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July 10, 2007
bLinking
This morning I spoke to a class at Regis College. The subject of the course was The Business of Art. The focus of my talk was that Publishing is perhaps the most dynamic industry of the day.
I couldn’t possibly mean by this that Publishing is at the cutting edge. Of course it’s not. Sometimes we bookpeople can’t even see the edge. Obviously I don’t mean that the industry is growing, either. I don’t even mean that it is particularly healthy at the moment or in any way tractable, though I believe it will again be. I mean only this: Publishing—an entrenched old industry, made rigid by fear and habit, instinctually conservative, codified, hierarchical, exclusionary, and terrified—is in historic throes at a moment of radical forced change.
When I say it’s busier than any other industry I know of, I mean it’s busy being reborn.
I was able to describe for the class (describe to a limited extent, since what I know of it is only what I’ve read online) the arrival of Manolis Kelaidis’s blueBook —a development by which a printed book might become hyperlinked on a nearby laptop via conductive ink, a reader’s finger, and a wireless processor hidden in the boards.
And I was able to say to the class that this technology has arrived while most of us have been holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously and trying not to be driven crazy by them. The competing thoughts (I think) are (a) that the Book will be inviolable for at least another print-bound generation, and (b) that all we need to do right now is secure the electronic rights and prepare digital files for compatibility with the right digital delivery system.
I don’t want to be any more Hegelian about this than necessary, but now that such lateral thinking—Kelaidis’s marriage of digital and analog—has arrived as (a perhaps-possible) synthesis, the industry is going to have to generate another thesis.
In the future,
Will authors and what-readers-there-are still need printers?
Will there be “books” at all as we know them?
Will “bookstores” all be online?
Will there still be Intellectual Property Rights?
Will Wikipedia’s angels buy all of those rights up and then free them to the public domain?
Will Bill Gates or someone else?
Or will Google just co-opt them?
Will the developing Digitized Universal Library both eliminate the concept of The Work Entire and make the public domain boundless?
As I said, the realities of the industry are, at the moment breathtakingly, terrifyingly dynamic.
But while we have been begging precisely these questions by focusing on the recent return of hand-held e-book readers, it strikes me once again as quite possible that the answers to our most important questions will not be technological.
Yes, I know that sounds like a thought either deluded or reactionary. But I genuinely do not believe that it is either of these.
More later.
Fred Ramey
Posted 7/10/07
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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