What is Business Lit, Publishers Scramble, Book and Internet Merge
What is Business Literature?:
Exceptionalists . This is the word Richard Nash uses in the article to describe the “defenders” of the book. We have all encountered people like that in our lifetime. The ones who say, “technology is the devil! Print is dying and it is all technology’s fault”. I agree with Nash, in that the book does not need to be protected. The physical invention of the book was the way literature began to solidify. It was the turning point where people began to trust words on paper than just words coming from people’s mouths.
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*”Business of literature is publishing”: It is true. The actual money is within the publishing system. These companies are the middle men and it is understandable why they feel threatened by the increase in digital print.
Nash makes another excellent point when he remarks: “First, prior to recent innovations, manuscripts not published were unavailable for analysis. So the universe of knowledge we have about books, literature, and publishing excludes that universe of books that were never published”.
Everyone obviously knows that not all works get published. But if you really think about it, there are hundreds maybe even thousands of books that were not published because companies (The Big Six), determined they weren’t “commercial” enough.
What if some of that literary work had revolutionary ideas? Readers (us) would never know. This reminds me of “The Canon” and how the selection of these books were made while others just faded away.
Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future:
Evan Hughes points out the flaws of publishing companies now and how they must adapt in order to flourish in this new digital print era. With more writers self-publishing and actually making more money, what future do these companies even have?
Although Hugh makes a good point that they have the connections, manpower and marketing strategy to blow up a book, it still might not be enough.
Anyone can self promote their school, job, or any organization they are a part of through social media and other channels. All it takes nowadays is enough “likes” and you can be getting interviewed by Ellen Degeneres the next day.
Why the Book and the Internet Will Merge:
The book and the Internet have already merged through Ebooks. All three of these articles are positive that technology, most importantly the Internet will actually build this new experience for readers everywhere. It creates a new type of market where the literary world meets the Internet. It will inspire people to be more creative and to do a lot more with the ideas from a book than just discussing it. Again, publishing companies may be in danger if they do not adapt but books will still be around for a very long time.
I thought these were some interesting articles on reading e books vs print books:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120765/naomi-barons-words-onscreen-fate-reading-digital-world
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation
This is a great video!:
One response so far
I agree that it seems that all three articles seem to consent on the revolutionary ebook to replace hard copies in the future. One of the articles mentioned how that despite having printed words becoming digital, there was still a need for book stores to allow people to peruse through bookshelves and serendipitously discover something they otherwise would not come across. But who is to say that with how the internet is able to gauge the users’ interests, won’t use their algorithms to cater searches to the users’ interest like they do with all the other commodities being packed and sold via the internet?
I like hard copies of books but I also see advantages of having books digitized: saves paper, saves space, “used” books will become something obsolete (Publishers lose money because people buy secondhand editions). Apps for reading books on portable devices only continue to improve as one article mentions, with a variety of features and it would be possible to still retain the possibilities of making notes and writing in the printed books.
I believe there are alternative business models that the publishing agency can adopt because we should not disregard the printed text just yet – though it wouldn’t be surprising that a hard copy book may become an “artifact” in the future. There are some publishing companies who aren’t willing to spend additional money printing out books unless say, the digital copy has received a certain level of acclaim. This will ensure that the hard copies are usually best sellers with a fanbase that would probably purchase these “limited edition” hard copies of the work to support the authors they love.
As a variation on the serial magazines of the old days where authors would put out a chapter of the novel in an anthology to keep readers anticipating, the internet allows the possibility of individuals to purchase each chapter separately as they are published like one would buy one song rather than an entire album (to ensure consistent revenue for the author rather than the whole gambling on a whole novel).
These are just my thoughts that I didn’t think were broached but which were derived from my own engagement with foreign books that fans have translated for target audiences and in a sense, “published” on the web to help these authors gain exposure to a foreign audience and possibly have their writing become officially published outside their country – globalization is a trend afterall.