THE FUTURE (of books) (Oh.)

I have a really great joke I’ve been telling lately, when someone asks me what I’m studying in school. First I say, “Oh, I’m getting my masters in Book Publishing,” and he or she pretends to be impressed, and then I say, “It’s really too bad that the entire industry is folding.”

I tell pretty much the same joke about a lot of things. I like to talk, for example, about Portland “folding”; about the United States “folding”; about the ozone layer, “folding.” There’s a lot of weird stuff going on, and I spend way too much time on the internet, trying to figure out how to make beef tallow candles or construct a tepee out of tall grass. The reality of the impending apocalypse is something that my generation in particular is pretty comfortable with; it informs our skill sets, our political opinions, and, most importantly, our fashion sense. So when I start to wonder about the future of publishing, the first thing I have to consider is whether or not we’ll have salt to put on our radio-active cockroaches in 2038, let alone anything to read.

But, even when my outlook is a little more grounded, it still seems clear to me that whatever’s going to happen to the book trade in 20 years will be something of a mystery. I like to imagine that, despite all these weird new Kindles and kids who only have the attention span to read graphic novels (count me into that group, by the way), people will always be cranking out amazing writing, and there will always be an audience for it. The word “book” might evolve, its definition might do some major expanding, but the basic concepts will remain the same. I don’t see a lot of point in speculating about eReaders and web 3.0 and the depleted rain forests. I’m learning this business because I love words, not because I love books.

Actually I Just Use MacMail for Everything

When I was a young lady, I left Portland to attend an outrageously expensive liberal arts college. It was very scenic, and I had some wonderful professors, and I smoked a lot of cigarettes and learned how to play BroomBall. But on Graduation Day, I walked away with more than a plastic cup of champagne and a dress made out of streamers. As a token of gratitude for my $60,000+ of tuition, the college informed me that I could keep my school email address for life. I was, needless to say, underwhelmed.

The weird thing is that almost two years have passed, and I still use the stupid thing. “At Marlboro.edu,” I tell people. “Like the cigarette.” I also use my Portland State account, and have TWO gmail accounts – one for business (school, this blog, harassing people about giving me internships), one for pleasure (porn. I mean, newsletters).

But more and more, I’ve been letting Google take over my life, and lately I’ve been using their GoogleDocs a lot (check them out, it’s so fun!). Eventually, I want to streamline everything into one technology which is then surgically implanted into my wrist, but for now, because I check all of my accounts between five and 100 times per day, I like to make the process as time-consuming and complicated as possible (This creates an illusion of being busy and productive. Try it!).

I Need a Tiny Computer to Get a Job to Buy More Tiny Computers

Clearly, I need an iPhone. Or an iTouch. Or a GooglePhone. Whichever. It’s important to my future career as a Young Professional* that I be able to access important information with one gentle flick of the index finger, that I can read important manuscripts on the train (I’ll be in New York at this point, duh), and that I can listen to current, ironic\socially conscious hip-hop while I burn stress (and calories!) away at the gym.

The problem is (aside from lack of funds, since I’m sure this blog will start generating revenue soon, as promised by this video) that I’m afraid of buying something that is doomed to become outdated. This happened with my MacBook. At first, I loved it, and my friends were all really jealous and we took about ten thousand PhotoBooth pictures, and it was so fun. But then it got dirty really fast and something weird happened with its hard drive and its battery died so now it has to be plugged in at all times and therefore is for all practical purposes not even a laptop, so much as a Totally Annoying Thing That I Hate. 

Still, when Bernadette Baker and Gretchen Stelter from Baker’s Mark came to talk to us about being rad literary agents (a very possible Future Career of mine), Gretchen had just gotten a Sony Reader and the general feeling seemed to be that soon important manuscripts will all be transported electronically, and you will be a total dud\fool if you don’t have some kind of device to read them on. But as cool as the Reader and the Kindle are, you can’t use them to watch your Pilates podcasts, and they don’t have apps. And Tom tells me that everybody’s going to be reading books on iPhones pretty soon, which reports from GBS about Google making its books available on iPhones and from the NY Times about Kindle books becoming accessible from “a wide range of phones,” both seem to confirm.

So, 

1. Will future employers take me seriously if I buy an iPhone and program my ringtone to this YM song? (and yes, I am one of the mesmerizing young ladies singing vocals at the end of the track)

2. What is the most professional\enviable SmartPhone for a young, would-be publisher? If I use it to read, could I consider it a “textbook” and pay for it with my student loans? 

3. Do I run risk, through this potential purchase, of becoming a GigaPet (my Number One Worst Fear), or, slightly worse, selling out the publishing industry by embracing new technology rather than continuing to champion actual, physical objects? Is it possible to appreciate old things and new things? Is it okay that sometimes I wish I had a TV\actual wireless internet that isn’t stolen from my neighbors, in order to watch House, MD in bed?

 

 

*(this is also an exciting career choice for me because I’ll finally be able to apply the fashion knowledge I’ve acquired from years of reading Lucky. Converting day-wear into evening-wear in 3 Easy Steps is kind of irrelevant when all of your clothes are actually pajamas.)

It Wouldn’t Fit In Here

Before I got “into” book publishing, I thought of Amazon.com as a pretty righteous company:  cheap, limitless, and somehow able to project a radical, free-market vibe despite its obvious corporate bulk.  I wrote my undergrad thesis on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire theory, which is kind of neo-marxism (if that even means anything to you\at all) and is very excited about the internet because Hardt and Negri wrote in the late 90′s, during the Pre-Jaded Era.  Anyway.  They loved the internet because it represented centralized information accessible to all, and, moved by that same spirit, I felt pretty Okay or even Good about Amazon.  Of course, the truth is that I was going to start using it no matter how I felt because it’s convenient, and I’m lazy.

Lately though, I’ve come to learn that Amazon is a lot more than one-stop shopping for my out-of-print textbooks and Pilates workout videos.  First of all, it’s cheap because Amazon screws over publishers (and authors), and there’s nothing new or innovative about that.  It is truly limitless, unconfined by spatial or geographical boundaries, which is the wave of the future, and, I’ll admit, pretty awesome.  But they aren’t radical.  They’re just Big Business, doing what Big Business does best:  Monopolizing the market, and then doing whatever the heck they want.

My Online Marketing professor, Marty Brown, posed the following question:

With its POD/distribution company (BookSurge) and its proprietary e-book platform (Kindle), Amazon looks less and less like an ordinary bookstore, and more and more like a publisher and distributor. Does this bode well or ill for readers, authors, and publishers?

This is, of course, a really good question. 

My first impulse is that this is a bad thing.  It’s going to run publishers out of house and home, destroy the industry, close the cute independent bookstores (if there are any still open), and convert books into GigaPets, or whatever. 

But the whole thing about the internet is that nobody owns it, and I would guess that, as we speak, some cybergenius is figuring out how to subvert the whole system.  Also, not to be a drag, but the publishing industry has been treading water ever since it started trying to make money instead of enrich and distribute works of art.  If anybody killed The Book, it was the blockbuster. 

In short, it’s high time for a restructuring of the whole system, and I’d be fine if all of us “publishing” students became freelance editors or literary agents, and left the ordering and stocking up to Amazon.  Not to excuse their evil ways, but if us bookish types were allowed to do our thing without stressing out over pricetags, it could be a boon to readers and authors alike.  My guess is that, in the future, sites like Amazon will be used as filters for the incredible excess of titles available to readers, and that other, more specialized filters will emerge.  Independent book review sites will be the new independent book stores, as well as the new “publishers.” 

Or, Amazon will just eat the entire world and we’ll have nothing to read but the Twilight Series.  Whichever.