FROM THE BOOKSHELFANDREW RUPPEL,
Feature Editor,
McIntire School of Commerce, Managing Editor Hal Jacobs brought to my attention a presentation made by Mr. Joseph J. Esposito, president of Encyclopedia Britannica North America, at a symposium on the future of publishing at the University of Texas in November 1994. DSI members should find his remarks of interest.
THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING (EXCERPTED)by Joseph J. Esposito, Encyclopedia Britannica North America Let's focus on the book industry. The most important thing to be said about the book industry is that it is very small. The total sales of U.S. book publishers last year [1993] were about $20 billion. From the $20 billion total we have to subtract $6 billion for books for schools and public libraries and another $2.5 billion for books for higher education, which are essentially secondary material. The professional segment, which is small but highly profitable, publishes books of little interest outside a narrow field. That leaves university presses, which are tiny, and general consumer publishers. The consumer segment, depending on who's talking, is about one-third to two-fifths of the total industry, and includes such categories as mass market romances, celebrity biographies, and children's books. We can all play snob and decide which trade books are serious and which are fluff. Is Anna Quindlen high brow or middle brow? How about John Updike? However, I don't think that is productive. What is clear is that the books serious readers care about constitute a tiny portion of the whole, perhaps $500 million and certainly not more than $1 billion. At $500 million, that is 2.5% of the total industry and .0078% of the gross domestic product. The future of publishing is not so much bleak as it is small. The various segments of the book industry will move into the future in different ways. Professional publishing has already been seriously impacted by digital media, especially online services; that trend will accelerate. But whereas current professional information services are large in scope, in the future such technologies as distributed processing, client-server architecture, and of course, the Internet, may reduce the critical mass necessary to get into the online game. I anticipate we will see more professional publishers in the future, not fewer. School publishing will be exactly what taxpayers want it to be. Educators are excited by the prospect of interactive instructional materials, especially products that are delivered online, but the fact is that the hardware isn't in place to make this possible and no one seems willing to shoulder the cost. It could be that the future of school publishing depends largely on the political prospects of Al Gore. If an information superhighway is built, and if (a big if) it extends into the schools, we can expect to see the traditional textbook market give way to materials produced in multiple media: some print, an online component, videotape, and especially for younger children, hands-on learning materials, which are called manipulables in the trade. These innovative instructional materials will be part of an overall re-tooling of the classroom, an important part of which will be the training of teachers. Our company has bet heavily that teacher training increasingly is going to be the responsibility of publishers. Thus the future of publishing in the schools may involve the packaging of the entire classroom experience. From there it is a short jump to publishers opening up their own schools. So, for publishers, the word future is a plural. But what of the future of intellectually distinguished works? Will this segment find its own path to the future, or will it piggyback on the developments of other segments? Let's break this segment into three parts and take a look. First, stepping away from books for a minute, we have academic journals. This category is dominated, at least in terms of dollars, by three or four publishers that concentrate in the areas of science, technology, and medicine. This segment, as we know it today, was essentially invented by the late Robert Maxwell, whose entrepreneurial insight was that libraries would pay almost any price for premier publications. He was right, and was hated for it. The backlash against Maxwell's paradigm is getting stronger, and with the aid of electronic publishing over the Internet, there is a reasonable chance of restructuring journal publishing by the end of the century. The critical drivers in this area are universities themselves, who may begin to assert more control over the publication of the research performed at their institutions. The copyrights to these works increasingly may come to reside at university presses, whose job it will be to manage Internet servers. As we go into the next century, journal publishing will be less profitable than it is today. It is an open question whether journals will flourish in an environment that is hostile to the creation of capital. The second area is university press publishing itself. University presses nowadays do a lot of things; ten years from now these publishers may be very different. One thing is certain: the move by university presses into general trade publishing will disappear by the end of the century for the simple reason that they will lose money at it. My advice to university presses is: get out of this area now. The trade publishers in New York City are very, very good at what they do, and it is naive to believe that a university press in Berkeley or Lincoln or even Cambridge can compete with them. It is the scholarly monograph that hurts so much to contemplate. Does it have a future? Print runs for some titles are now down to as few as 500 to 700 copies; the market continues to contract. Inasmuch as there is a long tradition of subsidizing monographs, I am sure some titles will continue to be published, but the outlook is not good. Nor does electronic publishing seem very promising, for two reasons: the discursive text of a typical scholarly monograph works best in print, and in any event, it is the fixed, not the variable, costs that are undermining the monograph, and the fixed costs do not vary much between print and electronics. It is my view that the notion, dear to college administrators, that university presses can be self-sustaining is a pipe dream. This leaves us with the quality segment of the trade book business. Here I am optimistic. Although the superstore chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders are primarily being built to sell remainders and bestsellers, stocking a broad selection of books is important to their image. Good books will find their way onto the shelves. And they will continue to be published, both by small independent presses and by sneaky editors in the large commercial houses. There is also little reason to believe that interactive media will make any significant inroads with this audience (at least outside the workplace) because the closely reasoned text that they enjoy is precisely what digital media is not good at. For some time to come, we can expect books to be the thinking person's medium. There is so much hype surrounding electronic media that it is good to slow down once in a while for a reality check. We have already looked at the myth that electronic publishing alone will destroy print, but perhaps more insidious is the idea that multimedia is somehow superior to text. If this were true, all music would be opera. Except for kids, most publishing will continue to be text publishing for the simple reason that words can do things that images and sound cannot. The text may be hypertext, and we may be seeing more and more of it on a computer screen, but the primacy of text is just about the one thing that publishers can count on in the future. What is for me the most intriguing question, whose answer may not be known for 10, 20, maybe 100 years, is how digital media will change our understanding of what an idea is. A paragraph is a creature of the print medium (obviously). But is the consciousness that creates paragraphs and thinks in paragraphs also a function of print? A closely reasoned argument proceeds step by step, word by word. Is such an argument an outgrowth of the linearity of print? I don't know the answer to that question, but what is clear is that if the future of publishing is increasingly going to be an electronic future, we will have to develop a poetics of new media. This is one publishing project whose time has come. The one outstanding question is whether we will publish it in print or electronic form.
Dr. Andrew Ruppel |