The book is dead, long live the book

Three stories concerning books caught my eye this week. Three different sources but related.

The first, Victor Keegan writes in The Guardian: 'Books are one of the oldest industries, yet they have been hardly affected by the digital revolution. Publishers just go on commissioning and editing them in their own sweet time as if nothing had happened. In an age when your blog could be out of date in minutes, publishers seem happy to leave months, even years, between the manuscript being presented and going on sale. The curious thing is that it doesn't seem to be doing them any harm at all.'

Then another story in Publisher's Weekly by Jim Milliot says: 'The production of traditional books (in the US) rose 1% in 2007, to 276,649 new titles and editions, but the output of on-demand, short run and unclassified titles soared from 21,936 in 2006 to 134,773 last year ... a 39% increase in output to 411,422 (titles)(!!).' That is truly astounding. So, far from killing the book industry, the digital revolution (read internet) has actually been a boon. One gets dizzy just thinking of the possibilities. 500,000 titles a year? One million?!

Then in another story, also from The Guardian from the recent Hay-on-Wye Festival, Aleks
Krotoski wonders Why is the book world threatened by gamers? But are they? Why this virulent antipathy towards multimedia? The traditional novel has already been challenged by graphic novels, an evolution of the comics and has made a slight, but if currently insignificant, dent in the order of things in the book world. It is only a little more than a novelty for now, but it is bound to grow. Then there is that cell phone novel. And with ebooks and all, the possibilities are enormous -- imagine moving pictures to accompany novels, with an infinite number of endings depending on reader interaction.

But will all that mean the end of books? I think not. The death of books has been announced before -- with the advent of the movie, then with the radio, then the television, the computer, the internet, the cell phone and the ebook -- and it will continue to be prognosed.

The book is dead, long live the book.

The Guardian

Publishers Weekly

The Guardian