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The Future of Publishing: I don't care
Lots of articles on the internet about "the future of publishing." Some of them are well-written and fascinating; some have carefully considered bits of historical explanation; some are wild speculation; some are fearmongering propaganda. And there's several of those on all sides of the debates.
The more I read? (And I read a *lot*.) The less I care.
I am not, except in abstract, concerned about "the future of publishing." I am concerned about access to educational literature, entertainment text, reference works... but I'm no more worried about industry trends than the average person is worried about whether advances in the energy industries are going to change what kind of stove they have. Gas, electric, something else... the point is, I want to be able to cook on it. Avidly tracking green-vs-unsustainable energy systems doesn't really affect whether I'll be able to make a grilled cheese sandwich in another decade.
I looooove books and reading, so the future of publishing fascinates me--but I don't have to let it affect my life much. As Dean Wesley Smith said, books are not produce; they don't come with expiration dates.
If I read 50,000 words/day (I read fast. I can read more than that, but between job, home, social life, and Cool Stuff On The Internet, there's a limit to how much average reading I can do in a day. Let's pretend, hypothetically, that I have this kind of time to spend every day) for the rest of my life, and we're generous and assume I've got another 60 years--that comes to 1,095,000,000 words. (Plus some leap days. I'm gonna pretend I took those off for religious observances.) One billion, 95 million words. For the rest of my life.
The top twenty wordcount stories at AO3 are over 5.5 million words. Top 2,000 by wordcount are over 20 million. There are over 200k works at AO3--and more every day. Over 36,000 free ebooks at Project Gutenberg, which average a lot longer than AO3 fics. (Sure, AO3 has a handful of fics over a quarter-million words, but the vast majority of those 200k works are less than 50,000 words each; probably more than half are less than 5000 words each.) FF.net has a selection that dwarfs AO3.
Not, of course, that I'm interested in everything archived at Gutenberg or AO3. Or Archive.org, which has more, although those are raw scans & unproofed OCR conversions. But Smashwords has over 40k ebooks; Backlist Ebooks features the works of about a hundred authors; Wildside Press is republishing midlist sci-fi as fast as they can get their hands on the rights; Baen has a decade's worth of publications in ebook format with a lot of older content too... I will. NEVER. Run out. Of things to read.
If publishing stops tomorrow, I'm set for life. I could probably read nothing but *free* ebooks for the rest of my life, if I were willing to do a bit of digging & sorting. If I had no interest in supporting new art.
This, I think, is what is causing the panic among the mainstream publishers--customers aren't limited to "what's been published in the last year, + the last five years of NYT bestsellers." 100+ years of literary history is slowly working its way online and becoming available, and people are buying or reading for free all those books from their childhood & college days that they thought about but didn't have time for or money for and when they did, they'd forgotten it or it was unavailable.
It's available now. All of it. (Well, not all, but increasingly more.) I don't have to settle for "whatever's hot on the market today"--I have a century and more's worth of literary history to dig through. I can get very specific with my preferences... "I'm looking for sci-fi mysteries with non-White protagonists." And while I know damn well that's a tiny filter, I'm not limited to a single bookstore or library in my search. I'm not limited to a single university's inter-library loan system. For broader interests? "I'd like some steamy historical romances in the US 1700-1900?" I'll never run out.
I do buy new ebooks. (Most I've paid for a single book so far is $30.) I love reading new books, new topics, books that couldn't have been written a decade ago. I love M/M books that publishers wouldn't've touched five years ago. But I also love classic science fiction, and the fantasy that my friends were reading when I was a teenage gamer and never got around to borrowing. I love cheap trashy romance novels. I love legal documents... I read briefs & rulings for fun. I love books about Pagan cosmology, ethics, philosophy; I love books about relationship dynamics; I love books about linguistics.
Publishers and authors who want my money for something new? Are stuck with one of two options:
1) Pitch "ooh, shiny!" Which is what sells me on some M/M, and some urban fantasy, and some science fiction. And hell, some romances, and mystery novels by romance authors I've liked. My capacity to enjoy the new shiny is boundless. It is not, however, priceless; my spending cap on ebook novels is $6 each--because if it costs more than that, I ask myself, "Am I sure I'd enjoy this more than [any of long list of books] I haven't bought yet from Baen?" And the answer is almost always "no."
2) Pitch, "elf, you *need* this book in your life." I need--for those selfish values of "need" that can include books--plenty of books. Gaming reference works. Linguistics books. Communications meta. Pagan & occult books. Legal books for laymen. Crossovers from any of those fields. I don't "need" fiction; the last fiction book I thought I "needed" (again, for these values of "need") was Harry Potter 7. Which works out to being a reference book rather than a story--I cared less about what happened to Harry (I gathered he was gonna fight a certain dark wizard? Gee, I wonder who was gonna win?) than about the details upon which could be built fanfic. Or which would be ignored to build fanfic.
The Girl With books? I don't expect to ever read; I don't care how popular they get. They're sold with DRM, so I won't be buying them. I could acquire bootleg copies... but why bother? I'm not short of excellent content to read. The Liaden novels are $6 each, and I've never read those; they're a lot higher on my to-read list than Larsson.
I care about what kind of future my *kids* will have, in regard to books. I care that they can't buy ebooks of their own--they need to be logged in on an adult account, with an adult's credit card, to access the stores. I care whether they'll think of books as something that poor people get ones nobody has ever heard of from clunky websites for free or cheap, and wealthy people get the ones mentioned on TV on bells-and-whistles websites. I care whether software & hardware is developed to let them use ebooks as serious study aids.
The big-vs-small publisher debate? The format wars? Amazon vs Kobo vs BN vs Smashwords? I cannot count the fucks I do not give. Those issues can be entertaining (and oooh, it's the internet, so I love the entertainment value), but they can't be *important.*
Important has to do with what's good & available to read--and that flood of content isn't getting smaller. The tidal wave of backlist must be *terrifying* to mainstream publishers. For the rest of us? Grab a board & learn to surf, 'cos the waves aren't getting smaller.
The more I read? (And I read a *lot*.) The less I care.
I am not, except in abstract, concerned about "the future of publishing." I am concerned about access to educational literature, entertainment text, reference works... but I'm no more worried about industry trends than the average person is worried about whether advances in the energy industries are going to change what kind of stove they have. Gas, electric, something else... the point is, I want to be able to cook on it. Avidly tracking green-vs-unsustainable energy systems doesn't really affect whether I'll be able to make a grilled cheese sandwich in another decade.
I looooove books and reading, so the future of publishing fascinates me--but I don't have to let it affect my life much. As Dean Wesley Smith said, books are not produce; they don't come with expiration dates.
If I read 50,000 words/day (I read fast. I can read more than that, but between job, home, social life, and Cool Stuff On The Internet, there's a limit to how much average reading I can do in a day. Let's pretend, hypothetically, that I have this kind of time to spend every day) for the rest of my life, and we're generous and assume I've got another 60 years--that comes to 1,095,000,000 words. (Plus some leap days. I'm gonna pretend I took those off for religious observances.) One billion, 95 million words. For the rest of my life.
The top twenty wordcount stories at AO3 are over 5.5 million words. Top 2,000 by wordcount are over 20 million. There are over 200k works at AO3--and more every day. Over 36,000 free ebooks at Project Gutenberg, which average a lot longer than AO3 fics. (Sure, AO3 has a handful of fics over a quarter-million words, but the vast majority of those 200k works are less than 50,000 words each; probably more than half are less than 5000 words each.) FF.net has a selection that dwarfs AO3.
Not, of course, that I'm interested in everything archived at Gutenberg or AO3. Or Archive.org, which has more, although those are raw scans & unproofed OCR conversions. But Smashwords has over 40k ebooks; Backlist Ebooks features the works of about a hundred authors; Wildside Press is republishing midlist sci-fi as fast as they can get their hands on the rights; Baen has a decade's worth of publications in ebook format with a lot of older content too... I will. NEVER. Run out. Of things to read.
If publishing stops tomorrow, I'm set for life. I could probably read nothing but *free* ebooks for the rest of my life, if I were willing to do a bit of digging & sorting. If I had no interest in supporting new art.
This, I think, is what is causing the panic among the mainstream publishers--customers aren't limited to "what's been published in the last year, + the last five years of NYT bestsellers." 100+ years of literary history is slowly working its way online and becoming available, and people are buying or reading for free all those books from their childhood & college days that they thought about but didn't have time for or money for and when they did, they'd forgotten it or it was unavailable.
It's available now. All of it. (Well, not all, but increasingly more.) I don't have to settle for "whatever's hot on the market today"--I have a century and more's worth of literary history to dig through. I can get very specific with my preferences... "I'm looking for sci-fi mysteries with non-White protagonists." And while I know damn well that's a tiny filter, I'm not limited to a single bookstore or library in my search. I'm not limited to a single university's inter-library loan system. For broader interests? "I'd like some steamy historical romances in the US 1700-1900?" I'll never run out.
I do buy new ebooks. (Most I've paid for a single book so far is $30.) I love reading new books, new topics, books that couldn't have been written a decade ago. I love M/M books that publishers wouldn't've touched five years ago. But I also love classic science fiction, and the fantasy that my friends were reading when I was a teenage gamer and never got around to borrowing. I love cheap trashy romance novels. I love legal documents... I read briefs & rulings for fun. I love books about Pagan cosmology, ethics, philosophy; I love books about relationship dynamics; I love books about linguistics.
Publishers and authors who want my money for something new? Are stuck with one of two options:
1) Pitch "ooh, shiny!" Which is what sells me on some M/M, and some urban fantasy, and some science fiction. And hell, some romances, and mystery novels by romance authors I've liked. My capacity to enjoy the new shiny is boundless. It is not, however, priceless; my spending cap on ebook novels is $6 each--because if it costs more than that, I ask myself, "Am I sure I'd enjoy this more than [any of long list of books] I haven't bought yet from Baen?" And the answer is almost always "no."
2) Pitch, "elf, you *need* this book in your life." I need--for those selfish values of "need" that can include books--plenty of books. Gaming reference works. Linguistics books. Communications meta. Pagan & occult books. Legal books for laymen. Crossovers from any of those fields. I don't "need" fiction; the last fiction book I thought I "needed" (again, for these values of "need") was Harry Potter 7. Which works out to being a reference book rather than a story--I cared less about what happened to Harry (I gathered he was gonna fight a certain dark wizard? Gee, I wonder who was gonna win?) than about the details upon which could be built fanfic. Or which would be ignored to build fanfic.
The Girl With books? I don't expect to ever read; I don't care how popular they get. They're sold with DRM, so I won't be buying them. I could acquire bootleg copies... but why bother? I'm not short of excellent content to read. The Liaden novels are $6 each, and I've never read those; they're a lot higher on my to-read list than Larsson.
I care about what kind of future my *kids* will have, in regard to books. I care that they can't buy ebooks of their own--they need to be logged in on an adult account, with an adult's credit card, to access the stores. I care whether they'll think of books as something that poor people get ones nobody has ever heard of from clunky websites for free or cheap, and wealthy people get the ones mentioned on TV on bells-and-whistles websites. I care whether software & hardware is developed to let them use ebooks as serious study aids.
The big-vs-small publisher debate? The format wars? Amazon vs Kobo vs BN vs Smashwords? I cannot count the fucks I do not give. Those issues can be entertaining (and oooh, it's the internet, so I love the entertainment value), but they can't be *important.*
Important has to do with what's good & available to read--and that flood of content isn't getting smaller. The tidal wave of backlist must be *terrifying* to mainstream publishers. For the rest of us? Grab a board & learn to surf, 'cos the waves aren't getting smaller.