Book Producer Wonders: Death of Printed Books Greatly Exaggerated?
Posted by Brian Hotchkiss on Wed, Sep 23, 2009
This is a truly auspicious time for Vern Associates to initiate our blog. You see, on October 4, 2009, VAI will celebrate its fifteenth anniversary!
A little more than a year before Peter and I founded Vern Associates, an illustrated-book producer, I spent a day meeting with curators and publications people at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The word on virtually everyone’s lips—often uttered in a hushed, tentative, but excited voice—was Internet. They all seemed to be discovering and exploring a new “thing.” I finally ventured the question, What is the Internet? Instead of snorting and looking at me like I was some sort quaint throwback to an earlier age, I got a half-dozen detailed explanations, few of which agreed with any other.
Several times that day I was asked, Are you on email? Assuming they were referring to the interoffice electronic message system we had at Little, Brown, I said I thought I was. Although I didn’t tell them so, however, I couldn’t figure out why they cared.
Within a year, I was meeting with Time Warner’s newly hired “electronics guy,” who had been brought in to help figure out just how the various publishing subsidiaries of TW could leverage the new technology. He was very smart, very enthusiastic, and didn’t last long. Not because he wasn’t capable, but because he read the handwriting so clearly scrawled across the wall: “This will never affect book publishing.” He left for a position within the computer industry fold that permitted him to work on figuring out how to “assist” publishers who wanted to enter this not-so-brave, new world.
I also recall the great expectations Peter and I—and the vast majority of our colleagues—had for the printed book. Maybe they weren’t expectations so much as assumptions: books would always comprise printed words and pictures on paper, which was then bound and sold in bookstores. Hmmm.
Just today, while visiting the website of the proposed Boston Museum, I read this: “Text book publishers predict the disappearance of the printed text, perhaps within a decade.” Yikes! Could they mean all books? Maybe they’re referring to textbooks alone? As has happened so many times over the past 15 years, I confronted the prediction that leaves me wondering just what it means to people whose livings depend on making books.
To be honest, I keep pretty close tabs on what publishers say on this subject—granting most of what I hear its requisite grain of salt. This was the first time I have heard from a publisher this dire a prediction of the imminent finitude of books as we know them. Even those most focused on the future of publishing don’t expect books to exit totally, either with a bang or a whimper.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, 15 years seemed an eternity. Not so much, anymore. As Vern Associates strides into the blogosphere, we are confronted once again with the need to adjust our views of publishing and books and to examine just what our working lives will look like over the next 15 years.