The Future of (Self/Academic) Publishing

Today Chronicle of Higher Ed features an article on up-and-coming textbook piracy websites, Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers.

As I said earlier, I'm looking forward to seeing how some experiments in ebooks turn out. We can't follow the example of the RIAA, and I'm skeptical of Ithaka and their recommendations, even when I agree with them.

I wonder if the survivors of the "new economy" of print might be those who translate the services provided by old companies into a new format. What I mean is that we currently look at ourselves as book publishers. That's what we do. But part of what we do (as has been mentioned many places by others) is add value to academics' work--editors and reviewers, typesetters and designers, marketers and royalty experts. It might be that those who succeed are those that offer the value-added services, say, blind reviews, for a fee, through an easy-to-access web interface. And, if a manuscript passes the reviewers, the author might be offered an opportunity to purchase additional editing, and to choose how she or he wishes to make the book available. I know, there are plenty of self-publishing services, but I don't think there is anything like this model, yet. A Google search for academic self-publishing returned, first, Self-Publishing Textbooks and Instructional Materials, available as a paperback for $32.95.

Who makes a book?

Late last week Book Business announced that a "Community-Sourced Book Publisher Launched" called WEbook, kind of a fiction-focused Wikipedia for-profit. As I scrolled through the proposals, I was reminded of another article in CTIAdvertising, When Did It Bekome Acxeptable to Spell Incuhrrectly? WEbook admits that they want to do for book publishing what "American Idol did for music." So, the WEbook "active projects"/proposals section is obviously the humiliation part of the program, where people who should be learning how to use their spell check are instead learning how to use WEbook, convinced they can write a book without knowing how to write a sentence.

There is something of an "ivy-league" and cliquish mentality in publishing, whether it is academic publishing or, from what I have read and heard from published fiction authors, literature, or even mass-market. There has also been a process to getting published which isn't completely dependent on breaking in to the clique. It's largely dependent on learning to write so that someone wants to read it.

Which brings me to this NYTimes article, "He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work). Did he "write" the books? I don't think so. He wrote the code that wrote the books. Because Google writes the algorithms that compile the data about websites doesn't mean that they wrote the data. He compiled the books. So, he's an author without being a writer.

Both these publishing models produce commodified books. Books-by-the-pound, at some point probably worth less than the value of the recyclable paper they are printed on. I don't think the models are inherently bad, but there is something shifty about their implementation. I think if P.T. Barnum were alive, he would approve.