Review of Books from Colin Robinson about the impact of global economic woes on publishing. As the byline has it, “Colin Robinson until recently worked for a large publisher in New York.” He outlines the pressures facing the principal cast of the publishing ecosystem (to mix my metaphors), including writer, editors, producers, retailers, and readers.
Robinson’s comments on the effect of electronic communication and the internet on the life of books could be judged as accurate or out of step, depending on your perspective. (I’m not going to go there on the “For all the claims of their optical friendliness and handiness, e-books still strain the eyes” remark.) Yes, there is a lot of rubbish content on the internet, and yes society seems to be moving towards a sort of chronic individualism that exhibits itself online. But is that dreadful for publishing and reading?
Robinson points to a possible solution – that the editor’s powers of curation and provision of status to some writing over other writing will migrate from paper to internet. “There is opportunity as well as challenge in this model. The roles of editor and publicist, people who can guide the potential reader through the cacophony of background noise to words they’ll want to read, will become ever more important.”
Perhaps what Robinson has a sense of losing is, to draw an analogy, a hansom cab for a yellow cab. That would be the other perspective.
“This is not to say that the book is doomed. But publishers will surely have to change the way they do business”, writes Robinson, and I’m sure we all agree.
2 Comments
Well, can I go there on the eyestrain remark, then? I just finished Little Dorrit which checks in at 1024 pages on paper, on the Kindle. I can report that my eyes are not strained. A review to appear shortly on my blog.
Certainly do agree that change is a-comin’ to publishing; maybe it’s already here.
Thanks for the link.
The major challenge for publishers is to recognise where they add value in the digital world. There is a lot of ‘junk publishing’ in the world now, most of it being personal blogs. Good content will ‘rise to the top’ and it is here that publishers must realise that the risk lies for their business.
Authors can go direct to their audience through the internet and can quite quickly build an audience for free through blogging, Twitter and many other new mediums for ‘making a noise’ about one’s own content.
The challenge for authors with this approach is that it takes a long time to understand how to use these tools and to build a following which is going to make them any money. Furthermore, publishers and editors can make good content into great content through their ability to stand back and use their knowledge, experience and marketing muscle to take a book to market, which, of course, let’s an author get on with writing.
I heard an interesting point from a marketer in a well known publisher who had come from the music industry recently. He was illustrating how some bans have cut out the record companies and gone direct to their audience through the internet. Although they sell less tracks an albums through this approach, they make more money.
This is the case in the music industry where bands have asked the record companies where they add value and the record companies have not had a good answer. The publishing industry needs to bear this in mind in the digital world and keep asking “Where do we add value to authors?”