0

By

A glory of e-books is that they require less investment by publishers and readers. What’s more, they can be called up instantly. Too, they are more open to “viral marketing”–fans can talk them up and spread the good news. With file sharing technology, publishers can let readers pass along sample chapters or even complete books. Various forms of protection, including the best one of all, fair prices, can help assure the right compensation for creators.

Luddites smug about the p-book world might consider a paragraph in a BusinessWeek review of recent novels about the industry:

Has book publishing fallen into a state of material and moral rot? Consider a few symptoms: Publishers’ seasonal catalogs loaded with already-ripe-for-the-pulper schlock. Fat advances that are thinly disguised payoffs to prominent pols. “Authors” (athletes, porn stars, celebrity girlfriends) barely capable of penning a shopping list. Media conglomerates dependent on big-name writers, whose books get piled in giant stacks meant to stampede superstore customers. The list goes on.

Meanwhile here’s a BusinessWeek quote-paraphrase from The Last Days of Publishing, one of the reviewed novels:

“Like light from a distant star,” he reflects, a publisher’s catalog describes books “signed up long ago by editors laid off by a management no longer in place for a house that, in all but name, may no longer exist.”

BusinessWeek has kind words about most of the novels reviewed, liking The Last Days of Publishing the most, followed by Foul Matter, while not so enthusiastic about The Storyteller, “a self-indulgent muddle of a suspense novel that considers the highly topical issue of plagiarism.” As the magazine notes, “commerce and creativity can still coexist” at times.

Still, an important point comes out along the way. BusinessWeek asks why “a turkey like The Storyteller would be picked up by Doubleday and get a nice-size print run of 25,000, not to mention the benefit of a muscular distribution apparatus, while the stimulating Last Days of Publishing finds a home only at a relatively weak university press and a print run of 4,000.”

E-books, anyone? Isn’t it time for a better publishing system? With TeleRead, big publishers could still be major players, but, via word of mouth and otherwise, it would be easier for books from smaller publishers to make their mark and help elevate standards of the industry.

 
0