Kindle & the Future of Print Journalism

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Kindle & the Future of Print Journalism

June 30, 2009 Electronic Reading, The Future of Publishing 4 comments

As someone who writes about the future of printed books, I’m often asked to weigh in on the future of another popular printed medium — newspapers. Up until now I’ve only broached the matter offhandedly, but this month’s Mother Jones prompted me to consider the matter more seriously.

It happened after a friend of mine alerted me to MJ’s “Exhibit” spread called, “Black and White and Dead All Over.” According to the piece, about 20% of newspaper journalists have lost their jobs in just the last eight years. And from January to May 2009, “100 newspapers shut down and 9,000 newspaper jobs were lost.”

Usually I’m skeptical whenever I hear about a medium’s impending death. It’s pretty clear from the spread, however, that newspapers are suffering terribly right now. This is due in no small part to proliferating digital communications technologies, combined with news agencies’ growing reliance on untrained grassroots “iJournalism.”

The irony is that newspaper publishers also see digital technologies as a savior. New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., for one, believes that Amazon.com’s new Kindle DX e-reader will “enhance our ability to reach millions of readers” — especially those for whom the printed version of the paper is unavailable. No surprise, Amazon is marketing the device heavily for its news reading capabilities, having partnered with the Times and other major U.S. papers.

Before I get to the crux of the issue, some disclosures are in order. I come from something of a newspaper family. My late sister Anne was an editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times, FL, and before that she was a reporter and editorial writer for the Time Herald-Record in Middletown, NY. Way back when she was editor-in-chief of her college newspaper at Binghamton University, Pipe Dream. I freelanced with the Record as a photojournalist in 1993 and interned with the paper in 1994. I also worked on my college newspaper, The New Hampshire, throughout my undergraduate studies. I even seriously contemplated becoming a professional photojournalist before deciding to pursue a career as a university professor.

In other words, I’m a friend of newspapers — and by that I mean, of printed newspapers. But I’m also part of the problem in that I now I do most of my news reading online. I cannot remember the last time that I actually paid for daily news.

The prospect of the newspaper’s replacement with costly digital e-reading devices, such as Kindle, seems a poor future for me indeed. I say this not because I fetishize ink and paper. As I make clear throughout The Late Age of Print, I positively do not. Instead, I worry about the economic and political effects of a business model in which stand-alone e-readers become a — or maybe even the — primary delivery vehicle for daily news.

The Kindle DX costs $489. It’s smaller, less feature-laden sibling costs $359. Either price seems to me to pose a huge barrier to entry when it comes to acquiring one’s daily news. Add to that the cost of one or more digital newspaper subscriptions — you cannot buy an individual day’s paper via Amazon — and you’ve dropped the better part of a grand inside of a year.

Beyond the reporting, what made printed newspapers great was their price. Most cost under a dollar a day when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, and many even hovered around 50 cents. In my grandparents’ day you could pick most papers up for around a nickel. Daily news was cheap — indeed, democratically so. Nearly everyone could afford to partake of the affairs of the day, and many did so regularly.

But if Kindle becomes a primary platform for daily news, then the newspaper industry will have all but abandoned this longstanding democratic ethos. What’s the point of a fourth estate if only the economically advantaged are the ones reading the news?

So here’s a radical proposal for Amazon and the newspaper companies to consider. If your survival plan involves a switch-over to digital e-readers like Kindle, then lower your prices! Significantly reduce the economic barriers to entry and create an economy of scale. Perhaps the e-reader even could be sold at a loss, with the understanding that a portion of all newspaper subscription revenue would be paid back to the hardware manufacturer.

The point is, you don’t save journalism by making it more exclusive.

Remains of the Day

June 4, 2009 Electronic Reading, The Future of Publishing 4 comments

If you’ve read The Late Age of Print, then you’ll know that I’m not a technological reactionary. In my arsenal of gadgets you’ll find a much-loved iPod Touch, a less-loved Kindle 1.0, a mobile phone that I regularly use, and more. A friend of mine claims that I’m a gadget-head. Usually I beg to differ, but having just inventoried my electronic wares, I’m beginning to think that he may be on to something.

Here’s the thing, though: I also love books — and my that I mean, printed books. While I’d hardly consider myself to be a book fetishist (i.e., I’m not a devotee of Nicholas A. Basbanes), I’m a bibliophile in about the same way that I’m a gadget-head, that is, by default. Over the years I’ve accumulated a sizable library, mostly in my capacity as an academic; I love to read; and I annotate my books prodigiously, creating personalized indexes so that I can return easily to the passages I’ve underlined. Maybe one day I’ll scan and post one of these indexes here, so that you can see just how intensely I read.

Because I seem to be pulled in two different directions technologically speaking, I was immediately drawn to this week’s (June 8 & 15) cover of the New Yorker, pictured above. Its setting is a post-apocalyptic New York City. An alien has touched down and sits amid the ruins, surrounded by what appears to be e-waste. Discarded CDs, mobile phones, and computer keyboards abound. Also strewn amid the litter are devices that look suspiciously like Amazon Kindles. Our genial-looking alien relaxes with a tattered but still mostly intact printed book.

The New Yorker cover is a brilliant commentary on the particular bibliographic moment in which we are currently living. It seems as though electronic reading was the conversation at last week’s BookExpo America. The prevalence of that conversation tells us just how short-sighted — and indeed profit-obsessed — the book industry is becoming. The central problem with e-reading, beyond the temptation to overly-secure digital content, is that of endurance. Too many e-reading devices and too many digital formats result in too much of one thing: technological obsolescence.

If you don’t believe me, check out Chapter 1 of The Late Age of Print, where I discuss an early e-book experiment called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). You can find the text of the Agrippa story online, but unless you’re a collector of legacy technologies you pretty much cannot read it in its original form. It was encoded on a 3 1/2-inch floppy diskette (remember those?) that is incompatible with today’s hardware and operating systems.

The partisans of e-reading may well retort that printed books, like their electronic kin, also deteriorate. Paper can become brittle and, well, there’s a reason why the word “bookworm” exists in the English language. All true. But here I’m persuaded both by my own experience and by Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, 2001). Baker shows us how even just a modicum of care can help print-on-paper books to endure for centuries. The “slow fires” that the proponents of micro-media first advanced and that the denizens of e-books now expound are pretty much smoke and mirrors.

For e-reading to succeed, there will need to be something even more fundamental than built-in dictionaries, wireless content delivery, and other such bells and whistles. What will be needed above all — and what the printed book so well embodies — is a stable platform. Indeed, when was the last time one of your printed books was “upgraded” out of existence?

Books, NOW!

May 25, 2009 The Future of Publishing No comments

Via Filed By and my good friend José Afonso Furtado’s Twitter Feed comes this fascinating Publishers Weekly story about Perseus Book Group and its BIG EXPERIMENT at BookExpo America 2009. The crux of the matter is this: Perseus plans on publishing a 144-page book consisting of “sequels” to some of literature’s great opening lines — all within the span of 48 hours.

The title of the work — Book: The Sequel — clearly isn’t just about the content. It’s as much if not more about the publishing industry and how it operates (or could operate), which is to say nothing of the existential crisis its main product — the book — finds itself in today. What we have in Book: The Sequel is more than just print-on-demand, it’s essentially books, now!

I’m usually fairly circumspect of experiments like these. Rarely are they particularly well thought through, and often they put far too much faith in simple, technological solutions or outcomes. Not here. Perseus proposes a remarkably holistic picture of what book publishing could be in the not-so-distant future — or later this week, if you want to get all “the future is now” about it.

First, the substance: crowdsourced content. There already have been experiments in collaborative book writing, so in a sense what Perseus is doing is not altogether new. Those who wish to contribute to the volume can log on to www.bookthesequel.com, where they can can pitch their own opening line sequels. On the other hand, the Press’ experiment in crowdsourcing demonstrates one possible future function publishers may choose to take on. That is, they may opt to become aggregators of decentralized information, as opposed to their simply remaining the gatekeepers of already centalized or unified information. Perseus also plans on focus-grouping the cover designs using similar means, which is in keeping with my previous post on the marketing power of a site like Scribd.

Next, the product, which is multiple. Perseus plans on releasing digital, audio, and online versions of Book: The Sequel, as well as a tangible, print-on-paper volume. This is impressive. Too often experiments in flash publishing result in only one of these — usually the e-edition and nothing more. The looming test of the book industry’s mettle will be in how well it works — quickly and elegantly — across both analog and digital platforms.

Finally, the opportunities for post-publication interactivity. Thus far publishing has done a fairly good job in recognizing the growing importance of author-audience interaction. It has built ample infrastructure to support this. But what the industry hasn’t caught on to well enough yet is the importance of decentralizing its social networks. Online book marketing has been preoccupied with bringing audiences back again and again to the publishers’ or the authors’ websites. This is understandable. But we live in a time when conversations about culture happen all over the place, and increasingly on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a testament to Perseus’ vision that it’s recognized how it need not try to control or consolidate the conversation about its book for that conversation to occur.

My only misgiving — and it is a significant one — about Book: The Sequel is that there appears to be no structure in place to compensate those who’ve donated their labor to create the book’s content. This will have to change, even if it ultimately results in micro-payments to the authors (which, as Chris Anderson has shown, can add up in the long run). Any book publishing business model that relies on crowdsourced content but that does not compensate the crowd for its initiative, wisdom, and goodwill surely will be unsustainable.

That said, Perseus plans on donating the profits of its grand experiment to the National Book Foundation. Who could have any truck with that?

Book Publishing's Reality TV

May 20, 2009 The Future of Publishing 5 comments

Will book publishers be able to maintain their cultural authority into the future? Should they?

These seem to be the questions implicit in a recent article in the New York Times, “Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies.” The focus of the piece is a new file sharing site called Scribd. In a nutshell, Scribd allows users to upload all sorts of document files to the web, whereupon anyone with internet access can read, download, embed, comment on, and share them. The site also provides pricing and encryption options for writers who’d rather not give their work away for free. Scribd scoops up 20% of the revenue.

Scribd is the latest in a wave of self-publishing platforms, including blogs, digital journal archives, wikis, and more. Collectively, these types of sites allow writers to bypass publishing’s traditional gatekeepers and thus to reach the public more directly and with less — if any — editorial intervention.

It’s hardly news to say that these developments make book publishers and other cultural authorities quite anxious, given how easy it’s become for writers simply to bypass them. It may be news, however, to say that publishers shouldn’t see Scribd and other self-publishing platforms as threats. Instead, they’re opportunities.

Think about it this way: sites like Scribd are the reality TV of book publishing.

Love it or loathe it, you cannot deny the brilliance of a show like American Idol. Essentially it amounts to a months-long focus group, where potential music buyers vote on who they’d most like to become a signed recording artist. The presumption is that many who’ve voted will then go on to buy singles and albums by the people they’ve seen featured on the show.

American Idol demonstrates how amateur cultural production and a more traditional, hierarchical approach can be made to harmonize. Why not use sites like Scribd toward similar ends?

Indeed, marketing has long been a major sore point for the book industry, filled with guesswork and erroneous conclusions about what will and won’t ultimately sell. So why not take some of the guesswork out of book marketing? Why not use Scribd or some other site to focus-group books (or parts thereof) up front before investing all the time and resources to publish them?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why would people buy something that they might well be able to obtain for free, or at a comparatively reduced cost? That’s where the publisher comes in. Pubishers have long imagined their work to be about proferring cultural authority; in the model I’m proposing here, their work would be more about proferring cultural authenticity. That is, their job would be to produce the definitive tangible object — an object whose content may nonetheless continue to evolve in the digital realm.

Think about it: the contestants’ live performances from American Idol are available for purchase online, but I’d venture to say that most people would consider the studio recordings of their songs to be the “real thing.” This is how academic journal publishing has been working for some time now, by the way. Journal publishers have recognized the ease with which academic authors can post pre-prints (e.g., .doc files) of their work online. In response, the publishers are now insisting that PDF journal offprints that are posted online be referred to as final, definitive versions of scholarly articles.

People love things, and indeed they love to consume what they perceive to be “real” things. When your authority starts waning, book publishers, what you need to start selling is exactly this type of authenticity.

Archive for The Future of Publishing