Consumer Republic

Digital publishing is driven by producers, not readers If one had to pick the moment in which the book publishing industry came to terms with the digital future, it would be those two days last March when gadget-happy readers downloaded a minor Stephen King novella hardly worth the paper it wasn't printed on. Since then, the traditional publishing world has gotten e-religion. Microsoft has nabbed Random House's Michael Crichton and 15 Simon & Schuster Star Trek titles for e-book giveaways using proprietary software for its new Palm Pilot-wannabe. Random House has bought a little less than half of the writers' self-publishing service Xlibris, bringing new legitimacy to vanity publishing. Recently, Time Warner announced its digital publishing venture--iPublish, iWrite and iLearn--a combination e-book mart, quasi-vanity press and writers' self-help community. A record 60 digital publishing concerns were among the exhibitors at last week's BookExpoAmerica, which was kicked off by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos. Perhaps publishing executives are looking over their shoulders at the music industry to see what happens when technology surpasses established business interests. Alas for the music moguls, their product already existed in digital form; it was easy pickings for a MP3.com and Napster, which have no vested interest in shiny rainbow-colored discs sold at fixed prices. Book publishers don't have that problem--yet. Meantime, publishers want a piece of the action before they are rendered obsolete. Although a lot of e-publishing chatter is focused on the e-book and its hard- and software wars, the beauty of digital publishing is not that it provides another way to consume the same 25 books that dominate the racks of every airport bookstore. Its impact on the p-book--books printed on paper--is far more dramatic. Digital distribution and print-on-demand technology will free publishing of its twin albatrosses: warehousing and returns. No longer will publishers have to guess how many copies of a book to print or wait 90 days after a sale to be paid. Books, if printed at all, will be printed after they're sold. Back-listed books will be dusted off, out-of-print titles resurrected. The obscurest manuscript will see the light of day. Anyone with a word-processing program can become a book author without sacrificing a single tree. We have seen the post-Guttenberg age, and it looks like a library: Jorge Luis Borges' library. That is, a collection of every book that has ever existed, infinite and unintelligible. In the old days, even vanity publishing had an entry fee. But at Xlibris, whose slogan is "Log on a writer, log off an author," a writer who doesn't mind using a generic format can publish a book for nothing. Better yet, there is only the merest line between publishing one's opus and distributing it, too. Unlike a traditional vanity press, which supplies its customer with boxes of bound volumes, an Xlibris book "exists" in the databases of Amazon.com, Borders.com and Books in Print, alongside all the "real" books. It's out there on the virtual shelves, waiting for a search engine to pluck it out and set it before the reader. Ah yes, the reader. One would assume that in our "consumer-focused" economy, the reader would be driving the stampede to e-publishing. This is not the case. Books may be at the forefront of digital commerce, but the sad fact is people are not reading more of them. Book sales have remained flat for most of the '90s. If anything, books are in serious oversupply. Publisher's Weekly (Adweek's corporate sister) employs legions of freelance book reviewers and yet it manages to cover only 10 percent of the 70,000 review copies it receives each year. With digital publishing, all readers will have to become editors of Publisher's Weekly, slogging through an undifferentiated slush pile in search of something good to read. Indeed, our whole culture is in the process of becoming a slush pile. There are no longer any significant barriers to recording and distributing music and publishing books. Once the bandwidth permits, the same will hold true for television and film--but not because audiences demand it. The secret behind the amazing fecundity of the information economy is that it is free from the restraints of demand. Information is indifferent to the users, for whose benefit it ostensibly exists. Rather, it exists for the benefit of its producers. And these days, that can be anyone. K

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Consumer Republic

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman