“Publishing: The Revolutionary Future,” by Jason Epstein
The New York Review of Books, 11 March 2010

This is a bit of a tough read. Epstein’s forecast for the publishing industry is well-informed, well-argued, comprehensive, and perhaps a bit impenetrable. It’s worth the work to get through it because he articulates some important issues about the digitization of books: the publishing industry’s business model, rights-management, literary content distribution and access, and the impact of widespread access on the quality of literary content.

Epstein’s perspective is one to be respected. He’s a publishing industry veteran, as an editor (of Norman Mailer, Philio Roth, Gore Vidal), and as a long-standing champion of the “backlist.” This is how publishers refer to their previously-published books that are kept in print year-after-year, and so are available to continuing generations of readers. With the decline of independent bookstores (in the wake of megastore chains, and then in turn, Amazon.com), the backlist has been steadily, and perhaps alarmingly, shrinking as publishers opt for a business model based on bestselling blockbusters. In 1999 Epstein was already proposing ways to keep the backlist alive, specifically with a machine that could print books on demand. As it happened, just such a machine already existed in prototype. Together with the inventor and other partners, Epstein founded On Demand Books. In 2007, the Espresso Book Machine was officially launched at the New York Public Library. Since then, it has been placed at various locations all over the world (see link at left for coverage of EBM’s arrival at the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Suffice it to say that Epstein has the experience and the perspective to voice what’s right, and what could be wrong, with the digitization of books and the transformation of the current publishing model. Read his article. I can’t do it justice by summarizing.

In all that he wrote, the thing that resonated most for me was Epstein’s caution that the act of reading is an act of concentration and absorption, it “abhors distraction.” I remain unconvinced about the metadata (audio, animation, CGI, critical commentary) that’s being touted as the exciting (and profitable) new literary frontier. This is not literature, it’s another environment entirely, one that has more in common with gaming or movies than books.

Epstein closes with eloquence:

“I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.”

That goes for me, too.