June 14, 2012 - Inside Higher Education
When it comes to publishing, Charles Dickens was half right. It’s the worst of times, and it always has been.
Ten years ago, when preparing for a panel on the future of book publishing, I jotted down some quotes from Publishers Weekly that still sound fresh, a decade and a technology revolution later. “Too few children are raised in houses with books,” one worried publishing professional declared. “The emphasis on bestsellers,” another wrote, “has lately been carried too far” and harmed the chances for other books to find an audience.
I should point out these Publishers Weekly articles were published in 1927 and 1929. The publishing sky has had almost more practice falling than night.
Very rarely do you hear “things are going pretty well,” unless it’s in the context of “because we have totally given up on stupid, greedy legacy publishing and our new approach will make you a self-publishing millionaire!” or as part of an annual report to the stockholders of Elsevier, Springer, or Taylor & Francis.
Congressional testimony from publishers around initiatives like the Federal Research Public Access Act tends to produce a weirdly mixed forecast. Big publishing conglomerates (along with leadership of scholarly societies that run big publishing conglomerates) will say on the one hand everything is copacetic. Anyone who needs access to research has no problem getting it today, thanks to their hard work and investment, but then they warn that if funders insist on authors agreeing to make the publications arising from public funding public – which means copies of an article here and there from some issues of their journals would be eventually available to non-subscribers - the whole system could fail.
If making some articles freely available within a year could bring these giant publishers to their knees, then maybe that rosy picture they painted isn’t so healthy after all. Or maybe they really don’t care what they say before Congress because it’s just democracy theatre. The real decisions get made behind the scenes and with big money (which is why Lawrence Lessig decided copyright can’t be fixed until we do something about how we legislate and adjusted his advocacy to get a bit closer to the root of the problem).
But to a large extent, it really is the best of times for publishing. We have a lot of potential to connect more people with more ideas more efficiently and quickly than ever before. We have more people reading and writing than ever before, though (like publishing) literacy skies are also in a permanent downward trajectory according to generations of chickens little.
There are challenges, particularly as patterns of distribution are disrupted and new ones emerge. New possibilities carry costs and many are inevitably going to be failures. Integrating new options into the way people discover, use, and contribute to the record of scholarship can be exhausting, and someone who hears about a new novel may have trouble getting it because it’s not available through their library, their favorite bookstore can’t carry it, it’s in the wrong ebook format, or it’s only available to people living in a different geographic region, which seems insane since their Facebook friends who are raving about it have no trouble expressing themselves from a different continent. There are more choices, but they come with new and perplexing limits, and the whole thing is changing so fast it’s wearing.
I should point out these Publishers Weekly articles were published in 1927 and 1929. The publishing sky has had almost more practice falling than night.
Very rarely do you hear “things are going pretty well,” unless it’s in the context of “because we have totally given up on stupid, greedy legacy publishing and our new approach will make you a self-publishing millionaire!” or as part of an annual report to the stockholders of Elsevier, Springer, or Taylor & Francis.
Congressional testimony from publishers around initiatives like the Federal Research Public Access Act tends to produce a weirdly mixed forecast. Big publishing conglomerates (along with leadership of scholarly societies that run big publishing conglomerates) will say on the one hand everything is copacetic. Anyone who needs access to research has no problem getting it today, thanks to their hard work and investment, but then they warn that if funders insist on authors agreeing to make the publications arising from public funding public – which means copies of an article here and there from some issues of their journals would be eventually available to non-subscribers - the whole system could fail.
If making some articles freely available within a year could bring these giant publishers to their knees, then maybe that rosy picture they painted isn’t so healthy after all. Or maybe they really don’t care what they say before Congress because it’s just democracy theatre. The real decisions get made behind the scenes and with big money (which is why Lawrence Lessig decided copyright can’t be fixed until we do something about how we legislate and adjusted his advocacy to get a bit closer to the root of the problem).
But to a large extent, it really is the best of times for publishing. We have a lot of potential to connect more people with more ideas more efficiently and quickly than ever before. We have more people reading and writing than ever before, though (like publishing) literacy skies are also in a permanent downward trajectory according to generations of chickens little.
There are challenges, particularly as patterns of distribution are disrupted and new ones emerge. New possibilities carry costs and many are inevitably going to be failures. Integrating new options into the way people discover, use, and contribute to the record of scholarship can be exhausting, and someone who hears about a new novel may have trouble getting it because it’s not available through their library, their favorite bookstore can’t carry it, it’s in the wrong ebook format, or it’s only available to people living in a different geographic region, which seems insane since their Facebook friends who are raving about it have no trouble expressing themselves from a different continent. There are more choices, but they come with new and perplexing limits, and the whole thing is changing so fast it’s wearing.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/whats-right-publishing#ixzz1y6X1kTXn
Inside Higher Ed
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