The Guardian says digital media portend future of books rather than death of print

It seems like every time you turn around these days, you see another scare or sob story about “the death of the book” showing up on major media outlets. It’s a bit refreshing, therefore, to see The Guardian’s publishing section spotlight four different publishing efforts that show there is a future in e-books.

The article first covers Unbound (which we covered here and here), a startup that brings 18th- and 19th-century subscription publishing into the digital age. On the site, writers can pitch their prospective e-book projects to would-be readers, who can then choose to pledge money toward the book’s completion. Once the target is reached, the book is written and published. If it isn’t reached, the money is refunded. The idea is to provide authors money up front to write the book without exposing the publisher to the risk of advances that might not earn out.

It sounds very much like a one-segment version of the Storyteller’s Bowl model, not to mention a more reputable-seeming version of PUBSLUSH Press’s plan. And it actually has had a couple of books published so far, including one by Monty Python alum Terry Jones. While the site has mostly been working with established or agented authors so far, it plans to open a section where anyone can submit a pitch.

The next section is on publisher Melville House’s “Hybrid Books” (which we covered here and here). The idea is to put QR codes within the pages of a printed book. Readers can then use their smartphones to scan those codes and be linked to “illuminations”—a sort of digital footnotes and other related material that add context and understanding. (Those without smartphones can receive it as a PDF instead.)

As [Melville House founder Dennis] Johnson points out: "The ebook accompaniment is something like 360 pages long; [hybrid book Bartleby the Scrivener] is 60 pages long. So that would have been a very expensive book – 400 pages to publish. But [with a hybrid] we can have coloured art – we can have art at all! – things that would have been very expensive to do in print."

I find it a little eyeroll-inducing that Melville House has trademarked the term “Hybrid Book” (even if they say they don’t mind if other people start using it), but it is at least a novel idea.

The third section is on a publishing venture called “Boxfiction”. It’s not really clear what the draw is; it appears to be shorter, episodic stories published in episodic format. It seems to be meant to tie in with television (the first series is a tie-in to a BBC crime drama) and appeal to people with short attention spans.

By combining "the satisfaction of the written word with the addictive fix of TV", [founder Conrad] Persons says he is creating a "new type of fiction". But isn’t the idea of releasing short, punchy narratives in weekly chunks a throwback to the age of Dickens? "Serialised content is not new," he admits, "but these are not just bits of a longer story divided into smaller portions. They stand alone as individual, self-contained episodes, but you also have the satisfaction of a story arc that builds and builds over the course of the series."

I’m not sure I see the appeal, or that the concept really merits dressing it up with slogans or buzzwords. But not every new publishing venture necessarily has to appeal to everybody.

The last section is on Penguin Shorts, (which we covered here and here), which is publisher Penguin’s foray into low-priced novella-length fiction and nonfiction, akin to Kindle Singles. For inspiration, Viking editorial director Venetia Butterfield credits the difficulty in rapidly addressing current events with traditional books that could take six months to a year to publish.

What the short book offers, she says, is a space between the full-length book and the magazine article, combining the responsiveness of the latter with the rigour of the former. "I think there is a real appetite for a kind of long essay, or pamphlet, that is responding to news events."

It seems like a fairly obvious insight—which is undoubtedly why so many different publishing or e-tailing concerns, including Amazon and the New York Times, are having it at about the same time.

As FutureBook points out in discussing this story, it’s good to see the media doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom about The Death Of Print. There are plenty of ideas going around with lots of potential to innovate the way we find material to read, and read it. Print and electronic media can complement each other in a number of ways. Rather than fear this change, we should embrace it.