Lecture 2

I cannot believe that a whole week has passed by since my last blog! It feels like yesterday on me blogging for my very first time!

In this week’s lecture so many different aspects of the publishing world were discussed, which got me to thinking of the changes that have occured in the publishing world since the rise of the e-book. This issue is discussed in three readings provided for us in the readings for this weeks lecture, which were-

The Rattle of Pebbles, by J.Epstein http://tlrg.bangor.ac.uk/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=true&id=1321
The Gutenberg Elegies- The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkets http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm
and
Chapters 1-3 from Books in the Digital Age, by John B.Thompson http://www.amazon.com/Books-Digital-Age-Transformation-Publishing/dp/0745634788

Over the decades the publishing industry has been transformed from a 'cottage industry' (a small publishing business, run by a few people) as J.Epstein refeers to in his e-journal, The Rattle of Pebbles in to an industry full of corporate business conglomerates taking hold of the market, consisting of different departments to carry out different functions for individual aspects of the publishing value chain. This no longer required the need of all publishing work to be carried out in-house like in Epstein’s days. This idea of the publishing world being taken over by conglomerates is something that is also mentioned in chapter 3 of Thompson’s- Books in the Digital Age. Thompson states that since the 1980s, large corporations began to emerge through merging or taking control of smaller independent companies. It is no secret that this transformed publishing into a world where conglomerates became the dominant players in the publishing field. One of the downfalls of this was that these independent publishing companies were being taken over by conglomerates that were mainly from the media sector. This therefore meant that publishing wasn’t their only focus; they also diversified into films and television broadcasting. This is known as vertigal integration, where companies own different operations and businesses across various industries and verticals. Here are two examples of media conglomerates integrating vertically by taking over publishing companies:
AOL Time Warner- Little Brown and Company
Viacom/CBS- Simon & Schuster

As the publishing world has transformed throughout the decades, this has made way for new publishing distributors to squeeze through, mainly because of technological advances. The most successful example to show you would be the online book retailer Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/. I’m sure that all of you have used this website to purchase a book at least once in your lives, and if not, I’m sure you will one day. This website has been distributing books since 1995, and has become a phenomenal success through internationalizing itself, as most publishing chains now do to capitalise on profit margins, and diversifying itself through distributing CDs, videos and toys as well as books. Amazon is now an extremely popular worldwide bookseller of new, second-hand and backlist books. This is largely down to the fact that it can undercut bookstores as their overhead is lower.

This leads me to the question; does the rise in online book selling as well as e-books spell the demise of bookstores and further down the line libraries? Will Robert Zich’s vision of the future in Sven Birket’s The Gutenberg Elegies- The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age come true? Will the libraries become more like dusty unattended museums? I certainly hope not! But as Robert McCrum iterates in an article from The Guardian on August 16th, 2009, 'There's no question that their (libraries) role has been transformed. The highly controversial digitising programme of " the Google initiative" means that many of the world's copyright libraries (in Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, among others) can be retrieved at the click of a mouse' http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/16/robert-mccrum-ebooks-kindle. Does this therefore mean that there's no call for public libraries any longer when you can easily access it on your computer at home? But the journalist also says 'Many people will hate e-reading. The screen is only a tool, and not much more, and a poor substitute for the printed page'. This was something I learned to be true when reading The Rattle of Pebbles by J.Epstein as an e-journal. I found it a highly unpleasurable experience to read the journal as an e-journal as the technology was getting in my way of being able to enjoy the reading because I had to constantly zoom in, scroll down, then scroll to the side for every single page, all 24 of them! Instead of experiencing the simplicity of turning the page as I would have experienced with an ordinary journal. Therefore this notion of disruptive technology always changing things for the better did not stand its ground with me when it came to evolving a journal to an electronic version!

Not only will online books and journals change the simplicity of reading, but arguably the language according to Sven Birkets. He claims that the traditions of print literacy will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic “plainspeak” which I agree with as the language seen online in visual novels a.s.o is not how the English language should be written or spoke when it comes to works of literature or academic purposes in my opinion.

Technology has also affected the publishing value chain in the sense that every link adds value to the product, as Thompson points out in the reading,
‘each of the links performs a task or function which contributes something substantial to the overall task of producing the book and delivering it to the end user’. If a link does not fulfil its function, and doesn’t justify its expense, then there's no need for it to stay in the chain, it will be dinitermediated. So, if technology is disrupting the normal, and creating new advances where this means that a link in the chain is no longer needed, such as when the author Stephen King sold his novel Riding the Bullet as an e-book online, this means that not every link in the publishing chain was needed for the creation of that book, or its distribution. It’s questionable if he even needed a publisher at all. Will this lead the way for other authors to follow in his footsteps, until there will come a day when the publisher is no longer needed? For example, on page 24 of Thompson’s reading he says-
‘Given that the publishing chain is not rigid and that particular tasks or functions can be eclipsed by economic and technological change, what reason is there to believe that the role of the publisher itself might not be rendered redundant?’.
(Here’s how the publishing value chain is implemented at the moment- http://tlrg.bangor.ac.uk/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=1392).
Does this mean that the cottage industry of publishing will be making a comeback? I’m sure that we’re not far from it!

I hope all this wasn’t too confusing for you to grasp the basics of what I’ve been researching this week. Feel free to express your views on the issues raised in my blog today by leaving your comments.

That’s the end of my blogging today, until my next installement!