To hear publishers and booksellers talk, no one involved in the production or sale of a book in this country ever gets a good night’s sleep. For years publishers have worried about everything from overpaying to greedy authors to takeoves by impersonal corporations. Independent booksellers fretted about superstores down the street and dot-coms on the Web.
And those were the good old days. Since March, when Stephen King became the first big-name author to sell a book in an exclusively electronic format, everybody’s been wondering what’s going to happen not just next year but next week. More than 400,000 readers downloaded King’s novella “Riding the Bullet” to their computers or an e-book reading device. Publishers reacted almost as swiftly. Two weeks ago three of the five largest publishing conglomerates announced plans to sell selected titles on handheld electronic readers and to publish manuscripts online. Overnight, the very definitions of terms like “publisher” and “book”–words basic to our understanding of our culture–are up for grabs. To sort out this volatile scene, we invited seven major players in publishing (list, left) to sit down and discuss a world where the printed word isn’t necessarily printed anymore. Here is their conversation with NEWSWEEK’s Malcolm Jones and Ray Sawhill.
NEWSWEEK: America’s readers are going to independent bookstores, they’re going to chain bookstores, they’re buying books online. Book buying has never been simpler. Yet publishers and booksellers talk as if they were convinced a tidal wave is about to hit. JOHN FELDCAMP: No matter how anybody feels about it, technology has seeped into the very fabric of everything we do and certainly every element of publishing. This creeping digitalization has now entered nearly every aspect of the process. It’s everywhere. Within the next couple of years, new books will simply never go out of print anymore. They’ll exist in these perfectly virtual forms and will be downloaded to e-books. We’re going to see print-on-demand machines, which allow distributors or bookstores to download and print a book on the spot.
AMANDA (BINKY) URBAN: I’m not convinced. I don’t know that it’s going to be that violent or that sudden, because I think a couple of things have to happen. First, there is a complete lack of hardware right now. Second, I think readers are going to lead us. I think there is going to be a slower transition, a generational transition. And I hate to be the agent here, but people are going to have to figure out how to make money doing all this. That’s going to take a while.
NEWSWEEK: Richard, will you be putting a print-on-demand machine in your store? RICHARD HOWORTH: I don’t know when it’ll happen, but yeah, I’m sure we will.
JASON EPSTEIN: Do you expect Barnes & Noble stores typically in five years to have print-on-demand machines in them?
MICHAEL FRAGNITO: Yeah, I think right now we have some print-on-demand machines in our regional centers.
SUSAN MOLDOW: The way in which your reading habits become public-domain information, and those habits get trans-lated into further commercialization of everything, makes me apprehensive. It’s exciting to you and it’s terrifying to me.
FELDCAMP: It’s not that I don’t find it terrifying. It’s just that there is an inevitability to this, and one of the great questions is: since things are heading this way in any case, how can we make sure that this does the most good for the most people? Let’s make sure that the technology serves the appropriate people. Let’s make sure that the authors are well served. Let’s make sure that the industry is strengthened. Let’s make sure that the agent community is strengthened. Let’s make sure that we can connect to readers more closely.
NEWSWEEK: Richard, how strengthened do you feel by all this? HOWORTH: Well, I notice he didn’t say anything about bookstores. [Laughter]
NEWSWEEK: Susan, you’re a New York City publisher. We’re talking about the dispersal of publishing into the very ether. How do you feel about all of this, and how do you see your role in it? MOLDOW: What’s obvious to me is that everyone can do what everyone else used to do. So I can sell books just like Barnes & Noble. I’m choosing not to. I’m choosing not to use my Web site to sell books because I want Richard to stay in business and I want Michael to have a job. But Michael can publish just like you can. And does Scott need his agent if he can go to Michael? So everybody can eat everyone else’s lunch. Each of us is trying to maintain an environment where there is a place for each of us.
HOWORTH: I think what we all want –and this is why most of us got into this business–is literature of quality. We want to get more readers. We want writers to be valued in society and to be paid for doing good work. I don’t give a damn if my store is in Oxford, Miss.–or exists at all–as long as someone is in that community doing the quality of bookselling which I believe people in my community want and deserve. And I feel the same way about all the other components of publishing. So I don’t think people are trying to hold on to their jobs, or take their lunch and hide it so nobody else is going to eat it. I think we all want the best thing for a healthy reading democratic society.
MOLDOW: It is under threat.
HOWORTH: It has always been under threat.
SCOTT TUROW: What bothers me about the new frontier is that it’s sort of a wasteland. Perhaps as the mainstream grows wider and wider and wider, it drowns all of the smaller and more diverse voices. Let’s not forget that the person who sold 400,000 copies in two days was Stephen King. That’s not a new voice. It may be a wonderful voice, but it’s hardly a new voice.
EPSTEIN: And it was free.
TUROW: And it was, by and large, free at that point. But you know, I guess my concern is that if there are 2 million trees, people are only going to see a forest.
FELDCAMP: I totally agree with you. But the fact is, you can’t get the genie back in the bottle. We’re already at the point where publishing a book is going to be aboutas tough as making a home page on the Internet.
NEWSWEEK: Recently people in publishing have been whispering a question: what if Scott Turow or Stephen King or John Updike decides to publish himself? EPSTEIN: In effect, that’s what has been happening with these high-priced, best-selling authors for a long time. Publishers pay them so much in advance, so much more than they can ever earn through the royalties on actual sales. In effect, these authors are hiring publishers at a very small fee to perform certain trivial functions for them that can be done by almost anybody. That’s the real relationship. But imagine a time not far off when you can take your next book and set it up on a Web site and people can download it as they did Stephen King’s at, say, $3 a copy, and you keep 80 percent of that. You’ll probably still have a very substantial hardcover sale through bookstores in addition, but that’s not bad. And that can happen.
TUROW: That’s not appealing to me at all, although if I was doing it in collaboration with Farrar, Straus and Giroux [his publisher], I’d be very happy.
MOLDOW: He’s saying he doesn’t want to be a businessman. That’s the very last thing many writers want to be.
URBAN: That’s why people like me exist. I’m making no money at all doing anything in this new medium. And yet I’ve hired four people since last October to do nothing but be engaged in what we call our Internet initiative. I spend countless hours every week meeting and talking to people. So that eventually, when this begins to sort itself out, I can make recommendations to my authors, who are expecting me to do this work.
FRAGNITO: It’s the same thing all over town as I talk to publishers. And of course, barnes&noble.com is investing millions in infrastructure that can support this. And it has to be done. I mean, those people who are courageous enough to invest now will at least be ahead of the curve for a couple of years.
NEWSWEEK: Michael, does barnes&noble.com seriously expect Americans five years from now to be carrying around little e-book readers? FRAGNITO: Yes, absolutely. I’m right now in the middle of writing a business plan. And the difficult thing is that there’s no data that you can look at. It’s very much device-driven, and within a couple of years the devices will be somewhat larger, hold more content, do a few more things and be easier to read.
NEWSWEEK: How quickly do you expect these reading devices to take off? FRAGNITO: Two to three years. Until the device is lighter than it is now and offers an advantage over paper, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I do think it’s possible.
FELDCAMP: The technology is all in bits and pieces and it’s not really fully built yet. It’s like the problem of the electric car. But at some point it will be there, all at once. I don’t remember who said this–about the world changing little by little and then all at once? Something along those lines.
MOLDOW: I think it was Chicken Little. [Laughter] People my age–my age and older–are attached to books as objects and are probably going to continue to seek a certain kind of entertainment from books throughout their lives. I think that your daughter, Binky, who’s going to start college in the fall, is a transitional being, and that her kids are maybe never going to see a book. I’m completely computer-illiterate. I don’t have a computer in my office. But I see kids who are completely graphically drawn, and that’s where they’re looking. So I think we have a window here of people like us–and then, who knows?
NEWSWEEK: Some years ago the publishing industry was in a tizzy about CD-ROMs. And then, suddenly, it was over. How can we be sure this isn’t that same thing? HOWORTH: This worries me. In the process of going where we’re inevitably going, mistakes are going to be made that cost a lot of money.
URBAN: Look at what the publishers did with the audiobook. They almost killed it before it got out of the gate. They didn’t want an audiobook released at the same time as the hardcover book. They thought it would cut into hardcover sales. So they would release it at least six to nine months afterwards, after all the publicity, after all the reviews, after the hoopla had died down. In a last-ditch effort they said, “Well, maybe we should try doing simultaneous release.” Voila.
MOLDOW: The point is, we can learn.
NEWSWEEK: A lot of publishers say that e-books will cannibalize hardcover book sales. URBAN: I just think that’s complete nonsense. There is actually data on how e-book sales spur hardcover sales.
NEWSWEEK: Jason, in your recent essay on the state of publishing in The New York Review of Books, you made the point that the trade-publishing world has never really made much economic sense. Do you expect it to start making sense once these changes–online publishing, books on demand–really occur? EPSTEIN: Well, who knows? I think the technology is going to change practically everything. I think what will happen is that the existing publishers will find their costly marketing, warehouse and shipping functions less and less valuable to them. I foresee editors operating in small groups, probably with some central financing arrangement, then putting their books up for sale and publicizing them over the Internet. This doesn’t preclude bound books’ going out to bookstores as well. Bookstores are a fact of human nature, no matter what the technology is. We’ll always find a place to sell books.
NEWSWEEK: We all love our neighborhood bookstore. What do you see it becoming in the future? HOWORTH: Well, I don’t think neighborhood bookstores, sick as they are, are going to go away. I think that there is a place in society for a bookstore. I think people want a bookstore in the same way that they’re going to always want hard-copy books. And there is a yearning for that in the soul that is deep and ancient.
NEWSWEEK: There’s something irrational about this. EPSTEIN: We’re an irrational species. And we’ve always made books and we’ve always made markets where books are traded. We’ll continue to make markets where books are traded. But you have to face the fact that these technologies are going to make an enormous difference. It’s not just a matter of putting a different kind of cover on the book and selling it under a different kind of distribution system. This is a paradigm shift. We’ll turn around one day and say, “Look what happened.”
TUROW: The problem is, it’s sort of like a bunch of cave people sitting around talking about what spaceships might do.
