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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Books 18 Problems

Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 8:28 AM

Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling has composed a list of eighteen challenges that the publishing industry faces. Here are a couple.

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

and

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

I don't know if I've seen the problems so clearly written out before. I recommend you go take a look at the list. And if you're still interested in the death of the publishing industry after that, I hope you'll take a look at my feature about the long death, and uncertain future, of publishing.

Comments (6) RSS

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But "traditional literary heritage" is NOT part of the cost-free database. The portion of the world's book publishing that is available online is virtually nil. The intellectual heritage of the world, over the last century or so, as represented in books, has NO PRESENCE online. Where's that going to go? Poof.

What I see instead is people reading the limitless supply on Twitter INSTEAD of intellectual production. That's not so good.

Mr. Sterling also makes the error of conflating "publishing" with "literature", i.e., serious fiction. There IS a crisis in serious fiction; no one reads it anymore (and nor should they, from what I've seen of it). That says nothing about history or the many other flavors of non-fiction. We live in a non-fiction age.

Posted by Fnarf

on June 11, 2009 at 9:02 AM

Not that publishing's not in a bad spot, but a lot of what Sterling says is ridiculous. Genre literature has never been marginal; just because sci-fi was in the 1950s doesn't mean that there was once a magical time when everyone sat around reading James Joyce and Marcel Proust. His comment that contemporary literature doesn't tackle urgent issues is also ridiculous, since it assumes that his tangle of hip tech concepts in several other points has somehow created a means for people to actually address urgent points. And his comment that search engines and aggregation replaces editors is just dumb. There's a difference between acknowledging the problems--even if they're ultimately fatal--and trying to spin the new reality as somehow better, or at least complimentary. I'd suggest his best points are that there are serious problems with the business model. However, great books--contrary to libertarian fantasy--don't spring out of thin air, nor have the best books, the canon books, in his terminology, ever been prone to hitting the bestseller lists.

Posted by jray745 on June 11, 2009 at 9:06 AM

I'm not entirely sure why it's a problem that romances are on the best-seller lists. Romance has been a powerhouse genre for decades, and now that it's moving from a strictly line-based publishing scheme to focusing on popular authors, it's inevitable that the bestseller list is going to follow. Maybe the real problem is that romances and "serious" fiction have reached a relative parity in literary quality, and the romance trumps out because it also provides happy endings. Which is a big boost to customer satisfaction in any field.

Posted by Electra on June 11, 2009 at 9:08 AM

My printed text will be flowing out of crystals and delivered by touch-teaching by nude women.

Heck, if it worked for Zardoz it can work for me.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on June 11, 2009 at 10:34 AM

I'd suggest his best points are that there are serious problems with the business model.

The worst problem with the business model is the attempt to make big bucks in the industry. Books have never been big business, ever. Book publishing was a gentlemen's pursuit, mostly limited to already wealthy men who cared less about making a profit than working in a field they enjoy. European publishers, by and large, are doing just fine because they're perfectly satisfied with a mere 3 percent growth rate year over year. Look no further than American corporations for what's destroying the industry.

Posted by keshmeshi on June 11, 2009 at 10:37 AM

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

I think that, if I could grasp a coherent single point in this statement, I could refute it. However, I am still trying to figure out what he is saying. Because people share videos via email, nobody wants to read plaintext books any more? Or maybe, if books were written more like Twitter posts with @mackovech and #allusion's sprinkled everywhere, people would get into them more readily?

Posted by Greg on June 11, 2009 at 10:45 AM