The role of the publishing industry in the age of digital reproduction through digital distribution finds itself in a volatile situation. Volatile in the sense that the traditional advantages and need for a publishing company become harder to justify, at least in regards to the role they play in the publishing process. But to say that the publisher in today’s contemporary age has no need or purpose at all is not fair to the role of the publisher. Not just printers or middlemen that interject between authors and readers to garner profit—but have the potential to add value to the work of authors, able to develop an author’s growing career and make a market for their works (Greco, 2005). There is a foreboded waning and changing role of the publishing industry in the age of digital reproduction—the role of file formats like .pdf and .epub, and the ideological nature of what happens to a book once it becomes digital. How does publishing continue to justify itself when file sharing becomes so frictionless and easy, how do they pivot and adapt to changing times, and the everchanging technology?
Core to an understanding of this problem is that when we idealistically consider publishers and editors to have a positive societal role in the transmission of knowledge, publishing is still likely to remain a business; holding an economic fiduciary duty to their publishing houses’ shareholders and owners, the maintenance of the bottom line (Clark & Phillips, 2019). An interesting comparison to the state of the publishing industry is to look at what modern media companies are doing with cloud streaming services in the post-cable internet age. The rise of the streaming service. McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2017) note that streaming services are able to take advantage of the fact that most people in developed societies have access to powerful smartphones with the capability to stream and consume huge amounts of music, movies, online content, all at the instant touch of a button. The act of bundling music or films into a package means that there is a convincing way to still sell media in the digital age: the subscription-based model. Promising a large library of content for a flat monthly fee. But herein lies the critique, the role and job shifts to the act of ownership, of copyright: ‘Instead of buying individual songs, they bought the right to listen to a massive bundle of music.’ (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2017, p.116).
They emphasize ownership and copyright with accessibility for a subscription-based or one-time payment model. Owning becomes the means of profit. Ownership and copyright create exclusivity, the only legal means of consuming and engaging with their content/media. It’s harder for publishing companies in the age of digital reproduction, downloading a pdf or epub file of a book is much more feasible than a whole .mp4 or .mkv file. Different both in its download speed/size and shareability from friends/online communities. It’s the difference as well in mediums, music and visual content like films being of a different sensory mode. When we see the rise of new proposed mediums of books, the ebooks and audiobooks—that is the present solution proposed by publishers for the digital age. Not necessarily reinforcing the book itself, but introducing it in a new digital form, one more entertaining for the visually-saturated masses.
The competitive effect of the ebook against the physical book in regards to the object being purchased finds a similarity to what has happened to a publishing company’s distribution. The ability to consume a copy of literature for free via .pdf has a larger effect on the publishing industry from an ideological point of view. The answer to this, should be an emphasis on the medium of a physical book as superior to its digital reproduction. Not everything new is an improvement of the old, avoiding the technological selling point of gazing at the advancement of technology as a rear-view mirror—a car is not just a faster horse, a clock not merely a better sundial, they all have an intrinsically unique effect with its own affordances. The issue of this essay is more a theoretical approach that publishers need to stress, and make clear to its audiences of potential customers. I view that any of the future success of the publishing industry requires a shifting of society’s understanding of technology, it involves an ideological understanding. An ideological understanding that the medium is the message. There is a benefit in drawing from both a Mcluhan view, and one of Walter Benjamin:
‘The personal and social consequences of any medium […] results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.’ (McLuhan, 1964, p.23).
‘But while in relation to manual reproduction (the product of which was unusually branded a forgery of the original) the genuine article keeps its full authority, in relation to reproduction by technological means that is not the case.’ (Benjamin, 2008, p.6)
Each new medium’s form has its own affording effect; each digital reproduction loses the aura of its unforged original.
Publishing companies need to return to a traditional emphasis on the physical quality of the book. While someone can download a .pdf or digital version easily, the medium becomes the message, something is lost in the way the information is carried when it becomes digital. It loses the physical embodied display of an author’s work, and instead takes on the digital hyperactive nature of content online—it takes on the nature of something reading is deeply not, swapping contemplation and active attention for indifferent consumption and passive viewing.
Something written for the digital means also has this embedded effect, not being able to be expressed in the physical. But publishing now is at a weird point where digital writers write for digital readers, and digital writers write for physical readers too. The medium’s message becomes muddied and muddled on such a weird subjective contextual level that it cannot place a footing, creating a lack of unified and artistic experience in its experiential consumption. The solution has to be an ideological one embodied by a publishing house, you need a publishing company with an ideological edge that reinforces and justifies itself as a positive presence for audiences and authors. It has to resemble and embody a measure of quality seen in its curation. Quality, not cheap prices or advertising campaigns, will be key to survivability for a publishing house in this day and age. Physical books are a medium capable of truly moving someone who makes the less-than-popular decision nowadays to read.
You see the detriments to an extent with publishing’s relationship to Booktok, which I view as a symbiotic relationship bordering on the parasitic. It’s a reliance on the only consistent population where consumption is almost guaranteed, quantitative measurements of popularity in the process of datafication for consumer statistics (van Dijck, 2014).
Industry experts highlight Booktok’s growing acceptance by publishers as a positive for the development of a literary culture, and its financial merits (Isen, 2023). But TikTok is still all about experiencing interactions, and engagements, through multimodal entertainment (Jerasa & Boffone, 2021). The publishing industry (even if Booktook brings in reliable sales in a sea of unreliability) in this relationship becomes primarily reactive, and shifts power over to a social media platform rather than themselves. Now not only have publishing companies lost the battle against digital distribution, but the means of access to customers also. They serve and attach themselves symbiotically to a digital trend and community that does not even see them, only the product. This feeds the process of rapid consumerism leading to infantilization, alienation, and exploitation through commodity fetishism (Barber, 2008), it cannot satisfy anything but the neoliberal urge to consume. It’s consumption for the wrong reasons, even saying that you are consuming a book feels crass in regards to the literary experience. You need a level of pretension that doesn’t fall into snobbery and smugness; because a total elimination of borders and thresholds turns meanings and definitions into meaningless notions (Han, 2018). This means an emphasis on producing the original physical medium of a book while highlighting the ideological intentions behind it, making that a core brand identity. That way the act of reading, and the act of supporting a publishing house with this philosophy can now operate in the ideological persuasion. Selling itself as something greater than just a publishing house, but as part of a greater ideological movement against technological developments that lose the core aura of a piece of media as they advance through time.
The overall problem faced by the publishing industry is not a new one. But the industry has survived and has a historical precedent it has served for a far longer time than the new media companies that we associate as traditional today. The publishing industry has the opportunity to enact positive social change through an ideological approach that understands the traditional physical medium that they continue trying to revamp and make more digital/entertaining is already perfect as is. This approach can lead to financial success in a sea of neoliberalism consumption, the publishing industry a contemplative beacon of quality in a society swamped with mass consumption and instant gratification.
Both the medium of the book, and its history are intertwined with our social, cultural, and economic legacies. What matters most to aid their survival and contribution to a possible social good, is to emphasize McLuhan’s warnings decades ago, that the medium is the message.
References
Barber, B. R. (2008). Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children Infantilize Adults And Swallow Citi. National Geographic Books.
Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (J. A. Underwood, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Clark, G. and Phillips, A. (2019). Inside book publishing. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351265720
Greco, A. N. (2005). The book publishing industry. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410611604
Han, B. (2018). Topology of violence. In The MIT Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11056.001.0001
Isen, T. (2023, July 28). TikTok is becoming a publisher. Will it ruin the book industry? The Walrus. https://thewalrus.ca/booktok-publisher/
Jerasa, S. and Boffone, T. (2021). Booktok 101: tiktok, digital literacies, and out‐of‐school reading practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 65(3), 219-226. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1199
McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E. (2017). Machine, platform, crowd: Harnessing our digital future. W. W. Norton & Company.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Sphere Books Limited.
van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197-208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776
-> Slopunk <- 