Three years ago it was all the rage to say that you believed in Hope and Change. The mistakes and missteps of the recent past could be tidied up and moved to the attic as relics of a bygone era. Today, the overwhelming sentiment seems to be that the cleanup isn't happening as fast enough, that the change hasn't yet fully arrived.
But I see significant changes taking place in the publishing industry, and the pace is staggering.
Longstanding barriers between authors and readers -- barriers of technology, finance, and distribution -- are crumbling faster than news stories can report.
When I got into publishing nearly a decade ago, the big thing people were excited about was the emergence of Print on Demand technology. It afforded publishers the ability to digitally produce a book without all of the set-up expense of offset printing, essentially making it more cost effective to generate print runs of 1, 10, or 100. Before POD, a print run of only a few hundred would have been cost prohibitive. The concession was that the quality of the book would be noticeably inferior when compared with an offset print job.
POD technology has come into its own over the last ten years and has made it possible for all sorts of people who would have been previously unable to start a publishing company to call themselves publishers. The financial risk of printing 5,000 or 20,000 copies and finding shelf space for them with a retailer was mitigated by the reality that a publisher could choose to print just enough copies to fill existing orders. Though the margins wouldn't be fantastic, there also wasn't the risk of having a garage full of boxes filled with a guaranteed bestseller that didn't.
It's not uncommon to hear the argument that this ease of publishing is detrimental to the industry as a whole because there are now approximately 50000% times more books published a year (not verified by real data, but you get the point). That's something of a false argument--even though the technological and financial barriers have come down, the distribution matter wasn't entirely cleared up by POD. The reliance on recognition of a publishing brand by major reviewers and retailers still exists. There are only so many column inches that can be devoted to book reviews and only so much space on bookstore shelves. The gatekeepers at these two outposts certainly and understandably rely on known quantities.
But the publishing evolution continues, and now we've got e-books changing the landscape in a
profound way.
I can't overstate how important POD has been to changing publishing, but I'm beginning to get the sense that it was only middle ground and that its effects won't be nearly as significant as those of the electronic book. The e-book is immediately available, lending itself to impulse buying. E-books take up no space on a bookstore's (or home's) physical shelves, and even as pricing practices fluctuate, low-cost options remain available daily. For readers, buying multiple books at once is easy, affordable, and gratifying.
So those are the changes, but what hope do they offer?
I hope these changes bring back the excitement of reading for people who may have given it up in favor of movies or video games or life. As importantly, I hope that those people who never really started reading because of its more analog nature can find the beauty and power, the human condition connectivity that is unique to the book and that they can cherish it like those of us who already do.
A few weeks ago when I was nursing a cold, I was lucky enough to talk a dear friend of mine into reading Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld to me over the phone. As she read, I was struck by a forgotten wonder, and instantly transported back a quarter of a century to the living room of my childhood home, and onto my father's lap where I first developed my love of reading.
As a kid, books made me feel like anything was possible. As a young adult they filled me with enough hope to start a publishing company. And in this new age, I'm hopeful that they can make a resurgence in the popular culture, bringing the country with them.