A Read Screed I just nished reading another of those many, many articles on eBooks vs.

printed books - some of these predict the end of print [using the term legacy publisher as synonymous with print - an error I would say], while others predict that eBooks will only ever be a niche market. Both are such dreary nonsense. My opinion - based on those individuals I know who like to read - is that both will exist for the foreseeable future - certainly what is left of my life and probably long after. But, my opinion, or the opinion of those on any side of this debate is irrelevant as no one can predict the future. What I can do, and will now is state my preference, and some reasons for that preference. First, I will go back a bit. Since movable type in the mid-15th century, and especially since the rise of the book as a medium of communication for more than the academic elite, books have been controlled by publishers. This occurred gradually and in response to demand and was a rational outcome of this demand. Those who had the expertise to produce a book how to print, bind, edit - did so, and became publishers. Authors sometimes published their own work - and in some cases discovered they preferred publishing to writing and became publishers instead. Publishing until the mid or late 20th century [there are no hard and fast dates here this was, like most history, a process] was an individual business. By this I mean, that a person owned a publishing company - if you published with Edward Smith Ltd., there was an Edward Smith who owned the company and who made the nal decisions over which manuscript to turn into a book - and oversaw the printing, binding, editing and marketing of that book. By the late 20th century, book publishers had become large corporations whose principal concern was prot and not a love of books. This is not to

claim that many, or even most of the employees of the rm were not book lovers - they were and are. But, prot came to rule over a love of books. This change was not specic to publishing, I should note. I worked for nearly 20 years as an ofce clerk for an industrial company. When I began there, the CEO was a professional engineer, as the products of this company were designed by electrical engineers. His second-in-command was an accountant - but the product came rst. Prot was a clear necessity, otherwise the corporation would fail and there would be no products to design. But, it was understood that the product should come rst, and it was the task of the accounting side to make sure there was money to produce products, and to sustain the company in that goal. But, during the same period when a publishing company's product - the book - began to play second ddle to the pursuit of prot, this was happening in all corporations. My assessment is that this overall has been to the detriment of western civilisation, but is not I emphasize particular to publishing. What do these corporate publishers do? Essentially that is, in terms of what gets published? They act as gatekeepers - deciding which manuscripts become books, and which books are promoted so anyone knows about them. This has always been the case, and has worked reasonably well, but is far from perfect. Why does it fall short? Well, publishers seem to have a poor record for discerning what people want to read. The biographies of famous authors are lled with tales of rejections slips for books that became best sellers - I can think of two off the top of my head - Agatha Christie in the 1920s, and J.K. Rowling in the modern era. [to be continued - I will post this as is for the moment as I don't trust blogger to keep the draft until I have time to get back at it - have to run to the store to buy cat food! or I will be eaten alive myself.....]

Ok, back again for a bit.....

I wonder at all the books that might have entertained, edied, instructed, annoyed readers that never did nd a publisher. What has happened now, of course, is the eBook - Amazon, the world wide web, sophisticated word processing programs...... all of which allow an author to bypass the corporate publishing world. The nonsense I referred to at the beginning of this post refers primarily to the idea that indie books are all of poor, and risibly poor quality and that publishing companies are necessary to weed out these dreadfully bad productions. This is nonsense, because readers will sort this out themselves - if a book is terrible, it will not be read - not that all professionally published print books are well written! Far from it the Da Vinci code springs immediately to mind. But they are well edited, and designed and sometimes even marketed - those this latter has been largely abandoned by publishers, who leave the marketing to a launch, and some tactics to get it on the upper shelf of display cases in book stores. But, does a book need a corporation to look professional? Well, no...... there are plenty of freelance editors, book cover designers, artists who would like a slice of this new pie. What is lacking at the moment is a regular way for an author to access and afford such services. Because, authors are not now going to stop self-publishing, and we authors are not going to stop writing for the eBook market - it is foolish to think it is going away, or will be only a minor part of the market. Which books will sell to such a degree the author can earn a living will be determined now, not by publishing companies, but by the market place. Some will be produced by these companies - but many, many more will be out there looking for readers. The second bit of nonsense I alluded to at the start of this post, is that there are too many eBooks competing for space. Well, if there are too many then most will not be read. Readers will nd them simply by using search engines, or browsing the lists of modern publishers - or publishing facilitators, such as Smashwords or Amazon. Readers used to pop into a small or a large bookshop and browse the shelves. Some bookshops were, and are, highly organized, some were not [and I always found these the most fun - I remember clearly a book shop that sold both new and used books, but they were piled in stacks on the oor, some were on shelves,

parts of the shop resembled a cavern of books - with a strange sort of order that I suspect reected the interests of the owner more than any logical taxonomy]. But readers found books, as they will now online. People in general today like to touch books. Those who love reading also love the look and feel of books. Not all books - this is something often ignored when this statement is made - most books printed these days are on cheap paper, and have crappy binding. Those that are on good paper and with hard covers are often out of reach in terms of cost for many, perhaps most. So this is overblown, but real. Far too many people [and I am one of these unfortunates] do not have time to sit and relax and open a book and lose your self in it anymore. I used to - when I had a regular 9-5 job, with weekends off - but a growing coterie of the populations of the western world nd themselves self-employed after their jobs went to China, or working a whole series of part-time jobs, usually many hours a day and seven days a week. Reading in the old style is becoming once again a preserve of the elites in our society who still have 9-5, weekends off + vacations type jobs. I don't. I work seven days a week, 52 weeks a year with no vacation time. I , alas, am fast becoming the new normal. When I read, I read for a few minutes from my my iPod, or if I know I will be in one place for a half hour or so, from my iPad. I don't have a kindle because that would mean carrying around another device - I use only those that will allow me to read from several sources. So, what is the future? Will our economy return to the glory days of the period 1945-75, with low unemployment and high employment in tasks that give you regular blocks of time to devote to leisure? Maybe, but it surely does not seem that way now - things seem to be getting worse, not better, especially for those who want to read the old way. If I were to be foolhardy enough to attempt to predict the future except in the most general terms, I would say that there will be more eBooks. But will the gatekeeper publishers, who feel they have some sort of right to

determine which books are worthy of publication, regain control? Whatever happens, I hope not.