Sarah Cypher

Jason Epstein, editorial director of Random House for 40 years, has written his forecast for the publishing industry in the digital age (New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010). Here are excerpts from the lengthy article.

On e-books:

[The digital books marketplace] will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom.

On creativity:

Works of genius will emerge from parts of the world where books have barely penetrated before.

On selling one’s work:

As conglomerates resist the exorbitant demands of best-selling authors … these authors, with the help of agents and business managers, will become their own publishers, retaining all net proceeds from digital as well as traditional sales.

On booksellers:

With the Espresso Book Machine, enterprising retail booksellers may become publishers themselves, like their eighteenth-century forebears.

On the necessity of the publishing industry:

It is fair to say that book publishing is more than a business. Without the contents of our libraries—our collective backlist, our cultural memory—our civilization would collapse.

On books, morality, and censorship:

The industry that Gutenberg launched eventually made possible wide distribution of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, to say nothing of [I]Babar the Elephant [/I]and [I]The Cat in the Hat[/I]. But his technology also gave us [I]The Protocols of the Elders of Zion[/I], [I]Mein Kampf[/I], and the nonsense that turned Pol Pot in Paris from a mere fool into a mass murderer. Digitization will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite. Censorship is not the answer to these evils.

On the future form of literature:

Though bloggers anticipate a diversity of communal projects and new kinds of expression, literary form has been remarkably conservative throughout its long history while the act of reading abhors distraction, such as the Web-based enhancements—musical accompaniment, animation, critical commentary, and other metadata—that some prophets of the digital age foresee as profitable sidelines for content providers.

In today’s LA Times, author Dani Shapiro laments the failure of the midlist.

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

It reminds me of something Don Delillo said in his recent Wall Street Journal interview, “I don’t think my first novel would have been published as I submitted it today. I don’t think an editor would have read 50 pages of it,” he says. What gives? Similar thoughts have led me to believe that the publishing industry is letting down many good writers–and in doing so, serves neither the writer nor the reader. While its selectivity has made generations of writers toughen up and write better, the arbiter of a book’s quality really ought to be the readers for whom it is written.

(Emiliano Ponzi, for The Times, 1.27.2010)

Again, this is why I see a future in which the big publishing houses become secondary publishers and mass marketers; and professional writers adopt self-publishing and local marketing as a way to sell their work, have an audience, and use their talent to participate in their communities. As a writer, editor and writing teacher, I have also seen how much of a young or new writer’s time and talent can be wasted writing to the industry or literary canon instead of to readers. The practice of again remembering and writing to our audiences might also recalibrate what the next generation expects from their work; and more important, foster the future Don Delillos, Dani Shapiros, Ann Beatties, et al., so that literature is still considered one of the arts, and not merely entertainment.