Walk down an average high street and you could reasonably conclude that, of all the products on offer, books are the most stupid. The windows of the big chain bookshops are littered with junk that nobody with a reading age in double figures would want to read. Inside, the stock of anything other than chick lit, celeb pap and footballers’ lives will be interrupted only by the odd history book until you get deep into the inner recesses, where you might find a yard-long poetry section and a random and desultory classics list. I, along with almost everybody I know, stopped buying in bookshops years ago. Why bother? Online, Amazon and AbeBooks have everything I need; in fact, they have everything anybody could ever need, and AbeBooks, especially, is absurdly cheap.
Yet in spite of my best efforts, over the past decade, power in the book industry has drained away from publishers to the bookshops. The shops now charge for their window displays, and publishers have to fight — with cash and discounts — to get any kind of show anywhere in the shop. This has shifted publishers’ lists dramatically downmarket. Bookshops have forced publishers to go for more and more sure-fire hits (such things are a marketing delusion: most of them fail, but never mind), and to abandon the very thing most of them went into publishing for in the first place — new, interesting and original books. Off the record, every serious publisher is now more or less unprintable on the subject of the big chains.
This, happily, is all about to change. With luck, within five years your local Waterstone’s will have shrunk roughly to the size of a branch of Snappy Snaps. Books will be a lot cheaper, and you will be able to buy anything published anywhere in the world. In fact, you probably won’t bother with Snappystone’s at all. You will go into Starbucks, slip your credit card into a machine, order a book and grab a latte, which you will finish just as your book completes its printing and binding process.
“Potentially,” says Andrew Gordon, editorial director of Simon & Schuster, “this is the biggest revolution in publishing since the invention of movable type.”
Books, basically, are about to hit their iPod/iTunes moment, when new technology drives down costs, transforms the medium and provides simplified, targeted distribution. Exactly what will happen is confusing the industry. At last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, the focus seems to have been downloading books onto machines such as the new Sony Reader, which is being launched in America at about £190. This is a portable device for reading books electronically. None of its predecessors has succeeded, simply because people are very attached to the physical object made of paper. The technology in the Reader has gone some way towards satisfying this attachment — notably through something called electronic ink, which makes the screen look more like a paper page. It might work, but the real action is elsewhere.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 on the basis of a simple technical insight: that books and the internet are a natural fit. This is because there are millions of different titles — no problem for a computer — and almost every book, apart from My Struggle by Wayne Lampard, is its own niche market. Look at a shelf full of cans of beans, any one will do; look at a shelf of books, only one will do. Amazon expanded into second-hand books and, together with companies such as AbeBooks, this effectively meant that just about every book in the world could be bought online.
Infuriatingly, however, this did not destroy the bookshops. Too many people were still too attached to browsing paper rather than pixels. In addition, of course, the bookshops were rapidly adapting by, in effect, commoditising books. The chick-lit or Jesus-was-a-gay-webmaster novel, the celeb autobiography, the self-help guide, the mad new diet and, latterly, the footballer’s anxiety attacks are all ways of making cans of beans out of paper and ink. It worked, and the chains survived and thrived.
In the meantime, however, it was more than just sales that had shifted to the internet. As anybody with a blog, like me, will tell you, serious, non-commodity books are a startlingly large aspect of daily web traffic. A recent post of mine on Jeffrey Archer and Paris Hilton received fewer hits than one on the use of metaphor by the American poet Wallace Stevens. Okay, this is not a strictly meaningful comparison, but the point was the size and global nature of the Stevens response. In another case, a debate on my blog about the reality of metabolic syndrome ended up with me telling an investigator in the public defender’s office in Portland, Oregon (find him at www.danielscottbuck.com) about the greatness of the novelist Marilynne Robinson. He bought the book in between comments on my post and was reading it and weeping before I logged off.
As with the book-discussion groups that sprang up a few years ago, this is because people love books but — because of poor education, the decline of the quality of bookshops and the mistaken marketing wisdom that real books were a strictly minority interest — they could find nowhere to think and talk about them. Fantastically widely read people come on my blog, but also highly intelligent people who don’t know what to read. Beneath all the babble about teen videos, porn and political bloggery, one of the great hidden virtues of the internet is that it has begun the long process of saving the real book. Check it out for yourself at any of these bookish sites: booksinq.blogspot.com, www.literaryrevolution.com, www.jacketmagazine.com, www.maudnewton.com, www.complete-review.com, grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com, post-literate.blog spot.com and countless others.
But, as I indicated, this is only the beginning. The next step is the big one. It is the iPod moment, and it is called, conveniently enough, POD. It stands for publishing (or printing) on demand, and it is the answer to every real publisher’s prayers.
The problem with traditional publishing — and the reason publishers are so weak in relation to bookshops — is simple: stock. Publishing a book is, in cash-flow terms, an absurd way to do business. You pay the author years in advance; you edit, print and bind the book; you then warehouse most of the edition and wait for the bookshops to order and reorder. Lots of cash goes out, and it’s a long time before any comes in. The bad side of the Bezos revolution, as far as publishers were concerned, was that Amazon holds almost no stock — a move that encouraged the bookshops to do the same. This put yet further pressure on the publishers’ stockholding budgets.
Publishers have been forced to take fewer risks. Their cheap-to-run backlists can survive on small sales, and the mass market will look after itself. But the middle element in the equation — consisting of the new, the risky, the strange, the difficult, the ambitious, the non-generic, everything, in fact, one values — has been squeezed out. As publishers repeatedly say, the number of copies of a book that now have to be sold to justify the upfront costs is getting higher and higher. New books that aren’t The Wag Diet by Jordan Beckham don’t stand a chance.
The solution to all this is POD. This does away completely with all stock and cash-flow problems. In POD, an author delivers his manuscript and the publisher edits, designs and sets it on a computer, but doesn’t actually print any copies at all. Instead, it simply waits until somebody buys one. At that point, the book — a proper one, on paper, with proper binding — can be made on the spot and delivered through, for example, Amazon or direct from the publisher. Alternatively, the buyer can get it from a printing and binding machine rather like the current digital-photo processors. The latter method is the obvious one, and Starbucks is indeed looking at it.
The central point here is that not only is stock no longer a problem for the publisher, it is no longer a problem for the reader. Every book ever written should, in time, be available at your local publishing machine. The technology is easily available. Indeed, it is already in use. Companies such as Outskirts Press and Xlibris have been offering POD for some time. There have been some successes, but the business has remained very much at the vanity end of publishing.
The difference now is that POD quality is virtually as high as the most traditionally produced book, and, of course, most serious publishers are desperate to seize back some of their editorial freedom. The threat of POD is that it will turn books into products akin to videos on YouTube. People will just churn them out in their millions, hoping for a hit. In that case, the anxious, searching reader will be in an even greater state of anxiety than he is now.
But most publishers are pretty confident they can sustain their brand identity in the POD world. There will be a fundamental difference between a book bearing the HarperCollins or Faber & Faber logo and one bearing that of some teenage bedroom geek. These mainstream publishers will also back their products with all the usual marketing and promotional devices. They are almost certainly right in this. A known publisher’s name will remain a primary signpost even in the POD world. And, in the end, a POD Marilynne Robinson remains a Marilynne Robinson, and the POD book is a real book. So the electronic book turns out to be on paper: what everybody wanted all along.
The effect will be seismic, almost certainly more radical than the impact on the record industry of MP3 technology. The whole paraphernalia of a bookshop can be replaced by a few screens and a few publishing machines. Best of all, the niche marketing and small-volume success of books on the internet will be carried over into the world of high-street selling. Thus, the truth known to bloggers and surfers alike: that real books — “the long tail” of the business, as it is fashionably known — are infinitely bigger than the tat market we are currently being offered by the malign finances and politics of the industry. POD will put power back where it belongs, with the publishers.
www.bryanappleyard.com
