The decline of publishing

Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews will close up shop at the end of the year, its owners announced yesterday. Like Max Boot, writing on Contentions, I never read them. Among the first jacket blurbs that I ever came across were, I remember with a flush of shame, from Kirkus Reviews. Trying to make sense of the literary world without any guidance, I was under the delusion that Kirkus was a valuable source of reliable criticism—until I went off to college and an admired professor laughingly disabused me. Editor & Publisher is the trade journal of newspaper owners; it should have been called Publisher & Publisher. I don’t recall anyone’s reading it in newsrooms when I worked there.

Unlike Boot, then, I am not “saddened to learn of [their] fate.” Anything that contributes to “the general decline of the publishing industry” saddens Boot. But even if that’s what their passing signifies, so what?

It is a vulgar error to confuse the decline of the publishing industry with the decline of literature and authorship. The two are related in much the same way that coffee is related to the electric percolator. The kitchen gadget is simply one way to brew the nectar of concentration. Coffee consumption has not declined along with the gradual disappearance of electric percolators. Or, to switch to the favored analogy of both Luddites and technological cheerleaders, traveling along roads did not melt away with the horse-drawn carriage trade.

What is happening is a reconception of the book. Once upon a time you could distinguish a book, the material object that could sit on a shelf or stop a door, from the text, an ideal order whose storage and transmission it made possible. That distinction is in the process of evaporating. What we are witnessing is the material book’s decline in cultural significance.

New gadgets for storing and transmitting texts are being developed. And right now they command higher prices than the texts they store. But this is probably a transitional phase in the market. New hardware is always expensive; software prices are more stable, because they represent the intellectual content that makes the software worth something. The problem that faces authors is how to capture a fair share of the market for their intellectual content. That’s what book-buyers are paying for.

In the long run, the decline of the publishing industry will only benefit authors as they are able to connect to consumers without hundreds of intermediaries who have their hands out. How will the authors of the future get paid? Who knows? That’s not the kind of problem I give my waking hours over to. But there are plenty of men and women who do.

Here is one example. I have a friend who markets a computer-based facsimile-transmission system to businesses. He provides the technological gadgetry for sending and receiving faxes—for free! He is paid every time a business sends or receives a fax. And of course, the system is first-rate; his users fall in love with it; usage explodes, and he makes tons of money. Why? If he concentrated on selling the technological gadgetry, discrete physical units, even of the objects that store the software that runs the system, he could only make money one unit at a time. His money-making capacity would be constrained by his physical ability to reach customers. But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued a couple of years ago in The Black Swan, “There are no physical constraints on what a number can be.” There are no physical constraints on the number of faxes that a business can send, using my friend’s system. My friend has made the conversion from selling material objects to selling ideas.

In their day-to-day writing, authors have always already been converts. But in their sales, they have been captive to the publishing industry, which conceives of books as material objects. The trick is to find a way to get paid for ideas. If I were running Amazon, I’d sell Kindles for a song and give away ebooks for free. Readers would only be charged when they opened a new book and scrolled to the next page. They are paying to read, after all; not to hold a gadget in the hand. And who knows? Maybe an author far cannier than I will beat Amazon to some such punch. In any event, the authors—not Amazon—will be the ultimate beneficiaries, if they are smart, of publishing’s decline.