Litopia After Dark : Corporate Publishing is Dead
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In the week when the world’s financial industries appeared to go into meltdown, Litopia After Dark zeroes in on the impact this will have on the publishing industry. What effect will the credit crunch and looming global economic disaster have on the world of books? We also discuss e-readers, following disturbing research showing that on-screen reading is flawed. Is the e-reader doomed? And, after Eoin Colfer has been commissioned to write a new Hitchhiker instalment, we ask if resurrecting old favourites is a good idea? All this seriousness is balanced out with our regular merrymaking in the form of Pitch the Nasty Agent, Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and of course Litopia’s Cry for Help.
On the panel this week we are delighted to welcome back Martyn Daniels, publishing expert and author of the seminal, pathfinding report for the Booksellers Association of Great Britain about their digital future. You can find Martyn on his blog Brave New World. Joining him are Donna Ballman, Dave Bartram and Eve Harvey.
In the Ustream chatroom (8pm GMT), amicable agreement broke out, join us next week to stir things up a bit.
Links mentioned in the show…
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In the New York Magazine, Boris Kachka
The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world….
The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.
Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.
So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.
In the Chronicle Review, Mark Bauerlein
Slow reading counterbalances web skimming…
When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times “the guru of Web page ‘usability,’” Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people’s online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages “in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.” It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. “F for fast,” Nielsen wrote in a column. “That’s how users read your precious content.”
The F-pattern isn’t the only odd feature of online reading that Nielsen has uncovered in studies conducted through the consulting business Nielsen Norman Group (Donald A. Norman is a cognitive scientist who came from Apple; Nielsen was at Sun Microsystems). A decade ago, he issued an “alert” entitled “How Users Read on the Web.” It opened bluntly: “They don’t.”
On the BBC website
Children’s author Eoin Colfer has been commissioned to write a sixth instalment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series…
Eoin Colfer, 43, is best known for the best-selling Artemis Fowl novels.
He said he was “terrified” by the prospect of creating a new Hitchhiker book almost a quarter of a century after being introduced to what he described as a “slice of satirical genius” in his late teens.
“My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series,” he said.
“But on reflection I realised that this is a wonderful opportunity to work with characters I have loved since childhood and give them something of my own voice while holding on to the spirit of Douglas Adams.
“I feel more pressure to perform now than I ever have with my own books,” he said, adding that he was “determined that this will be the best thing I have ever written”.
[...] this, Martyn Daniels (an expert in Digital Publishing) explained it to me on the Litopia Podcast: Corporate Publishing is Dead). But all was not lost, I still had my 100 free books to play [...]