The Hapless Seed

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Publishing is caught in a textbook example of a digital-era vise. As Google and Microsoft—indeed, the entire culture—take flight on the weightless, frictionless wings of digital, book publishing remains shackled to the kind of business model that would ruin a less stolid industry (or a more profit-minded one). Books are notoriously expensive to produce, distribute, and sell, and long-standing distribution deals (some clauses dating back to the Depression) often require publishers to pay for shipping crates of books to and from retailers. Publishers bid, often in a blind auction, to advance money to an author, who may or may not deliver the work promised. Then they have to edit, print, distribute, and market said work, often paying outlets such as Barnes & Noble to put it someplace where a customer might actually see it. If the book doesn’t take off in the short time booksellers—who are rapidly diversifying into anything else they can sell, from DVDs to coffee—allow for new releases, the author keeps his advance, and the publisher must pay to have the copies shipped back (the timing at the discretion of the retailer), then either warehouse, pulp, or resell them as remainders. Profits not guaranteed.

Nevertheless, books remain a popular content platform. According to a publishing trade group, from 2002 through 2005, the last year for which data are available, the value of trade books sold increased from $6 billion to almost $8 billion. Even accounting for inflation and the Harry Potter effect, this is an encouraging figure, sufficiently against the trend of other old media to warrant some optimism. The purchasing of business books and self-help books presumably accounts for much of the increase, but there’s also a less-publicized upsurge in reading among teenagers. “Not only are teen book sales booming—up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported in March, “but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.”

One can debate whether current reading habits are cause for optimism or deep despair, but the excitement teens have shown in reading real books, paid for with real money—even if too many of them are titled The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—means that Google’s final triumph is far from certain. Publishers are operating from a position of strength, not weakness. It’s very hard to believe that Google, which has so far respected the rights of copyright holders when it comes to displaying the scanned works, would ever be able to stretch copyright law to be able to function profitably without the help of publishers. So far, all Google has created is a marketing platform for libraries and booksellers.

Still, what Google is offering should be important to publishers: a new way to think about books, one that releases the content from the binding. Counterintuitively, books on paper are a singularly inefficient way to distribute knowledge. Most books are damned to a short shelf life and shockingly limited readership. If your book sells more than 10,000 copies, you are hugely lucky. If you can make a living writing books, consider yourself a genius. Google and Microsoft and the broader digitization initiative, while seeming to treat content as shovelware, actually take writing seriously, using search to link authors to a dedicated audience in perpetuity without concern for the vagaries of geography, lending practices, shelf space, and gatekeepers.

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