A Companion to the History of the Book (97 page)

To those horrified by these statistics, it is important to consider what went before. As Umberto Eco wrote, “We can complain that a lot of people spend their day watching TV and never read a book or a newspaper, and this is certainly a social and educational problem, but frequently we forget that the same people, a few centuries ago, were watching at most a few standard images and were totally illiterate” (Eco 1996: 297).

If newspapers have to consider competition from other media, then the book industry is also likely to continue to see erosion of their base readership. In highly developed nations, as more television is watched, as the Internet is more frequently surfed, and as more electronic games are played, is there not an inevitability about the decline in time spent reading books? The US analyst Barrie Rappaport commented in 2004:

The problem is that you can only grow by attracting new customers, but the industry is not attracting new customers; in fact it’s losing customers . . . That means it’s relying more and more on the heavier book-buyer – the more affluent, higher-educated customer - but we’re seeing some slack in that area as well. There’s only so many books that those people can buy. (quoted in Nance and Thomas 2004)

This is at the heart of the present debate in the mature industries in the US and the UK. How can they reach out to a new audience? What kind of books do light-buyers and non-buyers want? Boyd Tonkin writes: “The book market certainly needs to expand. What it requires is creative innovation, not mad downmarket plunges. For a start, publishers have to think harder about how to reach the hordes of critical consumers of film, TV, internet and pop culture who should be reading books as sharp and savvy as all the shows, sites and bands they adore” (Tonkin 2005).

To stimulate a wider sector of the population to read, is it possible for the publishing industry to be less elitist in its approach and more imaginative in its workings with other media? Publishing recruits the same personnel as make up its readership, as the publisher John Blake highlighted: “Publishing is dominated by middle-class publishers, publishing books for middle-class people to read” (Bury 2005: 12). Could representatives of a wider cross-section of the population produce books that more people want to read, with content more appropriate to their interests? The success
oí manga
(Japanese comic books) is an example of more visual material that can encourage reading amongst young people who are attracted to DVDs and games rather than books. Does it in the end matter what type of books people read? The debate echoes concerns from an earlier age, as Edward Tenner notes: “Even in the golden age of print culture from the 1880s to the 1930s, literary men and women were appalled by most Americans’ indifference to book buying and by what they saw as the masses’ preference for trashy and sensational reading” (Tenner 2004).

Aside from the Harry Potter phenomenon, a great stimulus to sales of books has been the involvement of television shows. Recommendations by Oprah in the US and Richard and Judy in the UK have led to big sales increases for the books concerned, suggesting there is a market for quality literature and nonfiction. However, especially in the UK, the increasing reliance of chain booksellers on sales figures to drive their stock decisions means that a new book has very little time to make its mark in the market. The concentration of bookselling has made it much more difficult for independent publishers to place their books in front of potential readers. Smaller bookshops have given up trying to compete against the discounting of the chains and the supermarkets, either ceasing to trade or becoming more specialist in the type of stock they offer.

The concentration of production in the publishing industry looks certain to continue. An Arts Council report into independent publishing in England concluded that the industry is becoming increasingly polarized “between a small number of very large corporate publishers, mainly divisions of multinational media and publishing groups, and a large number of small and very small operators” (Hampson and Richardson 2004: 14). The larger publishing houses strive to maintain branding and innovation by keeping smaller imprints alive within the larger business, but there are questions over the diversity of publishing if the industry is dominated by the larger players in both publishing and bookselling.

Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig’s book
Free Culture
(2004) is subtitled “How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.” Lessig argues that “A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past” (Lessig 2004: xiv).

The development of the Internet has led to new ways of thinking about intellectual property and the rights of copyright holders and users. The Web provides tremendous opportunities for collaborators to develop software, create multimedia projects, and write stories together. One example is
Wikipedia,
the free online encyclopedia whose entries anyone can edit. Yet the rules surrounding intellectual property remain rigid. When readers share a book – a novel passed round a family or set of friends – they are not penalized for those further uses, and copies can be bought and sold second-hand without royalties being payable to the copyright holder. By contrast, passing on the digital file of an e-book is rarely allowed by the terms of purchase, and controls in the software would most likely prevent this.

If the music industry has become more relaxed about music downloads, should not the publishing industry be more open to new ways of thinking about the copyright environment? In the area of academic journal publishing, there is a debate about whether the Internet changes the rules. Without the costs of print, journal publishing potentially becomes more profitable. Publishers would argue that they still have the editorial and quality assurance costs (articles are normally peer reviewed), but challenges from the Open Access movement have led to some journals becoming freely available to users (Worlock 2004). Some would also argue that publishers ought not to profit from information whose creation has been paid for by the government and research institutions. Should not critical research in medicine be available gratis to anybody? There is no clear indication of how great a hold Open Access will have on the journal industry, but experimentation continues and increasingly authors are allowed to post the final versions of their papers on personal websites. If monographs were also to go online, publishers would have to work ever harder to justify their existence (Phillips 2004).

Another initiative is the Creative Commons, based at Stanford Law School, which provides a set of intellectual property (IP) licenses for authors to use. For example, a photographer could publish a photo on the Web and allow others to use it on their websites as long as it is properly attributed. Creative Commons was founded on the notion that not everybody wants to exercise all their IP rights:

Many people have long since concluded that all-out copyright doesn’t help them gain the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Many entrepreneurs and artists have come to prefer relying on innovative business models rather than full-fledged copyright to secure a return on their creative investment. Still others get fulfilment from contributing to and participating in an intellectual commons. For whatever reasons, it is clear that many citizens of the Internet want to share their work – and the power to reuse, modify, and distribute their work – with others on generous terms. (Creative Commons 2005)

The content of the Internet is often criticized, but over time its quality will improve as more resources are digitized. Moves to digitize library holdings are underway, and Google is driving a project to digitize some major collections, including the New York Public Library and the Bodleian in Oxford. Google Print is also digitizing, for free, books in print from a variety of publishers, so that searches in Google will lead to the insides of the books. (Amazon has a similar scheme.) Links then offer ways of purchasing either the printed book or online access. Such developments have divided the publishing industry between those who welcome a new way of marketing their books and those fearful of the “Napsterization” of book publishing. If the digital files of books are readily available, will they start to be shared like music files?

This also presents a concern for those authors who need to make a living out of their writing. They are already questioning their share of the proceeds from digital delivery (Adams 2001). The instinct of publishers is to apply the same thinking as with print, i.e., a basic percentage of the proceeds goes to the author. But if the print cost disappears, authors will wonder why they cannot receive a larger share, perhaps equal to the publisher’s income.

The Book’s Digital Future

Advances in technology are producing a range of devices on which text can be read, and the possibility is that a dominant format will emerge. Digital technology has also revolutionized the production of printed books. Digital printing, as opposed to traditional offset printing, has changed the economics of book production, enabling genuine print on demand (single copies to order) as well as short runs (say, fifty copies). This facility has little relevance to the world of mass-market paperbacks, where large printruns mean that the benefits of offset printing still apply, but it is of great interest to academic publishers and those who want to self-publish. John Thompson calls this a “fundamental change in the life cycle of the book” (2005: 436). Some publishers are bringing out-of-print works back into print, while others are keeping books going with sales of only a few copies a year (Taylor 2003). As an example, the whole Virago backlist of women’s fiction is now available again in decent editions, whereas previously books had to achieve a minimum sale to stay in print. Publishers are no longer forced to put books that are selling only a few hundred copies a year out of print; they can build up orders and reprint, or use systems at wholesalers and the digital printers to supply copies on demand within a few days. Digital printing is also encouraging self-publishing. The author of a memoir unlikely to be taken on by a mainstream publisher can at low cost have it published by a third-party press or publish it him- or herself.

Chris Anderson (2004) writes of the “Long Tail,” an effect apparent in the music and publishing industries. Usually retailers will carry only stock that can generate enough profit: the major book chains will return books that are not selling through in sufficient numbers within a certain period. Yet there are many more titles out there and the Internet provides a means of displaying and accessing them. Previous thinking has been dominated by the Pareto rule: 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of the output. A few books are bestsellers; most are not. But what if that tail of misses extends a long way along the graph?

Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than hits . . . The average Barnes and Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: if the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are. (Anderson 2004)

The “Long Tail” could be supplied by delivery of online files or by books printed on demand. Anderson argues for everything to be made available – books should not go out of print – and for prices to be lowered to encourage consumers to visit the tapering end of the tail. Online delivery and print-on-demand could be especially useful in semi-developed nations like India or China, where books with a limited market (particularly academic books) are difficult to publish and distribute (Xin 2005).

A logical extension of print-on-demand at large production facilities would be the development of cheap point-of-sale machines. Jason Epstein sees a new order in which books will be printed and bound on demand by machines that “within minutes will inexpensively make single copies that are indistinguishable from books made in factories” (Epstein 2002: 178). These machines could be placed anywhere in the world, in bookshops, libraries, and universities, with access to an unlimited catalogue of titles over the Internet. An example of this technology is the Espresso Book Machine, which went on trial in 2006 at the World Bank’s InfoShop in Washington. The machine can print and bind a 300-page paperback in three minutes.

The Resilience of Print

In the early 1990s, the printed word appeared to be facing a terminal crisis, viewed as “a noble anachronism crushed between televised entertainment and burgeoning electronic information sources” (Tenner 2004). Subsequently, the book has proved to be resilient in the face of challenges from other media, confounding the predictions of those who saw its replacement, while digital technology is providing mechanisms that enhance our ability to produce and distribute printed books (Staley 2003).

Some publishers have switched to other modes of delivering texts. Lexis-Nexis, part of Reed Elsevier, sold off its print operation in the area of law, and delivers a fast and reliable service to its customers online. Large reference works such as the
Oxford English Dictionary
and the
Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
have moved online, offering superior search facilities and regular updating, giving access to an evolving title rather than a static edition. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
abandoned door-to-door selling of print volumes in favor of offering a free service over the Web, trusting that advertising revenues would support its operations. This was in turn replaced by the current online subscription service. Yet the
Britannica
has revitalized its print offerings with a new print set as well as other reference works. The new edition of the
DNB
(2005) came out in print as well.

The number of new print titles published continues to grow in many countries around the world. In China, between 1992 and 2002, title output grew from around 90,000 to 170,000; in Brazil, between 1990 and 2000, the total rose from 13,000 to 45,000.