It’s been ten years since I worked in book publishing, but I still sometimes miss it, and still follow the industry news a bit via daily emails from Publishers Weekly (PW). Today begins the biggest annual book publishing event, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the show started with a Tools of Change keynote address by Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan that revisited the topic of publishing’s future. PW wrote about the event and how in a blog post a year ago Lloyd had chastised her audience for focusing too much on this worry about the future and not on what was happening right now. In the Frankfurt address this week, she talked about the extent to which that future is now and how much has changed in the past year. For example, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol, outsold the print version on the book’s release date. That is not to say that she thinks devices will lead the way for digital publishing, as one of her predictions was that it will be platform-led.
I myself read Kindle editions on my iPhone (if only I could afford a Kindle DX!), but I also like those on the eReader platform I had first used on my old Palm Pilot. That one works not only on my iPhone but also on any computer, and allows me to customize the view on my Mac or PC in a way that makes the book very readable. I like being able to read the book either at my desk on my computer or on the move on my iPhone. But the Kindle app has a lot more books (and a more up-to-date selection), so I am plowing through novels on the subway in the Kindle format, too. Both platforms, Kindle and eReader, have a problem that Lloyd didn’t mention: in the rush to get books out, they’re missing some really basic copyediting steps. I’ve bought several books that had major typos and formatting errors, from blocks of text out of place or repeated, to text being spread across the page like an e.e. cummings poem. An author friend notified me that his backlist was now available on Kindle, so I happily bought some of them. I was embarrassed to tell him that they were full of typos, so I hashed it out with Amazon instead.
The Frankfurt speech ended with the following admonition against complacency in the industry (in any industry?):
Lloyd closed with the following quote from Seth Godin, which stands as both cautionary and a call-to-action: “Things you can learn from the music business (as it falls apart): The first rule is so important, it’s rule 0: 0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.”
from PW
Brave new world, isn’t it? I think it is wonderful that we have all these options, typos notwithstanding. I will beat the good old drums, however, and say that, for me, it does not get any better than opening up a newly bought book and smelling the printed pages. I also want the texture of the book cover, the design; reading includes olfactory, visual and tactile experiences for me. I just cannot imagine getting all this “pleasure of the text,” as Roland Barthes might call it, from either Kindle or a computer screen.
Plus, to my horror, but also in response to my nagging misgivings about cellphones, I am reading today’s New York Metro and the news that French health “watchdogs” recommend limiting the use of cellphones and other portable devices that “emit radio-frequency electromagnetic waves” simply because not enough research has been done yet to show their long-term effect on health. It is a point that gets me going, of course, me and my health concerns and my issues with global capitalism that allows for the marketing of hip products previous to adequate research about their overall impact on the human body or the environment. Not that I think we can live without them these days, but I will try and stay away from the glare of computer screens as much as possible, and read my novels in book format as long as I still have a pretty decent eyesight.
That being said, I do not want to be a killjoy here, for sure. The future of book publishing is indeed a valid concern, and we need to be aware of what is happening in a field that promotes what I believe is the essence of our humanity regardless of the format: thinking and reading.