Books, Design and Culture
This book just arrived in our office and it’s staring right at me!
There’s more than a little something of the late, great Paul Rand about the transfixing cover for Essentials of Visual Communication by Bo Bergstrom (published by Laurence King) wouldn’t you say?
…which is about all the excuse I need to post this great video:
(Full disclosure: Raincoast Books distribute Laurence King, and therefore Essentials of Visual Communication, in Canada)
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Slow Burner (above) — a rather awesome — if slightly racy — cover seen at the Bookkake Blog.
How to Publish in a Recession Part 3 — The always interesting Richard Nash, the editorial director of Soft Skull Press and the executive editor of Counterpoint, talks to Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading.
The Once and Future e-book: On Reading in the Digital Age — A fascinating article on the past, present, and future of e-books and e-book readers by John Siracusa at Ars Technica. I think — like many — he underestimates the challenges (such as rights issues and, on a really basic level, a lack of expertise and human resources) publishers face making their titles available as e-books, but this really is a must-read.
Book Expo Canada is officially dead. It is an ex-trade show– Surprising precisely no one. The Globe and Mail has publisher reactions and a postmortem interview with Tom Best, vice president, marketing, at H.B. Fenn. What troubles me is the belief that we need something to replace it…
There’s so much written about how publishers don’t know what they’re doing… But how do you know what to do?”— The New York Observer talks to former PW editor Sara Nelson:
“You’re making a bet on who’s gonna like something a year and a half from now. That’s without even getting into the economy or anything—just, ‘What’s the mood of a number of people going to be a year and a half from now?’ If you thought too much about that, you’d shoot yourself.”
“We are on the verge of an explosion in independent book publishing” — Hugh McGuire of Librivox and The Book Oven chats to Allentrepreneur.
The Google Paradox — Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, on two new books published (in the conventional way) about Google:
“the more Google does to kill the traditional publishing industry with the free online content from its search engine, the more books will get written about the central role of Google in our new digital economy… The irony of Elsewhere USA and What Would Google Do? is that both books rely on the five hundred year-old technology of Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type to explain the wrenching digital transformation of the 21st century.”
Who is on twitter? — I think I fall into the cateogory of “people who are concerned about the collapse of the publishing industry.” (Thanks Sio!)
Comments closedThe publishing industry is finally turning toward “mass digitization”, Matthew Shaer reports in The Christian Science Monitor .
But “it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest” he says. It is agile independent presses — who can make decisions quickly and are “more open-minded when it comes to distribution and marketing” — that are “making the most extensive restructuring efforts” according to Schaer.
Independent presses are undoubtedly innovating — necessity is the mother of invention after all — and I would really love to believe that they can steal a march on the big publishers in the “e-book revolution”. Unfortunately I just don’t think it’s true. Or, at least, that simple.
Even if you ignore the Schaer’s assertion that the “typical” independent press can make quick decisions “without much internal friction” (in theory yes, in practice I’m not so sure), the ability to adapt is not just about a “fast and light ethos”, it is also about resources. It actually takes a great deal of time and expertise — often in short supply at small presses — to put a digital program in place. And although the cost of creating, marketing, and selling e-books may be low once the infrastructure is there, getting to that point requires a lot investment.
Soft Skull’s ambitious aim to have its entire list available digitally by the end of the year is a huge step for an independent publisher. But the two publishers Schaer specifically identifies as being behind the times are, in fact, already on this track. In November last year, Pan Macmillan made books available for the Stanza e-book reader for iPhones, and they currently offer a large, large number of downloads in different formats from their web site, as do HarperCollins .
In fact, ALL of the other major publishers — Random House, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — offer e-books to download from their web sites in the US. Not that you would know from Schaer’s article.
And HarperCollins has been trailblazing with creative online initiatives in the past year. They set up Authonomy, a community site for writers, and are launching BookArmy, which Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, describes as a “social networking site organised around books and authors.” . They’ve collaborated with if:book London and Apt to create an online, annotated version of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook , and in December they released a charming online video, This Is Where We Live, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 4th Estate imprint, that quickly went viral.
In April 2008, HarperCollins also acquired The Friday Project — originally set up to find web based material and turn it into books — as an “incubator for fostering new talent, and finding new markets.”
And let us not forget HarperStudio who may not be offering e-books yet, but have firmly established themselves on online.
Penguin have not been idle either. In December, Penguin US launched Penguin 2.0 to boost their web presence with an iPhone app and other downloads. Penguin in the UK — who sponsored in the recent BookCamp on technology and the future of the book — not only offer over 1,000 e-books on their website, they have an online dating service (no, really), and have created SpineBreakers, a web site with teenage contributors. And there is, of course, the ever-popular Penguin Blog.
The same day as Penguin 2.0 was announced, PW also reported that Random House would be partnering with Stanza and making select titles available for iPhones, and in January, Simon & Schuster relaunched their website with all the whistles-and-bells — such as blogs and author videos (outlined by PW here) — that one would expect from a publisher who knows their audience is online.
Of course none of these strategies is perfect and the major publishers still have work to do on their e-books programs (there have been complaints about the pricing in particular), but this is a period of experimentation and, with the best will in the world, it’s simply absurd to suggest, that the big publishers are “dinosaurs” who “think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books.”
Independent publishers may have “the most to gain from electronic publishing” as Richard Nash of Soft Skull says, and I genuinely hope that e-books usher in a renaissance of independent publishing. But the big publishers are not blind to the possibilities that technology is opening up and they have the resources to move quickly and boldly, and, in some cases at least, they are doing so. Let’s just give credit where it is due.
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