aDiGiTaL_FuTuRe

Digital Reading | Authors Go Direct

Even in today’s rudimentary digital marketplace some authors have linked their Web sites to sites of related interest, hoping to create their own expanding communities of loyal readers with each new book they write. Minor technological modifications will soon enable writers to sell their books to readers throughout the world directly from these Web networks, bypassing publishers who may have rejected their work, while established writers may choose to forego the security of a publisher’s royalty guarantee in exchange for keeping the entire revenue from the sale of their books. In today’s tightly structured publishing environment manuscript submissions are largely winnowed first by agents and then by publishers and booksellers before readers make the final decision. For readers accustomed to an orderly literary marketplace the much less disciplined digital future may seem as threatening as widespread literacy seemed to the priests of the fifteenth century. But the human capacity to discriminate what is readable from what is not, and over time to discriminate what is truly valuable from what is merely readable, is no more likely to be overwhelmed in a marketplace where anyone can claim to be a writer than the critical faculty was defeated by the torrential energies released when the secularization of literacy swept across Europe five hundred years ago.

Since digitized books occupy no shelf space they can remain in print and in stock as long as digital storage devices survive. And because digital texts can be transmitted directly to consumers, they can be sold for much less than books that are shipped physically from printers in Illinois or China to publishers’ warehouses in Maryland or Ohio and from there to regional chain store depots or wholesalers’ warehouses and finally to thousands of retail bookstores from which, after a few months, unsold copies are returned to their publishers and destroyed. Because books published digitally involve no physical inventory and will cost their publishers virtually nothing per unit to produce and deliver, authors will contribute relatively more value to the final product than publishers and can claim a larger share of proceeds than from books sold in today’s over concentrated and inefficient literary marketplace dominated by book chains rooted in the five-hundred-year-old Gutenberg system of centralized manufacture and physical distribution.

To the extent that unmediated electronic distribution of books printed on demand at point of sale with its greater efficiency and low costs replaces this archaic system, today’s book publishers will either devolve over time into decentralized teams of writers, editors, publicists, and Web site managers or be replaced by such groups. Thus book publishing may revert to the cottage industry that it had been before today’s homogenized retail marketplace, dependent on a steady supply of promotional titles, imposed a corresponding obligation on the publishing industry. Thanks for reading a Digital Future Blog.