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The
Warren Adler E-Sheet 36
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The Paper
Book Is Dying
Don't panic.
It will be a long goodbye.
I'm reminded
of the immortal words of T.S. Eliot in "The
Hollow Men."
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a
bang but a whimper
 Note
that he repeated the first line of this stanza
three times.
This is
exactly the way it has gone for the paper
book. Its death has been predicted at least
three times. It will end...but with a whimper,
slowly and painfully.
When
digitalized books, meaning e-books, first
arrived on the mass consciousness, I felt
certain that the pace of its acceptance would
be a lot faster than it has gone. I rushed to
have all of my backlist of 27 novels in the
English language digitalized and started on
the French translations.
It seemed a
logical next step for an author of my output,
with copyrights that lasted more than seventy
years beyond my lifetime and the budding
promise that these books would stay alive in
cyberspace for at least the time of their
cyber life, which might be for forever,
whatever that means.
Nearly half a
decade has passed since that eureka moment,
but, at long last, after numerous missteps,
failures and money hemorrhages, I begin to see
that there is a light at the end of the
tunnel.
As a lover of
books in paper form, as a producer of books,
as a collector of books, as someone who cannot
live without the comfort of being inundated
and surrounded by books, I hate the idea of
its coming demise, but I have surrendered to
its inevitability. Indeed, the book business
has already passed through the first "This is
the way the world ends" phase.
As my friend
Mike Shatzkin, one of the great gurus
of the publishing industry has pointed out,
ten years ago, there was virtually no online
bookselling. Amazon.com was launched in July
1995. The used book business was still a tiny
Mom and Pop enterprise with searches taking
time and much effort. Selling second hand
books to compete with new and paperback books
is now a big Internet business. In fact, ten
years ago the Internet was merely a device for
academia and below the radar for ninety
percent of the people. No more. It is the
ubiquitous world highway for information and
commerce.
The second
phase of "This is the Way the world ends" is
now beginning. Digital publishing, after a
stumbling start-up, is on the march,
especially in the vast field of educational
content. Most professional journals, if not
all, are on-line, including the major medical
and legal libraries. Textbooks in academia and
high schools are rolling on-line at a
breathless pace. People-friendly portable
reader devices are proliferating with most of
the major hardware manufacturers in the game
with new advances such as digital paper and
other technical breakthroughs arriving
shortly.
The biggest
challenge, again according to my friend
Shatzkin, is in the trade book field,
particularly as to the future delivery of the
narrative book, which he calls the "read once"
book.
Since writing
the narrative book is my principal occupation,
I like to think that content trumps delivery
and that if we could read content on a device
that was portable, easy and user friendly, I
would be satisfied with the reading
experience. Mr. Macawber or Leopold Bloom will
not care how they arrive in the human
imagination. Indeed, if I could load up a
friendly device with more than one narrative
book, say ten or a hundred, I would be
gratified, having saved money and time and
have my own private library traveling with me
wherever I might go.
Nothing I can
say to people over forty will ever convince
them that reading on screens will ever catch
hold. But people below that line, many of them
much younger, have grown up with screen
reading and have less of a problem with that
technology. Their sentimental devotion to the
paper book will not resonate as much as it
does to me and those of my generation.
The second
phase of "This is the way the world ends" will
be long and contentious, but it will be in the
third phase that the narrative book is
destined for change. Here I will have to be
prophetic and prophets are often not treated
kindly.
The
publishing business, like all contemporary
media, again thanks to Mike Shatzkin's insight
are operating on outmoded and soon to be
unworkable paradigms. As the music business
learned to its economic horror, the technology
that led to the democratization of the music
business has quickly and noisily destroyed the
old parameters in which that business was in
the stranglehold of just a few players who
controlled the gateway to the musical artists,
their recognition and success.
The movie
business is also on a punishing pathway led by
the technology that is slowly breaking their
stranglehold on the distribution business. The
video store is on its deathbed. The theatrical
movie business, which still depends on
auditoriums for its initial breakouts is
beginning to take the heat from internet
distribution, although its ancillary business
and DVD production is where the real money is
now. Their revolution is underway and we will
probably see the day soon when independent
producers will be able to bypass the studios
and find their financial and creative niche
via internet delivery, direct to those already
becoming accustomed to viewing movies on their
computer screens.
But the
publishing business and the brick and mortar
book booksellers will feel the heat faster
than we think. They are locked into a "best
seller syndrome" which equates the narrative
book only with its near term earning power.
Editors, who are the controllers of the
gateway to publication, are increasingly
pushed to make sure their "picks" make
favorable near term numbers. If your jobs are
at stake why take a chance on the untried and
unproven?
My narrow
interest and concern is for the author of
creative works of the imagination,
specifically the novelist and short story
writer. Like me. While I did use the term
"narrow," the facts belie its use.
There are now
nearly 200 accredited universities and
colleges giving degrees in Creative Writing.
If you go into Google and request creative
writing course in the English language you
will get, hold your breath, more than ten
million references.
What it tells
me is that there is a massive body of
aspirants trying desperately to get into the
narrowing funnel that will lead to
publication. Their chances to interest the
limited number of agents and publishers in
their work is almost nil. This does not mean
that some might find their way up the chain to
publication, but the best way to describe the
process is to use the biblical "camel through
the eye of the needle" metaphor.
What happens
to these thousands upon thousands of graduates
of these creative writing courses? Perhaps
some, unable to make a living out of novel
writing will turn to teaching, an honorable
position, but not quite the dream they
envisioned. Others will have to accept defeat
and use their talents in other, perhaps
related fields. The fact is that there is no
well trodden path for creative writers as
there is for lawyers, doctors, forest rangers,
nuclear scientists and numerous other
established occupations.
I am bowled
over by the amount of people in these creative
writing courses. They are burning with great
hopes, energy and zeal and, I'm sad to say,
that if they cannot get their efforts in front
of the people that make the publishing
decisions, they are a doomed lot. The
Internet, in my opinion, is their best hope
and is to this proposition that my efforts are
directed: Is it possible to create a path
for an author to take control of his own
career in a way that establishes an audience
for his material that will sustain a career?
This third
phase, in my humble opinion, will mark the end
of the publishing business as we know it and
while that paper book world will slowly
whimper away, a new digital era will emerge in
which the dedicated author will find another
and better path to fulfill his dream of
sharing his stories, insights and thoughts
with others. Projects are stirring whereby a
path could emerge for that first novel
dreamer, not the mere digital conversion
offered by any of the numerous companies that
will be happy to publish a physical book and
leave it isolated and in limbo.
I believe
that the many creative writing program
administrators will one day find a way to
promote their best novel and short writing
students through a system of digital
publishing yet to be determined and this
system will evolve into a credible breeding
ground for talented writers to find their
niche in the commercial publishing world.
When the
stranglehold of the publishers over
distribution is challenged by a another mode
of "out of the box" ideas using digital books
and the Internet as its principal delivery
system, the third phase will begin to
eventually displace paper book publishing in
its present form.
I truly
believe that such a time is coming faster than
we think.
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Warren
Adler
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