Day 321: The Late Age of Print

At exactly 12:01 A.M. on March 14, 2000, Simon & Schuster began an experiment: the publisher released best-selling author Stephen King’s first digital electronic book, or e-book, the sixty-seven-page novella Riding the Bullet, on the Internet. By 11:59 p.m. on the fifteenth, an estimated half million people had downloaded King’s story, prompting Jack Romanos, Simon & Schuster’s president, to declare the experiment a resounding success: “We believe the e-book revolution will have an impact on the book industry as great as the paperback revolution of the 60’s.” Later that year, the soon-to-be notorious accounting firm of Arthur Anderson joined the celebration of e-books. In a dubious feat of actuarial prowess, Anderson’s consultants predicted that by 2005 no less than 10 percent of all books sold in the United States would be in electronic form. It appeared that the dusty old era of printed books was finally poised to give way to a sublime digital future.

 Several years and a healthy dose of cynicism later, it seems clear that these heady claims about e-books were suffused with the same millennial hopes and dreams that had helped fuel the late 1990s dot-com boom and its accompanying faith in a resplendent technofuture. Despite the efforts of Stephen King, Simon & Schuster, and Arthur Andersen to locate themselves within the vanguard of an e-book revolution, the latter hasn’t quite reached the fevered pitch that book industry insiders had anticipated. The turning point seems to have occurred around 2001 when, in the words of Publishers Weekly, the book industry trade magazine, e-book denizens faced a “reality check.” Sluggish sales and the economic downturn following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States led many hardware manufacturers and e-book publishers to divest themselves of their interest in e-books. Their doing so followed on the heels of Stephen King’s decision, in December 2000, to discontinue writing his second e-book, The Plant, after the number of those who had downloaded installments from his Web site without paying had grown too high by his estimation.

 Still, interest in and sales of e-books have rebounded of late. A 2003 report by the Open E-book Forum found that close to a million e-books had been sold in 2002, generating nearly $8 million in revenue; the first half of 2003 saw healthy, double-digit increases in units of sale over the preceding year. A second report, compiled by the Association of American Publishers, showed more modest gains of nearly $3 million in e-book sales among the top eight trade publishers. Of course, these reports don’t account for the innumerable e-books that people acquire for free from sites such as the University of Virginia Library’s EText Center (now the Scholars’ Lab). In 2001 alone the library recorded over three million e-book downloads of works that had passed into the public domain. Moreover, major academic textbook publishers such as McGraw-Hill and Thomson Learning continue to pursue e-books in earnest, with the former reporting per month revenue from e-publishing in 2002 in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 Two other higher-profile e-book ventures not only have helped to renew public interest in the technology but have also prompted some to begin imagining a world in which the content of books—perhaps of all books now in existence—would be little more than a click away. Since 2004, search engine giant Google has been busy digitizing part or all of the printed book collections of twenty-nine (and counting) major research libraries. The company’s self-described “moon shot,” also known as Book Search, promises to make content from millions of books freely available to those with Internet access, and perhaps one day even to realize the promise of a massively cross-referenced universal library accessible to all. On November 19, 2007, online retailer Amazon.com released Kindle, a portable electronic reading device whose express purpose, according to CEO Jeff Bezos, would be to bring books—“the last bastion of analog”—into the digital realm. Onboard mobile phone technology probably makes Kindle the first portable electronic reading device to provide for ubiquitous two-way communication between bookseller and consumer (available only in North America at the time of this writing). According to Bezos, “Our vision is that you should be able to read any book in any language that’s ever been printed, whether it’s in print or out of print, and you should be able to buy and get that book downloaded to your Kindle in less than 60 seconds.”

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control -by - Ted Striphas

Day 209: The Content Machine

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

Day 95 : Essay Excerpt: Disciplining The Printed Text

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the publishing industry, comprising the writing, printing, and distribution of books and periodicals, was perhaps the largest indigenous enterprise in Calcutta. In 1911, when the six jute mills located in Calcutta employed 15,111 people, there were ninety-nine printing presses with 11,880 people working in them, making printing the second largest industry in the city. However, unlike other industries, printing posed special problems of supervision and control. As is well known from examples from all over the world, the social impact of the printing of books went far beyond that of the mere triumph of technical ingenuity in the production of a commodity.

The culture of publishing and reading printed texts was, like most other items of everyday modernity, introduced into India by Europeans and, in some sense, grafted to prior indigenous traditions of learning and intellectual activity. James Augustus Hicky, whose otherwise questionable career earned him the disapproval of his contemporary expatriates, was one of the pioneers of printing in Calcutta. After Hicky, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Charles Wilkins, and the Srirampur missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman (and their typecasters, Panchanan Karmakar and his son-in-law Manohar Karmakar) made pioneering attempts at printing in the Bengali language. Although government presses were set up in the late eighteenth century, the year 1800 is really the most crucial date in the history of Bengali printing, because in that year Fort William College and the Srirampur Baptist Mission Press were established. Young officers of the East India Company, freshly arrived in India and unraveling the mysteries of the East at Fort William College, needed texts from which to learn the local language, and the Srirampur Baptists were keen on spreading literacy and Christianity. Together, they gave impetus to the printing and publishing of books in Bengali. Very roughly estimated, a total of 212,000 copies of books were published in forty languages between 1801 and 1832 from the Srirampur Mission. During this time, Bengali entrepreneurs also came forward to try their hand at this new cultural technology. It turned out to be a roaring success.

The first Bengali publisher was Gangakishor Bhattacharya, a former employee of the Srirampur press. Gangakishor set up a press entirely on his own and started a newspaper entitled Bengali Gazette in 1816. He also brought out printed editions of the popular eighteenth-century Bengali ballad Bidyasundar, the longer Annadamangal, and the classical tales from Betal, with woodcut illustrations. A contemporary source claims that the first book published at the initiative of a Bengali was Annadamangal. Gangakishor Bhattacharya can therefore be credited with having been a pioneer who foresaw the potential market for printed editions of popular books that were already in circulation as manuscripts or in oral performance. Nothing much, unfortunately, is known of this man; his newspaper, too, was short-lived.

But Bengali entrepreneurs came into the new trade in a big way as soon as it became apparent that books could become popular as a marketed commodity. The history of these early presses is hard to reconstruct; there is little or no documentary evidence to indicate anything of the background of the printers or the life of each press. For the period between 1820 and 1830, we have the names of twenty presses, from four lists quoted in two sources. As the lists are incomplete, there is no way of ascertaining when these presses were set up or how long each survived. In several cases, their locations are also not mentioned. We have thirteen place-names for seventeen of the presses: Bowbazar, Mirzapur, Sankharitola, and Arpuli were places claiming more than one press. The presses were quite widely dispersed in the Bengali settlements in the northern part of the city.

Sometime later, a major center of printing and publishing grew up along Chitpur Road, in the neighborhood of Shobhabazar, Ahiritola, and Goranhata. Exactly when this happened, it is hard to say because, except for mention of a single press in Shobhabazar, there is no indication in any of the available records of a printing center in the area until the 1830s. The exception was Bishwanath Deb's press, set up perhaps by one of the members of the Deb family of Shobhabazar. Sukumar Sen has suggested that Bishwanath began the press in 1817 or 1818 and was the first person after Gangakishor to start a press. Sometime later (once again, it is difficult to be exact), the presses in this area came to be referred to collectively as the Battala press. Sukumar Sen has declared Bishwanath Deb as the founder of the first Battala press and most scholars today accept this. 10 Battala, as a descriptive term for books and prints, first earned its name from this area of concentration of printing presses, although gradually it came to signify a whole range of popular productions that, in the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, found themselves displaced from the podium of high culture. By then, hierarchies had appeared in the domain of the printed text in Bengali and these were beginning to reflect the new social and cultural differences in Bengali literate society.

For our purposes, this sudden boom in the book trade had another very important consequence: it summoned the state to intervene and take cognizance of this rapidly proliferating industry. Ostensibly to keep itself informed about the effects of education on the native mind, the colonial state began to devise mechanisms of control and censure. The state's intervention was not without its effects on Bengal's literate society and how it set out its own criteria of classifying printed literature by quality and taste.

~~Essay Excerpt: Disciplining The Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance of Bengali Literature -by- Tapti Ray from the book "Texts of Power"