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Why don’t you take the comfortable chair?

Colin Robinson, former editor at Scribner (a division of  Simon & Schuster) and previously at The New Press and Verso,  has written an excellent diary piece for the London Review of Books on Publishing’s Demise.

It’s always interesting to read an experienced insider’s take on the state of the industry, and although it covers some very familiar ground, Robinson’s article is particularly  comprehensive and thoughtful (and, given he was fired by Scribner in December 2008, dignified).

It is also interesting that Robinson notes — as Allan Kornblum of Coffee House Press did in his recent interview with Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading (mentioned yesterday)  —  that electronic communication has made  “life easier for writers and harder for readers.”   As more and more stuff is published fewer of us are actually reading. We’re  becoming more concerned with being  heard than with listening, with being read rather than reading:

Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?

And yet, Robinson doesn’t think the book is doomed. Publishers just have to change the way they do business:

A system that requires the trucking of vast quantities of paper to bookshops and then back to publishers’ warehouses for pulping is environmentally and commercially unsustainable. An industry that spends all its money on bookseller discounts and very little on finding an audience is getting things the wrong way round.

According to Robinson, the opportunity is in curating the mass of material that is out there and finding niche audiences:

The roles of editor and publicist, people who can guide the potential reader through the cacophony of background noise to words they’ll want to read, will become ever more important.

Sounds about right.

Link (via @sarahw)