Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Last week, I was very flattered to be asked by Richard Charkin, the head of Macmillan in the UK, to write up some thoughts for his Charkinblog on what it’s been like to be a person who works in the publishing industry who has just gone through the process of writing and publishing a book. Charkin is a very smart and nice guy, so I was only too happy to oblige. After spending a couple of hours thinking about this, I sent him my thoughts in a short essay entitled “Some Experience Necessary: Looking at publishing from both sides.” Here’s a portion of the essay:

One of publishing’s dirty little secrets is that, increasingly, it’s not about the books. Or maybe, it’s too much about the books (meaning books as objects, or even books as a number on a balance sheet). In the publishing process we find ourselves sometimes getting removed from the ideas and stories found in our books; the words that provide the power to deliver amazing and transformative experiences to readers (and are therefore the kinds of books we read growing up that made us want to get into this business in the first place).

One of the reasons this happens is because people who work in publishing, for the most part, have not had the experience of writing and publishing a book.

The rest of the essay has been posted on Richard’s blog, which you can view here.