Publishing is the primal creative industry qua industry. It was the reproductive potential of the printing press, the first technology to mass produce and widely distribute cultural and intellectual items, which threw up new modes of organisation around the workshop, the humanist printer and ‘typographical fixity’. The spread of printing across Europe was astonishingly rapid and ignited revolutions in religion, science and education (Eisenstein 1980). Arguably, more than anything else, printing, publishing, created modernity itself. Even before Gutenberg, in medieval scriptoria and the great centers of ancient learning, there were still many functions of publishing; after all, books (or scrolls) were still produced. Publishing occupies a unique place in cultural history, and we should ask what affect this had on other creative industries.
So we have a strange practice, but also an ancient proto-industry acting as a template for one of the fastest growing areas of the contemporary economy. Now we also have an industry in crisis.
Perverse as it may seem, even setting digital media aside, publishing is in crisis. Publishing, famously, is always in crisis. The present one has some nasty symptoms. Across the industry consolidation has been rampant. New working methods and cultures have displaced gentlemanly Old World orthodoxies. Bricks and mortar retailers fight for survival, particularly in Anglo-American cultures. Costs, inevitably, keep rising. Alarming macro-trends, like the decline in long-form reading, the rise in alternative media and audience time pressures, only worsen. Trade publishers see their mid-lists hollowed; academic publishers face pressure from higher education spending cuts, while educational publishers encounter increased competition across their markets.
Then along came the digital challenge. Centralising power, eroding value and breaking publishing’s time-worn business models with parvenu ease, publishers have been caught in a race to catch up, scale up and tool up. Trade publishers are trapped, like traditional computer manufacturers, between powerful upstream producers (i.e. authors, agents) and downstream distributors and retailers, like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Profit lies in the efficient coupling of the two, creating a structural vulnerability now exposed by the web.
Self-publishing – whether for the callow novelist or seasoned academic – has never been easier, raising strategic questions not just for the industry but about what it means to publish in the first place. Publishing can be difficult for outsiders because it is already intensely competitive. In few sectors is there an equivalent expenditure of intellectual capital on such low financial returns. In short, in few fields do equivalent levels of talent work flat out for, by the standards of many globally scaled industries, such meagre pickings. From old media giants to nimble web native startups, new entrants are nonetheless circling. It remains to be seen what difference merged entities like Thomson Reuters and Penguin Random House will make or how publishers will grow in emerging markets. The calculus is changing in the digital world with its low barriers to entry, fast growth rates and direct consumer relationships.
Over the centuries change was the norm for publishers, whether they liked it or not. Somehow book sales kept on rising. Yet this masks missed opportunities – by, erroneously, defining their role as makers of books, publishers have straitjacketed themselves, missing new formats ripe for publication and so backing themselves into a corner. Perhaps this is an inevitable result of specialisation and market segmentation. Perhaps not. Either way, publishers need a more informed idea of their role, allowing them to focus on core competencies in difficult times while building a more expansive notion of their activities. In future they might react more nimbly to technological change and see it as an opportunity, not a threat. Ignoring big questions is easy but leaves publishers without a clear identity when having one has never been more important. Lacking definition leaves publishers horribly exposed to the whims of history and technology.
On a more theoretical plane, our concept of mediation is troubled. In the now standard textbook on communication studies Denis McQuail (2010) lists some of the metaphors for mediation: as a window, a mirror, a filter, a gatekeeper or portal, a signpost, guide or interpreter, as a forum or platform, a disseminator, an interlocutor. Mediation, like publishing, is conflicted and elusive. A theory of publishing is a theory of mediation, of how and why cultural goods are mediated. It is the story behind media, rather than the story of a medium itself (like books or words), and has a big role to play in our understanding of communications.
Publishing is an activity, a mode of production; it is difficult labour. At the same time, it is about judgement, taste, aesthetics and the exercise of reason, the considered deployment of resources, financial or otherwise. It is anything but straightforward. Nonetheless, most books on publishing, the history of the book or cultural studies are premised on an unexamined understanding of publishing. Publishing has been thoroughly explored, both historically and in the present, but not adequately theorised.
People will always communicate. More books, by far, are published than ever before. On the one hand, we have a human need, a booming sector and, with the Internet, a general flourishing of communications unprecedented in history. Long-form reading isn’t going away, it’s in a golden age. We also have an industry, a set of standards and way of life under threat. What’s going on here? We need to go beyond folksy descriptions, untested assumptions, industry propaganda and workmanlike dictionary definitions to really get publishing. We need to test those assumptions and see what, if any, conception of publishing stacks up.
We need greater clarity. Publishing is often equated with making something public. Is that enough? Does publishing always need to be commercial and what is its relationship to profit making and capitalism? Does publishing work with or against technology and technological change, and how? Dissenting pamphlets and the Financial Times web app, Bach sonatas and The Sims are all published material. How can that be? In order to understand publishing, how it might survive and thrive in a period of unparalleled challenge, we need to appreciate why it was a problem before digital technology.
Beyond the theoretical or strategic questions, this is important. Publishing really matters. It’s at the heart of our literature and our learning, our civil society, our public spheres and political discussions. Publishing carries forward our sciences and powers our culture. Publishing isn’t a passive medium; it is a part of our lives and societies, shaping them, guiding them, sometimes even controlling them. Rarely looking inward, publishing helps define our world. Over the centuries that classic combination of hustler and humanist has had an outsized impact. That should be worth a closer look.
~~The Content Machine -by- Michael Bhaskar
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