Just before jumping into my back-to-back BookExpo panels last week, I sat in on a conversation between Wired contributing editor Jeff Howe (left) , the author of Crowdsourcing, and Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody—two digital culture observers with slightly differing but complementary perspectives on the Internet’s ability to bring wide collections of people together to perform distributed actions around common goals. In a world where readers are no longer limited to being consumers, but can also become producers and distributors, the book industry is challenged to connect with its audience in new ways (some of which we’ve discussed earlier this week). Towards the end, Shirky warned that there would be no easy answers: “I don’t think there is a twenty-year business model available to anyone.”
After the talk was over, I met with Shirky back in the speaker’s green room to discuss some of these issues one-on-one.
One of the first things that book publishers need to do, Shirky emphasized, is to get comfortable with the ways the Internet enables readers to share things we like with people we like. “The most natural impulse in the world is ‘you gotta see this!'” he said. In the past, that was harder to do with books because of the obstacles in reproducing them, but “digital data blew the lid off everything.” And given how many new books are coming out every day, “enthusiasm is the only thing that matters” anymore—sure, Here Comes Everybody is getting plenty of press mentions, but it’s the three new bloggers discussing the book every day that keep the conversation about the book going and ensure its long-term viability.
That got me thinking about the distrust many print book reviewers have demonstrated towards bookblogs for “stealing” “their” audience (a topic I’ve discussed at great length), and what some people are seeing as the decline of mainstream book reviewing into general irrelevancy (in terms of how people find the books they choose to read). “If you care about books, the bookblog world is such incredibly good news,” Shirky agreed. “The idea that suppressing conversation around books is good for the industry is insane,” an example of how “the stability of the ecosystem is regarded as more important than the business model.”
But the media seems to be getting the message: Look at how many major American newspapers have launched their own bookblogs now, from Paper Cuts(NY Times) to Jacket Copy (LA Times) and Texas Pages (Dallas Morning News). (Plus, as always, whoever I’m missing.) The magazines aren’t far behind; as Emily Gould noted two weeks ago, Harper’s and The New Yorker just started blogs, too, and I’m sure others will follow suit. Now all we need, as Scott Karp observed earlier this week, is for the website designers at those publications to put the content where we can find it…