You don't think of book people as warriors, but that's exactly what they've been for about 130 years. I thought it might be fun to examine why print on paper is losing the media battle. Until fairly recent times books held their own pretty well, which is remarkable when you consider how strong the competition used to be. Book publishing used to be a feisty industry and its battles deserve to be chronicled.
Here in three short paragraphs is the David and Goliath story of how publishing managed to survive and even thrive against fearsome odds for more than a century.
The first major hurdle that books had to overcome was newspapers, starting in the late 1800s. Newspapers improved rapidly in that time in content, presentation, and distribution, and an awful lot of people stopped reading books and read only newspapers.
Book companies fought back by sponsoring magazines, which were enormously successful.
Then came the double threat of film and radio, which threatened to sweep everything before them. Radio was free, and it's hard to compete with free. Print fought back manfully with the magazines about movie stars, the Golden Age of Pulp, and comic books.
Then came TV and LP records, and once again print fought back...
...this time with the cheap paperback revolution, which was so influential that it helped to create the youth movement of the sixties.
It also fought back with skin magazines like Playboy. Can you believe that a guy actually got rich by stacking a mansion with beautiful girls and then writing about it? Poor censored TV was powerless to compete! Man! Print people were gladiators back then!
So with a distinguished and combative history like that, how did it come about that the latest new medium, the internet, managed to do what film, radio and TV couldn't...namely, cripple the publishing industry? The short answer is that it didn't. Modern publishing self-destructed.
If you think about it, books should have had nothing to fear from the web. Book people were the natural providers of content for the web. Books had all the ideas, all the in-depth research, and a significant share of the recognizable public figures that people cared about. It was better than the net at providing fiction and fictional role models. The net, which even now is still primarily a reading medium, is potentially a terrific instrument for funneling people into bookstores. Of course this assumes that publishers are printing stuff that people actually want to read, at a price they can afford.
Sure the net is free and books cost money, but radio and TV were also free, and old-school publishing still managed to be competitive. With so many advantages at the starting gate, why did modern publishing fail to compete?
I can think of no other answer than that publishers in our era are less imaginative and less competent than their predecessors. Maybe we're paying for the anti-business attitude of the sixties. Older publishers stood up to film, radio, and television by innovating and redefining themselves. Our guys can't be bothered. Our best minds have either abandoned publishing or, more likely, been locked out of it.
I have my own ideas about what publishing should do to be competitive. I'd need more room to talk about it than I have here, so expect to see a pamphlet on the subject in the Theory Corner Store (...sorry for the delay in putting it up...I got side-tracked into learning Photoshop). In the meantime, I'm hoping that publishers jump on Amazon's offer to sell new top-of-the-line ebooks for $10, and on iTunes' offer to sell books by the chapter.
Nice think piece, with great illustrations.
ReplyDeleteLuv the hippie.
i worry about this and i dont have any answers.we cannot allow the internet to become the only source of information for millions of people.its too tempting to simply wipe out certain aspects of history and culture in order to make it more digestable for the masses. publishing must be saved,various points of view must be maintained not simple soundbites.things are changing quickly-as a child born in the sixties, ive witnessed transformations, my generation is the only link to what was and what will be, it is up to us to seek a balance between traditional journalism and rapid fire digital information. it can be done-it must be done-whowever controls the information and its distribution controls the world.for me this issue is just as important as healthcare reform,its just that serious.
ReplyDeleteIntereging...
ReplyDeleteI've got one idea. It won't necessarily get people to buy books, but it will get people into libraries and bookstores. Provide a large digital billboard where one person can address the public, and let them say absolutely whatever they like, leaving it up there for half an hour or letting it linger until the next person has something else to say.
ReplyDeleteLeave it in a place where anybody can come by, read it, and discuss what's said. If you could go down to the library or bookstore, say anything you like, and have a crowd of strangers listen to what you have to say, it would help break us out of this shell of digital culture. I know that I would go there every day I could just to get out of the straight jacket that's been imposed on self expression.
We need to bring back real human interaction on terms that the people involved in the interaction decide.
You've obviously put a lot of thot into this post, Eddie, but I hafta disagree with you on alost everything. Give me a day or so to forumlate a proper response and I'll post again.
ReplyDeleteHow much of a driving force was the novel, in the creation of a strong publishing industry?
ReplyDeleteI'd say a significant one, but he novel doesn't really have the same cultural cache today, that it had in the 19th century, or first half of the 20th.
When was the last "great" novel written?
Talking: True, so true.
ReplyDeleteGW: That's a great idea!!!
Buzz: Wow! Sounds interesting. I'm looking forward to it!
Thomas: So far as I know the last good literary novels were written in the 50s. Maybe whenever people feel the need to redefine themselves they turn to the fictional heros in new novels.
I appreciated what Tom Wolfe tried to do in his first novel, even though the book was uneven.
We've lost Mom & Pop publishing houses.
ReplyDeleteThis is at least the third time, maybe the fourth or fifth, that I've heard someone mention that the print industry is destroying itself. I'm not old enough to remember what print was like in its full force, but I can believe that blind, thoughtless conservatism is choking the life from newspapers, magazines, and books.
ReplyDeleteConservatism may kill the industry, but the print medium will certainly remain. Think, for instance, of all the online comics that make their sales from print books. And once that old dinosaur, Big Print, is out of the way, who's to say that a new industry won't rise up in its place? It'd work the same way you mentioned, with material appearing first on the web and then funneled into print.
In fact, I wonder how much awful fan fiction (aside from Twilight) has been made into books? Even just small vanity runs. I bet the next big step for print is right in front of our faces and we can't even see it.
Eddie -- why stamp the last good novel as coming from the 50's? On what criteria are you judging?
ReplyDeleteGood, even great, novels have never truly disappeared. They're just impossible for meek creatures like ourselves -who don't have the time or energy to read dozens of novels in a year, all through the year- to pin down in a world of endless plaudits on every single back cover. Authors become celebrities, debates get so ferocious they reduce themselves to questions of whether the writer even knows their own language (Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer) and people who are just looking for a good read get turned off and tune out, inevitably going back (preferably deep) into the past.
ReplyDeleteLast Summer I read The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and a modern novel back-to-back. The modern novel still stood up. *Mom: "DINNER! NOW!!"* I'll reveal which one later!......
The book was "Between the Bridge and the River" by Craig Ferguson. Yes, the same Craig Ferguson who appears very late every weeknight to make Conan O'Brien seem normal. I regard him as the funniest human being alive at the moment (Don't worry Eddie, you're still high up there) as well as perhaps the most philosophically poignant (ditto). See my complaint about back-cover BS above: doesn't apply here. The guy saying "Kurt Vonnegut meets Johnny Carson" is DEAD RIGHT.
ReplyDeleteFor your consideration: there is actually a sentence within the text of this book which, without being anywhere near overlong -at least not by Joycean standards- contains ALL of the following phrases:
nocturnal
Emperor Tiberius
carp
savory bread crumbs
scrotum
This sentence, furthermore, is not seriously contrived in any way, nor does it break from the storyline in any egregious way whatsoever. Yet the story itself is nowhere near abstract or even particularly strange to someone who has been exposed to a fair amount of experimental fiction.
Oh, and Carl Jung shapeshifts. And he's a sexy lady sometimes.
Basically I think it's a modern masterpiece. I might read it again this summer and kick myself for saying that....but I doubt it.
Severin: Conservatism definitely is killing publishing, but just to clarify, when I use the word I mean it in the sense of averse to both risk and imagination, and not in any political meaning of the word.
ReplyDeleteI can only guess how things got that way. I expect that big unions prevent newspaper editors from making the new hires that they desperately need to make, but I could be wrong. Political correctness, law that makes it too easy to tangle things up with litigation, the kind of wayward management theories discussed in "Managerial revolution," and a host of catastrophic philosophical ideas all probably contributed.
None of these depressing subjects are discussed in the pamphlet I said I'd write. I'm more interested in supporting the people who are making a creative assault on the status quo.
Zoran: Thanks for reminding me about Craig Ferguson's book! I'll get it from the library. I just watched a YouTube video where he interviewed Stephen Fry, and it was great!
ReplyDeleteI just read part of Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which was recommended by a commenter. Aaaargh! Not to my taste. I also got "The Circus of the Earth and the Air" which Feckled Derelict recommended, but haven't had a chance to get to it yet.
Brian, Severin: I should have said that I was talking about literary novels when I said not much first rate stuff was written after the 50s. There was some decent genre fiction after that, and some terrific non-fiction...like Tom Wolfe's "Pump House Gang," for example.
What's my criterian? Geez, I don't know.
I suppose one of the things we forget is that in the sixties, when most artforms were rejecting and/or distrusting their own pasts, many of the most important books nontheless came from eras already gone by, be it Tolkien, the beats, religious texts....mixed in with contemporary sci-fi writers and reinterpretetations of old spiritual writings. But even those - Hesse died in '62, Lovecraft in '37, and I actually had to LOOK THIS UP. Such is the myth of the "counterculture novel". The musical equivalent would be Woody Herman getting his first decent paycheck at Woodstock.
ReplyDeleteSo there was a period during which trendy new fiction stayed "important" to a point, but none of it held up so well -"Jonathan Livingston Seagull", anyone?- because in a sense it didin't need to. There was enough great fiction to go around and any old self-aggrandizing crap would make money if it was sold just right. So maybe publishing, being the forward-thinking strategic machine that it was and as you described it, got in early on the boomer contadiction market - meaning they were the first to realize that a generation so self-righteously bent on rejecting it's heritage would set itself up to eventually hit a spiritual impasse, triggering a radical 180-degree turn back towards a hyper-nostalgia that their parents had also demonstrated, but mixed with a new kind of intense reverence and fascination with the past that went deeper than just the already-familiar feelings of patriotism. It's thanks to people who thought they were cultured and were almost right that I can walk all of maybe sixty feet from my house -which, praise be to G-sauce, is on a generally VERY quiet street- and buy just about any great novel of decades, centuries, aeons gone by....yet I don't see many other doing this.
(A little experiment: I am going to refrain from reading this again before I post this, and I want the rest of you folks to let me know if it's completely incoherent. I have never been sure exactly how much faux-intellectual, half-baked padding there is in my writing on subjects like this, the meat of which predates me by miles. Seriously, do I have ANY idea what I'm talking about here?!)
Last "great" novels..... Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude, or Kundera, The Joke, or Unbearable Lightness. So that would be the late 60's.
ReplyDeleteThomas: Lightness? 100 years? Aaaargh! Those are hippie novels!
ReplyDeleteI'm ashamed to say that I haven't read them. I saw the film version of Lightness and it was agonizing to watch, but I guess you can't blame the author for what people do with his novels.
Marquez is associated with "Magical Realism," and the idea behind that movement intrigues me. I assume that Tim Burton's movie "Big Fish" falls into that category, and I liked that a lot. My family and friends hated it, but I thought it described an aspect of my own life that I hadn't been able to put into words until i saw that film.
I see life in mythic, storytelling terms just like the character in the film. Maybe that's one reason I like The Odyssey and The Fountainhead so much. Some people are put off by what they think is the unreality of those books, but life as I've experienced it can only be described in grand, hyperbolic terms like that. Sometimes you have to exagerrate to tell the emotional truth.
Okay, I'll give 100 Years another try, but I have some other books I need to read first.
Haha, if I'd meant the Conservative Party (with a capital C), I would have used the term blind, thoughtless, erroneous, stupid, and criminally insane conservatism! *dodges shoe*
ReplyDeleteMy only point was that your thought about web content materializing in print may already be coming true, just on a microscopic scale. Webcomics are my best example, though I'm sure that there other other, text-based authors making money off of books. These books are sold directly off the internet without publisher intermediation, so a lot of the problems of the print industry just don't apply.
I look forward to the pamphlet from the Theory Corner Store! But don't forget that for most of the 19th century most novels appeared first, and were bought in the greatest numbers, as installments in magazines. Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Thackeray, etc. Remember that famous scene: hundreds of people on the docks in New York eagerly awaiting the magazine with the latest installment of "The Old Curiosity Shop", wanting to know whether Little Nell had died. When the novel was finally collected as a book, usually in three volumes, it was ordinarily out of the price-range of most people, hence the popularity of lending libraries in the Victorian world. What was responsible for the change was partly novelists themselves. Henry James, though most of his novels were serialized in magazines, described 19th century novels as "loose, baggy monsters". By about 1900, many novelists shied away from serial publication and preferred their works to appear only in books. Short stories continued to appear in magazines for much longer, of course, but you're much more limited in a short story. Interestingly the last gasp of the serialized 19th century novel was all those comic strips in the 20s and 30s which would run a story for months at a time (sometimes for almost a whole year).
ReplyDeleteYou owe it to yourself to read Marquez. '100 years' is one of my all-time favorites. The magic is spare & set among fantastic historical events. Magic never solves a literary problem for the author & it feels organic within the family narrative. "Love in the Time of Cholera" would also appeal to your romantic side.
ReplyDeletePrint media is a big subject, but for literary publishing, the problem is a loss of independence. Media consolidation means that the same individuals who made cartoons so crappy own the big publishing houses & the same philosophy applies. There's a legal obligation to use fiscal due diligence to create the best return. No publicly traded company can be satisfied with a 'gentlemanly' return of 5%.
Eddie -- liking myths and storytelling, you haven't read Life of Pi?
ReplyDeletePappy: I rail against corporations like everybody else, but I don't think they're the only reason why the arts are in decline.
ReplyDeleteI assign part of the blame to toxic ideas and behaviors like cynicism, nihilism, and the fashionable ridicule of virtue and heroism. It was easier for people in the past to write great literature because they believed in the existence of great people.
Stephen: I love novels, but I also love short stories, and the decline of either is upsetting. I even regret the decline of serial novels. Whatever their flaws, serial novels promoted the idea that stories should contain lots of cliff hangers and suspense. Authors like Dan Brown and Edgar Rice Burroughs owe something to the era of serial novels.
ReplyDeleteEddie, I agree with you about serials. I actually wish novels would go back to this. TV has (unintentionally) taken up that Victorian model: first, you watch the episodes as they air, then you buy the box set and watch the whole series. If it works for TV then I think it would work for novels. I think a series of short chapters/installments featuring the same characters, whether it's The Pickwick Papers or Terry and the Pirates or Dr. Who, is as appealing as ever. Of course, many of these kinds of story are either comedies, adventures, or both, and as you say, 'trendy' worldviews like nihilism and cynicism are 'above' either humor or heroism...
ReplyDeleteWell anyway, I think its funny I pissed you off!
ReplyDeleteI read Hundred Years and The Joke when I was pretty young (but not during hippie era) and the were both biting off a little more than I could chew at that point. I remember A Hundred Years more vividly.
Its awkward trying to define a "great" novel. When I chose them, it wasn't because they're my favorite novels. It was more trying to locate a time when a novel that was intellectually, and dare I say spiritually ambitious, entered into the general culture.
I don't really know what I'm trying to say besides the novel ain't what it used to be. And its not because there aren't writers out there.
I don't disagree, but I think all the cynicism is a reaction to nihilism. Consider the cynicism of the educated person who does publish Danielle Steel, of all the shit-geniuses who have made the world more gray & mediocre so they could be a little more comfortable. These are cheerful cynics, insect-like 'rational actors' in the marketplace who elbow values out of the way to make room for a growing economy. Wielding Ockham's chainsaw, they pare down virtue to the ultimate value of how-much & declare themselves heroes.
ReplyDelete"Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man...." --Nietzsche
Eddie:
ReplyDeleteReading my last comment over, I'm worried that it sounds anti-rationalist & that's not what I meant to say.
Print media is a broad subject, & I was thinking more specifically about literature. Under the old pre-media-conglomerate Mom & Pop model of publishing, Pop was a man of independent means & Mom was a Vassar grad. They were fans of literature who loved their work & probably enjoyed an occasional close brush with bohemia. They nurtured talent & fostered relationships between writers & editors. They encouraged the writer & would buy him drinks or sober him up as needed & all for a very modest return on investment. They couldn't compete with an ordinary modern business plan which focuses on maximising profits.
The HarperCollins(NewsCorp) website, "authonomy" appeared around the same time as Mass Animation's innovative business move to get animators to work for free.
www.authonomy.com
http://www.massanimation.com/