Digitise or Die - What is the future of the book?

One of the (many) things you may not know about us is that over the last few months we have been helping develop the content delivery systems for a brand new eBook proposition, so it was interesting to go along to this talk during this London Book Fair week.

Authors Margaret Atwood and Andrew O'Hagan, Faber CEO Stephen Page and Times literary editor Erica Wagner talked about the future of the book in the digital age.

To summarise.....overall it felt to like a paean for the return of the Old Media, a remembrance of things past. Although I never attended the Guardian Future of Media summit it had the same ring about it judging from the blog posts. For example there were no digital mediarati (like us, or maybe even Amazon at a push in on the panel), so there was not really the input from that side until Question Time.

Nonetheless, there were a number of points that came up that were quite interesting. Its probably useful to split the discussions into three areas, viz:

- The future of the book as a technology for reading text
- The future of the book as a thing flogged by booksellers
- The future of the book as a way of authors making money (aka copyright)

The future of the book as a technology for reading text was in my view best expressed by Margaret Atwood in her talk "the death of the scroll" - she noted that if history is anything to go by, new tech (eBooks etc) will be adopted if they solve a problem, and will then coexist with Old Tech for quite a while, and the Old Guard will tut about the New Stuff all that while - it was ever thus.

Her view was that an e-Reader will only really replace a book when you can drop it in the bath and it still works (must pass that tip on to the product design team....)

She also asserted that book reading is a more neurologically effective way of taking in and assimilating data....I haven't been able to corroborate this yet though.

There was also quite a passionate discussion about the physical joys of actually owning and interacting with a physical book - riffling, smelling, scribbling - clearly some fetishes going on there - and quite a subtle point was made (by Andrew O'Hagan I think), in that physical book ownership tends to push you to exploring the canon of works by an author, whereas Amazon etc pushes you to explore "books like this that others have bought" - which can be useful but can also link books you buy for yourself plus the one you bought for retired Uncle Bob.

The future of the book as a thing flogged by booksellers really (in my view) resolves itself into the discussion about how the "long tail" is to be found and sold, ie how best to serve the many literary niche audiences - via digital media or books.

(Note - at no point was the term Long Tail ever used in any of the presenters' talks....thats how little "digerati" input there was, until I asked about it specifically in the Q&A)

Stephen Page's view was that the Long Tail is best handled right now by the ability to print on demand, but over time the more the niches are pulled out of teh book supermarkets, the harder it will get to find physical niche books.

It would seem that partly in response to Amazon etc, large commercial booksellers are stacking "books like beans" and it is harder and harder to get niche (aka quality) literature. One of the corollaries of this has been the increased manufacture of "beans" - large amounts of "crap books", typically by slebs - to the point that to be a successful author the last talent you probably need is good writing skills - fame is the thing.

There was also quite a long discussion on the death of niche forms like the essay, and literary criticism (which they differentiated from literary review)...but no comments about the blogosphere, where criticism - literary and otherwise - certainly abounds, as do essays and many other media forms. (There was some disagreement on the state of poetry.....interesting to know why it has become resurgent if true - has the 'Net had an impact?)

The last - and most emotive - area was about Copyright and DRM, and is clearly what literature is really all about - Andrew O'Hagan quoted an Edith Wharton character:

"A keen sense of copyright is the nearest thing she has to emotion"

Needless to say the Internet is (mainly) a Bad, Bad thing for Literature - you've heard it all before....but the reference to Ghougle - a ghoul that reduces all literature to searches of lumps of text - was an interesting allusion

I thought two interesting points were made here though:

Firstly, copyright as a quality assurance tool - editing is a craft, and its supposed replacement, social media - the tyranny of the most popular - does not really replace it.

Secondly, many people see publishers as the Evil Aggregator - but the truth is that they arose because writers wanted people to "monetise" their talents. ( Margaret Atwood noted that publishers were a 20th century phenomenon, and that the 'Net may have removed the need for their role)

Overall though, the sense I was left with was that Olde Literature, like Olde Audio and Olde Video, are still not really grasping, grappling with and grabbing the opportunities from the emergence of the Digital Media.

Other writeups are a detailed one here, and others here, here and here