That’s Not the Doors Song I Would Have Chosen
There’s a long cover story this week in New York Magazine about publishing. Rather than leave any doubt as to the future of the book industry, the article is called “The End.” And while movies in the thirties and forties were never complete without those two words appearing in the final reel — those six letters giving cathartic closure and making us eager for yet more stories — what writer Boris Kachka seems to be saying with his piece is that not only is our movie over, but there won’t be a sequel. Time to leave the theater. Go home. Stick a fork in publishing; it’s done. Don’t believe me? Here’s the subheadline:
The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.
And yet, even though I wrote a book called Print is Dead, even I don’t think that publishing is over. Rather, it just needs to change and be willing to embrace new ideas and business models. And while the challenges the industry faces are indeed difficult, they’re hardly insurmountable. Kachka himself points to a few hopeful enterprises (HarperStudio, the Kindle) but, for the most part, the article is more of the usual.
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Will publishers be an extinct business? A friend and I recently talked over this issue while sipping our Starbucks. For us the issue came down to, “Will there be anyone to buy the books?”
Let me give you my prospective from the heartland of Michigan. My friend and I are both educators. We find increasingly in our schools teachers no longer assign lenthy reading or book long reading. Teachers are turning away from reading the text-book to reading short 1 or 2 page summaries which they have pasted together about a topic. So, increasingly, students are reading less from books and are more often than not, rarely having the experience of reading any book in its entirety. Very often students carry their textbooks back and forth between home in the school, but these books are actually never read.
When I go to our local library, I find mostly middle age housewives checking out the latest fiction and a second group of mostly children. These children are generally the children of foreign students and immigrants. The larger bulk of our upper elementary, middle school, and high school students are absent. My friend’s and my experience is the bulk of students just simply are not reading books.
Recently, I read some articles on how some major libraries and universities are removing the books from the libraries. The libraries are being changed into common meeting and study areas absent the books.
It would appear the future of what would be the book market is no book reading. No book reading = no book future = no future for publishers.
Jim
The title of the book should have been “Books are Evolving”. The difference between books and print is not a small distinction.
There is also sufficient anecdotal evidence to suggest that the WEB is being optimized for a market paper books were never really meant to own. They were just the best, perhaps only way at the time, to present and distribute that information.
That said, how could I even consider buying your book without a product description? You send me to Amazon and their poor user interface to fish out the details I’ want. Still, thefishing looks good. Congrats on your attempt to tackle this topic.
I ran into the phrase recently “reading long” to describe the act of reading multi-page articles and books as opposed to the one or two paragraph snippets.
The author, Joe Clark, an expert in visual accessibility and captioning was making the case that the internet has molded our brains to the point where focusing our attention on a single subject for an extended period no longer feels right.
He’s exaggerating for effect, I believe, but I agree with the drift was of what he’s saying.
Anyway, “reading long” has now become a part of my vocabulary.
(The article will be posted free on the net in a couple of months. I’ll come back and post the link. Gotta look it up.)