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.