Digital media encourages us to change how we think about the meaning of ownership of and access to cultural goods. The myriad of successful music streaming services shows that many consumers don’t feel the need to buy music in old fashioned collections (albums) when they can have access to all the music they want anytime they want it.
This concept, when applied to written content might have profound ramifications for publishers, for instance if readers decide that it is both unnecessary and impractical to own books as commodities if they can have instant access to books or other written material at any time in digital form online or in the cloud.
This makes us all dizzy because we don’t know what it means for the “business model.” But culture is all about exchange, which means that we can be confident somehow or another this will all get worked by intermediaries working for readers and creators.
Here are some key points for what we know now as “the book business” as it will continue to be “evolutionized” over the next few years, while the web and especially the mobile web becomes the predominant distribution system for information and entertainment in our culture:
- we (that is, publishers and writers) are really in the reader business
- readers – and those who serve them the way they want to be served – will lead in creating new forms of publishing
- publishing has in fact always been about connecting readers to writing
- the mobile web enables that connection to be recast, and therefore further upsets existing authority models with the most profound ramifications for both sides of the reader-writer equation.
As long as we are bound to existing structures and containers, rather than underlying principles and concepts that govern culture, art and media, the future of publishing, and in fact all media, will remain obscure to us.
The web truly enables innovation as it both flattens and expands the boundaries of culture. There is so much creativity in every form of media we are often overwhelmed by it all, and of course some who hold onto the past will tell us that this means the end of culture “as we know it.”
But longstanding principles and values will always remain central:
- Creativity
- editorial talents and skills
- the ability to recognize the transformative and meaningful·
A quote from Ed Catmull, one of Pixar’s founders, certainly applies to publishing:
“Creative power in a film has to reside with the film’s creative leadership. As obvious as this might seem, it’s not true of many companies in the movie industry and, I suspect, a lot of others.”
It’s my belief that it is the writers and those few publishers who express creative leadership that will carry publishing forward into the brave new world the mobile web enables, always in service to readers.
