For one of the leading lights of the book publishing
industry, Gail Rebuck doesn't claim to have all the answers.
But at last night's Livery Lecture at Stationers' Hall, the
Random House Group chief took apart the issues facing an industry in
transformation in much the same way a good butcher carves up the choice joints
worth chewing over.
I'm sure Ms Rebuck wouldn't thank me for such a comparison,
but the talk made for a pretty clean dismemberment of publishing in the 21st
century.
Is the book a device or the work itself? Where does a work
stop being a book and become a film, a soundtrack, a discussion? Are books
boring, reflecting the whims of an increasingly homogenous society? Are
bookshops worse, promoting 3 for 2 offers over the merits of the books themselves?
Are we guilty of linguistic imperialism rather than empowerment and education? What will the book's iPod moment look
like? Do people read anymore? Should we care?
Rebuck's commitment was that her company would be at the
table to sample every new opportunity and challenge presented by the digital,
connected world.
Building communities around books and authors; offering the
tools and platform for peer review of academic work; supporting new
technologies to sample and distribute the book form.
Indeed it seemed clear that there are some types of content
that will find digital as the most appropriate platform. Scientific journals
will always benefit from peer review and can continually be updated in an
interactive format.
But the book as most of us understand it, as a novel we take
for the train, the lunch break, for bed, will struggle on anything other than a
page.
"The eBook is here, and its impact will be
far-reaching," she said, despite her personal grumbles over the products
she had trialled.
She's right of course – the eBook will undoubtedly find its
place once the right service is there, but my word there will be some teething
problems.
The most painful, in my err book, is that an eBook can hold
an entire library. I don't care. I can only read one book at a time. A book is
also a public statement, like a mobile phone. The Harry Potter commuters clearly all belong to a club. Rebuck herself
said that viral marketing – word of mouth – is the biggest driver for book
sales.
But an eBook reader doesn't have a cover.
What digital doesn't change, however, is the core role of
the publisher: to nurture new talent and protect the rights of authors through
copyright – an issue not lost to the audience at Stationers' Hall: the cradle
of copyright in the UK
and custodian of many thousands over hundreds of years.
Copyright will haunt book publishing. When dealing with the
physical, copyright just about works. A publisher might not like the fact I
lend you a book, but they at least know that if you have it, I can't read it,
and it might cause you to buy it. If I make a copy, it's unlikely to be as
good: paper stock, ink quality, the end product will likely suffer for being
cheaper.
Digital copies are perfect, and effortless to create and
distribute.
And efforts to inflict copyright technologies have more
often than not resulted in a poor user experience. Ask Sony.
Gail Rebuck is right to take digital seriously and to be
seriously worried about copyright.
But there will likely be years where the problems caused by
digital far outweigh the revenues generated from it.
Will we be thinking about books in the same way we consider
the floppy disk a few years from now?
That, by the way, might be about the only rhetorical
question in book publishing these days.