Publishing in 2025, Part Two

In part one of our series on the future of publishing we received a rich variety of predictions for the year 2025. In one contributor’s vision of the possible future, it was foreseen that Croydon would undergo a flowering — a renaissance in arts and culture. Another predicted the advent of electronic paper that would feel, act and look like a book — only hyperlinked and uploadable. One contributor maintained that physical books would continue to dominate the industry.

This week on Fifth Estate our series on the landscape of publishing in 2025 continues. For several years now, publishing commentators have been predicting revolutionary change in the industry. Here at Fifth Estate, we thought it would be fun to explore different views of how this might play out. This is the second in a three part series.

Rahim Hirji, Director of Corporate Development

There will be no books in 2025 – well, not in the form that we know them today. With time scarce and technology advancing at a speed faster than a pandemic outbreak, we will see a merging of content across all media. Books will become productions and publishers will become producers, not just of fiction and non fiction, but of stories, ideas and visions. All content, not just books, will be digital with every single book in the world instantaneously available, anywhere, anytime. There will be no physical book and I will not need a bookshelf. I’ll be able to read whatever I want on whichever device I want, be that on my phone, tablet, laptop or TV. I’ll never need to worry about where my book is, because it’ll be stored in a virtual Googazon cloud, that will not only store the last page that I read, but will also serve me up the next piece of media content that I need and want to read or watch, be that the news, the latest Gladwell theory of wow, or episode of season 24 of 24. Everything will be available in all languages immediately, in human simulated audio and in word form. Rights will extend globally, as international boundaries become more blurred. And publishers – publishers will work together, invest together and join forces with other media producers. Stranger things have happened. Who knows what publishing in 2025 will be like? What we do know is that technology knows no boundaries and the future has not yet been written.

Ben North, Creative Director

There will be at least six new genres that we either don’t think will work or haven’t considered yet. This is because the future isn’t predicted, it’s made by interested and interesting people having ideas and doing things. Sadly, in 2025 most publishers will spend far too much time trying to predict what will happen in 2030 or 2035. E-readers will be dead, and we will be reading on … whatever device works best to read on. (The central question with this sort of technology is nearly always: does A) work better than B) for my current needs? If the answer is ‘yes’, then A), be it a book, a convergent digital device or a spaniel with a chalkboard hung from its collar, is the thing you need.)

Even so, I’ll make some guesses. Almost none of them will be right. Which I guess will still make them more useful than most futurology.

1. A trend that might be called ‘Punk publishing’ via POD. Might involve ‘writers’ markets’ — cottage publishing, etc.
2. The ‘literary’ novel will continue to fade in significance and most people won’t really care … but someone will start doing something else ‘serious’ with narrative forms. Probably not with the written word.
3. A new age of pulp (see 1 and 2).
4. Publishers will still publish books. They will still consist primarily of linear text, and will not make much use of moving image, sound, or hyper-textual bulls**t. This stuff is like the waiter who interrupts your tasty dinner to tell you about the provenance of the meat, the concept behind the menu and all that nonsense. Briefly interesting and then just an obstacle to you enjoying the thing you actually came for.
5. Speed. Books will come to market FAR more quickly (giving hacks something to do after the likely death of the newspaper industry).
6. The age of the all-in-one fluorescent jump-suit will finally arrive. Tweed and linen versions will become the default look in publishing circles.

See you there …

Hannah MacDonald, Publisher, Collins

Summer holidays in 2025: My daughter sulks by a swimming pool reading interactive horror stories on her phone. She subscribes to over twenty small, edgy online publishers who keep her supplied with the slightly sexy, scary morality tales that are to her taste. She watches a lot of movies on her phone, the screen is the same size as the packets of cigarettes she hides in her drawers. But she still reads because she likes the way she can be involved in the stories — change the events and endings according to her mood.

I don’t spoil it by telling her that most of her suppliers aren’t as independent as they seem. The ones with the sillier titles (Kinetic Kink, creatOR) are owned by publishing corporates who monitor content and activity in the silence of near paperless offices.

I meanwhile sulk in the shade reading a new paperback called Teenagers: How I Coped by the-ex minister for social mobility, Jordan. I am one of a sizeable minority who still prefer paper.

Jeremy LoCurto, Graduate Trainee

In ETA Hoffmann’s short story, “The Choosing of the Bride”, a goldmaker produces a magical object: a blank book that becomes whatever you most want to read. Most readers would love a magic book like this. And in a sense, now you can have one — in the last couple of years, this alchemy has sort of been brought to reality with the advent of e-readers. So many people are now asking: is the future of publishing written in e-ink?

I don’t think so. E-readers aren’t good enough today, and won’t be around in 2025. Hoffmann wrote his short story almost 200 years ago, and the modern e-reader still creaks with the cobwebs of a two-hundred year old vision dreamed up by a gothic writer. In 2025 e-readers will have been long since swallowed up into convergent media devices, like the forthcoming Apple Tablet, and publishers will step up efforts to produce ‘enhanced’ content to ensnare the user in the galaxy of the digital book (and make them pay more for it). By then, users will micro-purchase slivers of extra material to build a more in depth reading experience. A new layer of personnel will be added to the publishing process to create digital media productions. They’ll be more akin to producers than editors, and work to build book galaxies for a short list of select mass market titles.

I imagine (read: I hope) that by 2025 there will be a generation of devices that project atmospheres consisting of image and sound. By then books remain narrative driven text, but are orbited by material beamed out of the screen. So when I read A Moveable Feast, satellite maps tracing Hemingway’s Paris hover around me, and archived historical snapshots of the location of the Café des Amateurs float around the walls like framed clouds. Soundtracks of Parisian music from the 20’s are beamed into my headphones. If I want, I can activate a 360 panorama view of Hemingway’s study at Finca Vigia or turn the walls of my room into a video of Cuban fishing and Kudu hunts.

In 2025 available technology might finally be more in step with our imaginations. But even then, I predict that at least 70% of publishing will still be physical books. The technology behind the book is proven: they are portable, cheap, easy to use, and durable — and engage our imaginations like no other medium.