Gurdeep's Column

 

Someone recently asked me why it was that most of my columns, which I’ve been writing for the SYP for three years now, are so off topic; why it is that almost none of the output over that time has been publishing related. There were a few columns that I could pull to my defence: I cited the very first one that I did for the SYP, which was ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, about my time at Robert Hale, working on their fiction list. Along the way there have been some stunningly leftfield detours – a short essay on Love, pretentiously entitled ‘Lufian’, for instance (cf. the Anglo Saxon root) – but then I always did struggle with the idea that someone might give a topic to write on, and then I would go away and write on it. It seemed the opposite of ‘creative’ writing, and is why I flourished on the Music desk at the Oxford Student but not on Features Desk. 

However, I took the comment as criticism and I’ve always been keenly aware of it as one of my failings. Eventually one has to either learn, or give up the activity or the pretence of learning; I don’t feel that I’m ready to give up the activity yet, so I plod on. And so a ‘topic’ arrived fully formulated when SYP Chair Doug Wallace wrote in a recent email that many of the SYP committee were being put out to pasture at the end of this year – including me. It occurred to me that in the three years that I’ve been doing this, publishing has changed quite considerably. It isn’t a long time, no – I know people that have been in the trade for decades. However, in just that small amount of time, we’ve seen the publishing world radically alter. More specifically, or rather, most importantly, we’ve seen the electronic world encroach into our daily lives in a whole new way.

The most important developments are mostly centred on the rapid rise of affordable, reliable ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband: high speed internet for a large percentage of users. Without the irritating slow, chugging dial-up access afforded by modems, this meant an Internet full of pictures, of video, of downloads, of live video feeds. Suddenly it could be made to look swish, and yet also be coded so well that it could be user friendly, too. Interfaces could be as complex underneath as they needed to be. Web 2.0 arrived and couldn’t really happen without broadband access.  Online Shopping was around before, but not like this – now people could browse, ‘See Inside’ the book, and they could manipulate it in 3D. Google and Amazon became inorexibly linked to the future of the publishing trade.

The old standard internet ‘thing’ was email, long used by publishers and in publishing. It just meant more speed, and eliminating the slow post services: it was instantaneous electronic letters. But in the last three years, it has been added to by attachments on a large scale, added to by RSS feeds, blogs, profiles, books from blogs, blogs alongside books: an explosion of formats and platforms. The spate of books in 2006 and 2007 that have been birthed from blogs, and publishers such as The Friday Project, show how things have changed. Larger publishers wised up – The Random House Group invested in a whole new division dedicated to the Digital World, a development foreseen by only the far sighted when I first started. Smaller publishers and ones with less cash-flow are going to have to be clever and nimble with how they manage this information revolution.

I moved after Hale to academic publishing – SAGE Publishing – and almost as soon as I arrived things were changing. They, and academic publishers like them, had invested heavily in the digital technology that would provide the productivity, flexibility and hopefully the rude health of the next tens years. Across the trade a scramble began to be in place to deliver the things that people, the customers, or the ‘stakeholders’ (that horrible term) needed. How did it affect the editors? Well, the speed of peer review has rocketed yet further from the leisurely speculative letters of yore. The job of the editorial assistant can in some cases be augmented and helped by a raft of electronic processes. Whole content management systems were put in place to manage journal articles, and similar things are arriving and have been set up for books. Production won’t be the same again. In marketing, everything is ONIX fed (if you’re Compliant) to retailers via BookScan. If not, hurry up onto the bandwagon. We’ve seen journals finally go Open Access on a big scale. Whole scripts are edited on screen; they pass from author to publisher in Word, copyedited and then to onto XML – a cross-platform and versatile form that can be converted to whatever you need. Never leave the digital stage, and better still, the whole thing can be managed in India without a Production Department in the UK at all.

The major changes in trade publishing have been the probable end of sale and return, the demise of the big chains, the rise of the Indie bookshop and the re-emergence of the viability of niche publishing, intelligent market gaps spotted and catered for. Picador made waves recently by effectively abandoning the hardback fiction format. Alongside these, what does Print On Demand hold for the future of the ‘long tail’ and the backlist? What does it mean for the trade when the Espresso Book Machine arrives in an affordable format? Any book, in any format, at any time? How far has publishing really come in three year? Light years, it seems.

Digital Rights Management – three words not really bandied around in publishing meetings three years ago, much like Companion Websites five years ago. Now they are integral, if still contentious. And this of course brings us onto another big development, perhaps the one that might be the biggest (or the biggest white elephant) of the next three years:  E-books. E-books bring into play a need for adaptive and fair DRM and a demand for eReaders that work and that are fun, easy and useful.  

It feels rather one sided to have so much on technology. This isn’t the only thing that has changed in the last three years, but it has been the main instigator of the changes. It is difficult to point to one other thing that has had quite as much impact, in such a little time. The rise of the supermarket chains as big players in bookselling might be one. The pile them high and sell them low mentality arrives for the latest Andy McNab. It is certainly important to mention the Harry Potter effect – arise of the Big Book, and the Big Book Event – and its gradual culmination over the last few years ending this year. The Richard and Judy effect is another – the ability of two television presents to make or break sales of certain books: a case of an old technology uniting with an even older concept – of the influence of fame, stardom and celebrity – to produce a new method of sale.

And what next? Will the Kindle finally live up to its name and birth a flame?