Richard Eoin Nash

I agree that “[Publishers] need to stop thinking that the rest of the world exists to offer attention for the books we deign to publish”…

There’s also a good case that publishers would do better to listen to the world, or to the editors who do.

This reprint series has been very popular in Australia. Though there’s speculation (it’s Australia: those who don’t bet speculate) about how profitable it has been for Penguin, it seems to me that Penguin wouldn’t be asking the public for more reprint suggestions if it weren’t doing somewhat well out of the project.

The present ills of publishing have been 40 years in the making, as we all know: the privatizing of the Post Office by Nixon, leading to the almost-immediate demise of Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post; the Thor Power Tools decision, which was applied to publishing, and which publishers never succeeded in being exempted from, and which introduced the ruinous practice of pulping in lieu of paying warehouse tax… There is conglomeratization, which meant publishing was taken over by non-publishing enterprises and expected to return double-digit profits, which it never realistically could. There are the chains and the destruction of the mass-market paperback, and in SF a discernible disinclination towards the stand-alone novel.

So what is at issue here is a particular history in a particular country, or in Anglophone countries served by multinational publishing conglomerates, and the behaviour and philosophy of multinational publishing conglomerates (the pursuit of the blockbuster, the non-support of the mid-list) rather than the inherent qualities of print and hard-copy.

However, at my large, print-related org, the discontinuation of the hard-copy Seattle Post-Intelligencer is being read by the ascendant faction as a kind of tipping-point moment in the (ultimate) failure of print, and the world-wide adoption (ultimately) of e-books.

This scenario is never run against the obvious difficulties that global warming will produce: the revolution in the generation and distribution of electricity, for one; the complete dependence on electricity at the moment of reading for another; the replacement of plastic for encasing electronic devices and in their components, for a third. Non-electronic alternatives to wood-pulp paper generally don’t enter these discussions… There is a host of factors which makes the print = dead, e = new&alive;! paradigm at least a tiny bit suspect as a complete model of the shape of things to come.

New ways of connecting writers with readers are definitely needed. I’m just not sure they require the death of the book.

    – MF McAuliffe (04/04 07:59 PM)