The Decentralization of Publishing: Some Thoughts on the Future

The Publishing Industry's Mergers

Is literary culture is best served by the ceaseless centralization of publishing, as a writer at the New York Times wondered?

The article asserts that

Decades of consolidation have cost writers and consumers alike. There is, for one, the persistent gripe of writers and agents: companies either forbid (as at Penguin) or restrict (at Random House) their constituent imprints from bidding against one another for a manuscript. That means not only lower advances, but also fewer options for writers to get the kind of painstaking attention — from editors, marketers and publicists — that it takes to turn their manuscripts into something valuable.

The inevitable consolidation of so-called legacy publishers resulted in part from technological advances.  As information became digitized, it became easier for competitors to traditional publishing to advance.

But it wasn't merely the digitization of information that pushed publishing into transition.  It was, quite simply, the democratization of information publishing:  the Internet allowed motivated writers and editors to become their own publishers and marketers, essentially competing with the Big publishers for their products.

I've long written that publishers considered their distributors as their customers, rather than book buyers, the end consumers of the writing, editing, packaging, and distributing chain. Recent publishing industry news only strengthens my argument.

Barnes & Noble's Recent Announcement

To their own detriment, that focus and the insularity that it cultivated has held the publishing industry back.  The most recent demise of Barnes & Noble's CEO William Lynch is a marker for too-little, too-late thinking among publishers and their distribution channels.  The much-maligned Amazon, in launching its Kindle devices as well as its Kindle reading applications, tapped a pent-up market for digitized content.  Following on its successes, Amazon added direct to reader publishing options, eliminating the gatekeeping function so long the foundation of traditional publishing models. The lag in development by other distributors hurt them, as is evident from the discontinuation of the color Nook, announced this week as well.  The lack of focus and urgency necessary was never seriously considered, as noted by tech writer, David Pogue, in the New York Times.

Again, I assert that there truly isn't a "ceaseless centralization" of publishing. Rather, it's a ceaseless decentralization, with distribution likewise less widely disbursed, especially now that Apple has lost its lawsuit.

The Industry's Fears of Loss

Again, as Pogue noted, each e-book device manufacturer developed its own DRM solution, making the choice for consumers quite difficult, since the books they supposedly bought (but were actually on lease from a company) entirely dependent upon the continuation of that distribution channel.  Now Nook owners may be wed to device and application obsolescence.  The problem has always been that publishers and distributors did not understand what they were doing, essentially wedding content to technology, when each could have existed independently, as long as standards could have been agreed upon. Sadly, Barnes & Noble learned this lesson too late, in part because they were late to even begin to understand the customer and the market.  You would have thought that the publishing industry could have learned something from the recording industry's long and difficult struggles with copyright protectionism.

What Could the Future Hold?

Boris Kachka declares,

We could use more gatekeepers — the kind that trumpet their history and quality unapologetically.

Agreed. With publishing ubiquitous, those who can sift the gems from the mines will be needed more than ever.  But those who perform such tasks could be transformed into digital curators rather than the cultivators of new talent, depending on whether or not the industry can re-think its purpose and role in a more democratic arena.  Such roles as talent development may fall to agents rather than publishing house editors, thus demoting the role of the traditional publisher to distribution and curation. The inevitable question arises as to whether those who curate might be digital themselves:  automated recommendation engines.  Where will these consolidated publishing houses be then?

Rather than asserting the consolidation of publishing as 'centralization', it seems to me that these mergers are mere half-way houses on the road to traditional publishing's revitalization in an altered role, with a much-reduced workforce, smaller, leaner, and more agile, better able to respond to threats to their existence.  For that to happen, however, publishers have to begin regarding the end customer--the individual book buyers--as their customers, just as important as their dwindling distribution channels.

Authors and their agents are already reaching readers, through building author platforms, a requirement most publishers have long sought as a method to cost-shift marketing to the talent. Now that authors have made direct contact with their readers, they are considering what value the traditional publisher brings to their product negotiation, when the terms they can receive from direct distribution are more appealing.  If writers are doing better on their own than with traditional publishers, as illustrated by author Hugh Howey and E.L. James as two recent examples, manufacturing and distribution may be the only role left to the 'centralized' publishing industry. Quite the future to ponder.