Looking at A New Era
Paul Hilts -- 5/8/00
Ninety attendees came from as far afield as Denmark, Brazil, Japan and Australia to examine the strategies and software of e-publishing at the sixth annual University of Virginia and Library of Congress electronic publishing seminar, "Publishing in the 21st Century: Redefining the Industry," held last month at the Library of Congress.
Keynoter Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House Inc., was inspirational as well as timely and topical. While all the industry was abuzz with talk of Stephen King's Riding the Bullet, Epstein adapted his article from the New York Review of Books, "Rattle of Pebbles," about the changes wrought in the industry in the last decade. The increasing pressure from corporate headquarters to produce profits, and from mass retail to produce more and more bestsellers, he said, has led to a "commoditization" of books.
During the last 20 years," he asserted, "book publishing has deviated from its true nature by assuming, under duress from unfavorable market conditions and the misconceptions of remote managers, the posture of a conventional business. Book publishing is not a conventional business. It more closely resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the activity itself, not its financial outcome. For owners and editors willing to work for the joy of the task, book publishing in my time has been immensely rewarding. For investors looking for conventional returns, it has been disappointing."
According to Epstein, because the new technologies liberate publishing from the economics of the printing press, the social changes to come will be sweeping. "The transformation that awaits writers and publishers today arises from new technologies whose cultural influence promises to be no less revolutionary than the introduction of movable type, a vector of civilization which these new technologies, after half a millennium, have unceremoniously replaced in the last dozen years.
Among the many tyrannies to be overcome by the World Wide Web will be the turnover requirements of retail booksellers. On the infinitely expandable shelves of the World Wide Web, there will be room for an infinite variety of books. The invention of movable type created opportunities for writers that could barely be imagined in Gutenberg's day. The opportunities that await writers in the near future are immeasurably greater.
"Whether publishers adapt to this opportunity with foresight or let [it] fall upon them as it will is unclear. What is clear is that on the World Wide Web, publishers' tasks can be reduced to an essential handful: editorial support, publicity, design, production and financing. For these functions, size confers no advantage and at a certain magnitude becomes a nuisance. My guess is that future publishing units will be small, though they may be related to a central financial source. To the extent that writers deliver the contents of their minds directly to those of their readers over the Web as Stephen King has done, such traditional publishing work as marketing, sales, shipping and warehousing together with their bureaucracies and inefficiencies can be minimized and assigned to specialist firms. Book publishing may therefore become once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative, autonomous units--or so there is now reason to believe."
The programs that followed were as exciting as Epstein's, describing how the industry players are using new tools to reshape their business. Barbara Kline-Pope, director of National Academy Press, and Scott Lubeck, v-p and managing director of Westview Press, spoke of using market research to decide what to publish and how to store, display, manufacture and sell it. Lubeck has instituted the Book in Time program from Xerox, and he brought in an inventory control specialist to better manage his printing plans.
John Conley, v-p strategy and new business development at R.R. Donnelley & Sons, explained how Donnelley is working with publishers to rethink the way they go to market. Digital printing allows the publisher to do pilot or test-market programs, he noted, while the company lowers print runs to fight returns. Publishers can therefore decide which are the manageable risks.
Bob Stein, chairman and CEO of Night Kitchen, but better known as the driving force behind Voyager a decade ago, showed his authoring tool kit, TK3. Explaining his concentration on tools, Stein noted that in the past, "The tools for e-publishing were wrong. They passed on the development of titles to the code-writers. Publishers need not worry about the technical stuff. Then the emphasis g s back to publishers' skills. They can concentrate on page design and marketing."
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