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2009 was most definitely the year of the iPhone, with publishers and other media outlets alike all competing for their slice of the iStore pie. With rapid technological advancement this could all have changed by the end of 2010, but for now the iStore remains the first place to launch new smartphone content. In recognition of this, in the first of a series of pieces, Digital Diary will look at how different publishers have sought to grapple with the new platform – and what sort of content they have launched off the back of it.
Penguin kicked off the new year by offering loss-leading excerpts from the e-book version of Paul Hoffmann’s haunting novel The Left Hand of God – which plays out in a Mervyn Peake-esque imaginary world stuffed with absolutely terrifying characters. Perhaps because of the genre, this loss-leader concept seems to have served them well as a means of attracting new readers to the novel – with countless reviewers who claim to not normally buy Penguin books saying that they clicked through from the app. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out with other texts.
Alongside this new foray into suck-in iBooks, Penguin also seem to have recognised the huge marketing potential of the iPhone. Their umbrella app – last updated in late Novemeber – seeks to update readers regularly on Penguin release and upcoming titles, therein building their fan base. Potential click-through is always in mind though, with a stylised shopping trolley on each page.
With genre-specific searching and the weekly Penguin podacst, readers are able to move throughout Penguin’s content. The app itself – with a free price point reflecting its status as a marketing platform – is largely concentrated on Penguin US at the moment, though it does have numerous reviews of books published in the UK.
While it remains to be seen whether publishers will be able to develop the sort of brand loyalty seen in other industries, these are intriguing new ways of engaging with readers.
Read more Digital Diary entries:
Anyone interested in the ongoing debate about ebooks and how (or whether) to enhance them may be interested in this site:
What are books?
We feel passionately drawn to them. We fall in love with them. But a book is usually nothing more than text on paper. Sometimes there are pictures, perhaps even a few maps. The constraints of book technology rule out anything more.
Until now.
At Book Drum, we believe even the most wonderful books can be enhanced through selective use of the images, sounds, video and information available on the Web.
Isn’t Captain Corelli’s Mandolin all the more moving when you can listen to the music the Captain plays on his beloved Antonia? Aren’t John Harrison’s inventions more impressive when you can see the actual mechanisms described in Longitude? And don’t videos about the Taliban and kite fighting in Kabul add depth to a reading of The Kite Runner?
The idea of outsourcing the job of enhancement, wikipedia-style, to a willing community of avid book-lovers is certainly a novel one (geddit? groan). In fact, it’s sort of genius - putting the emphasis of providing additional material back on the book fans not only saves time and money, it increases the likelihood of choosing material the core community of book readers would like.
Book Drum is currently hosting a tournament “for writers and editors all over the English-speaking world to help us assemble a collection of Profiles that illustrate and illuminate great books.” Sound like fun? Click here to pick your favourite and find out how to enter.
Meanwhile stay tuned for announcements and exclusives from our own forays into the world of book enhancement.
Read more about digital publishing:
This week’s Digital Diary sees Sam comparing two new tech products from two of the industry’s biggest players, and musing over what they might mean for publishing.
With Christmas Day seeing Amazon sell more e-books than their printed counterparts for the first time ever – perhaps in part due to it being the present most teens were unwrapping that very morning – 2010 looks set to be a year of digital experimentation and creativity: one which will see a clash of the technological titans, as well as a raft of brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas in the publishing industry.
Wasting no time in setting out their stall, Google launched their new smartphone this Tuesday, the fancifully named ‘Nexus One.’ A direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone – rather than a subtle attempt to undermine the latter’s dominance with the Android operating system as they have attempted thus far – the Nexus will have a 5 megapixel screen to the iPhone’s 3. Despite outdoing the iPhone in terms of functionality, the Nexus owes much to Apple’s simple design: besides four small buttons along the bottom strip, the phone is black with a large screen.
Apple meanwhile, have been tinkering on their new tablet-like device – referred to in the interim as the iSlate – which was rumoured yesterday to be a ten-inch slate with e-reader capabilities and has been described by some as a ‘Kindle Killer.’ The Venturebeat blog reported that the iSlate will be marketed mostly as an e-reader with iPhone functionality, a sort of smartphone/e-reader hybrid. Either way, an announcement is slated for the end of January.
Whether this will smash Apple’s apparently inexorable rise to pre-eminence is debateable; what is indisputable however, is that these developments provide publishers with yet another potential platform on which to publish, with both helping to improve the e-reading experience and much for publishers to chew over.
The Christmas of 2009 was like nothing ever before seen in the industry. On Christmas day, ebook sales from Amazon.com outsold physical books. Perhaps this, combined with the fact that we are at the start of the first week in a new decade, is behind the waves of bloggers and commentators taking a moment to peek into their crystal ball to try to predict what publishing will look like in the future.
At least one major publishing company will be acquired by a retailer. For instance (and this is NOT a prediction, just a for-instance), Amazon could acquire Random House or Apple could buy Simon & Schuster.
I don’t know whether this would be a good or bad thing for the industry as a whole, but Curtis certainly makes a convincing argument for how this could bring stability to the publisher in question.
Meanwhile, over on Brave New World, the involvement of Google is viewed as a major deciding factor in the future of publishing, regardless of the success of their book settlement.
A while back, we did our own survey of predictions by industry insiders for a feature entitled Publishing in 2025. To read what MD of Press Books, John Bond; Peter Collingridge, MD of Apt Studio and Enhanced Editions; and Scott Pack, Publisher of The Friday Project, as well as many others, think the future of publishing will look like, click on the links below.
Publishing in 2025
After a short break to visit the HC Warehouse in Glasgow, Sam Hancock is back again this week, looking at the latest developments in digital publishing.
With the runaway success of Lonely Planet’s digitized guides firmly in their sights - the LP’s language guides, despite offering only 600 words and not a great deal of interactivity, have repeatedly reached the top 20 paid travel apps ranking – Time Out have begun launching their range of city travel guides as apps.
The first app – initially only covering New York – has married mapping from Google with Time Out’s own extensive content, offering a constantly-updated guide to the city. The app manages to be both highly simplistic and very effective: using the iPhone’s GPS in combination with the myriad reviews and listings Time Out have to offer on a city’s cultural landscape.
Interestingly, the Time Outers have offered up their app for free – attempting to draw out a strong dividing line between themselves and Lonely Planet. For more discerning customers – read those with a thicker wallet – the app offers a ‘Critics Choice’ filter, whilst those looking to get more for their dollar can make use of the ‘Free and Cheap’ criterion. Other added features are the ability to send recommendations to friends and the fact that the app works even when you’re not connected.
Whilst the graphics aren’t great and Time Out are hardly going to blow the world away with their functionality, they have crossed one big hurdle: combining mapping data with creative content and have thus outdone LP on this front – time will tell who’ll be more successful.
Following on from Sam’s Digital Diary post yesterday, I thought I’d share this.
The concept, dreamed up by Mobile Art Labs, Japan, is the perfect solution to the problem of the Iphone being too small for tiny child hands. But the real gem here is how technology is used to add value to books, and keep kids interested in them, rather than setting itself up in opposition to them.
As the website explains,
The keyword of Phone Book is “Analog on the Digital Technology”; it combines digital value of iPhone and analogue advantage of books.
It’s true, there are some things the book is better suited for. In our technological excitement, it seems that we sometimes forget that the book is perfect in many ways. If it were a riddle, it would seem nigh impossible to fit so much information in such a small space. That was before microchips, though.
In a month which has seen a huge profileration of apps aimed at children – presumably a result of many parents recognising the calming qualities of their handy multi-media smartphone – one app has taken off spectacularly: Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’.
So much so, in fact, that its developer – the Duck Duck Moose Partnership – has released another two apps to sit alongside their runaway seller, an Old Macdonald app and Itsy Bitsy Spider version – the developer’s latest offering.
Hot off the back of an Apple Staff recommendation, the app has attracted rave reviews from the likes of the New York Times and U.S.A Today. A musical book, based on the perennially popular song, Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’ creation manages to be both incredible fun and a valid educational tool at the same time. Alongside a recording facility, the book app allows playback in five different languages, squeezing more educational value in just for good measure. ‘Itsy Bitsy’, the latest installment, asserts to offer more interactivity and more educational value, with a fly acting as a tutor teaching children about nature and the environment.
Ultimately, the success of these apps has thrown the playing field wide open for developers and publishers alike, confirming a market which many had long thought existed: parents looking to use the iPhone as a means of entertaining/pacifiying their children, in much the same way as a childrens’ book long has.
In a fortnight that witnessed another outpouring of apps, app related paraphenalia, and plenty more products masquerading as apps, one set sticks out amongst the rest for its simplistic brilliance: the Wallace and Gromit Digital Comics series produced by Titan Publishing.
The set comprises one free app and four paid offerings (‘The W Files’; ‘Parts and Labour’; ‘Big in Japan’; and ‘Where there’s Muck there’s Brass,’ respectively), all launched to celebrate the 20th birthday of the plasticine pair.
The free comic – transparently named ‘The W Files’, sees everyone’s favourite crackpot inventor and his canine friend come up against a group of alien interlopers. Public spirited as ever – the pair set off in search of the aliens, kitted out with Wallace’s various bizzare contraptions, only to be mistaken for aliens themselves and interviewed by the military staff of ‘Unitwit’.
The comic comes complete with all the accoutrements one might expect: thinly veiled parodic episodes, brilliantly understated lines and slapstick humour. The app’s creators have taken advantage of the new promotional pricing function of the App Store with ‘The W-Files’- making it available free for a limited time. The others – which offer variously a glimpse into Wallace’s mad world of inventions, a trip to Japan and a misguided attempt by Wallace to bring brass music back to the local community – are available at the lowest priced tier of £0.59.
Developed by Titan Publishing, the apps are amongst the first in a long line of comic book and graphic novel releases – a frenzy that looks set to throw up more exciting creative content. Watch this space.
Starting this week, Sam Hancock will be joining us to in the form of a weekly column, DigitalDiary – frontline reportage from the cutting edge of digital technology. Each week he will explore one new, big digital idea in the realm of publishing. First up: The Zehnseiten App
With The Bookseller talking about an ‘explosion in the number of apps’ available for the iPhone, and Apple’s device starting to be taken seriously as a challenger to Amazon’s Kindle, a small German start-up has set the running with the cross-publisher project ‘Zehnseiten.’
Brought to the world from the depths of Bavaria, Zehnseiten (ten pages), have combined the iPhone platform with that most traditional mainstay of publishing publicity – the public reading, presenting authors reading the first ten pages of their works, filmed in black and white and with only a glass of water for company.
The app’s brilliantly user-friendly layout and simple biographies mean that they largely succeed in their aim of giving both author and book centrality, ‘in a measured fashion.’ The aim, presumably, it to whet the reading public’s appetite for these new works – spurring them on to buy the whole physical product in response. The paradoxical result is that the audio-visual mastery of the iPhone brings the words on the page back to centre stage.
Impressively, the app’s developers have managed to secure the involvement of a cross-section of publishers, from big names such as Suhrkamp – Herman Hesse’s publisher and the publishing house that brought T.S.Eliot to German speakers, to the old East German publisher Aufbau which in its heyday published greats such as Christa Wolf – to smaller niche publishers, such as the Swiss imprint Sanssoucci. It’s range of authors is also extensive, covering the evocative migrant literature of Rafik Schami to the satirical non-fiction of Christoph Süβ.
Though the future looks bright for Zehnseiten, the app does have its draw backs – constructed entirely with flash, you can’t link to specific extracts; access too, can be painfully slow. And, conspicuously lacking an English-language section, it’s difficult to see the app’s plucky developers making waves outsides of German speaking Europe. But with their unusual combination of the multimedia functions of the iPhone app with the monochrome of the traditional public reading, Zehnseiten have kicked the app race off with something quite special.
Today on Fifth Estate we post the final instalment of our three-part series on the future of publishing. So far, much of what we’ve heard suggests that by 2025 the world will increasingly look like a disturbing cross breed between a Philip K. Dick novel (minus the mind-bending hallucinogens), and Back to the Future 2 (minus the hoverboards and flying DeLoreans).
In parts one and two of the series, our contributors presented speculations on the radical shifts publishers and the entire publishing process will undergo in coming years – covering everything from the emergence of new genres to the form next generation reading devices will take. In our concluding piece we continue to look at ways the industry may transform in the coming years.
Scott Pack, Publisher of The Friday Project
The lovely, and increasingly bearded, Jeremy LoCurto, asked me to write a piece about what publishing will be like in the year 2025. In the spirit of our digital future I asked people on Twitter for their views in 140 characters or less.
Here is what they said:
@rblandford In the future, books will be read to us by a robot butler, who will then waltz with us in the living room before bedtime.
@adrianslatcher books will be smaller, faster (to market), not necessarily just books (see new nick cave), but still, distinctly books
@booksellercrow What will publishing be like in 2025? – Fucked. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
@nikperring I suspect a very small amount of paper will be used, if any. Is that too obvious?
@davidmbarnett Dominated by novels and autobiogs by the children of today’s celebrities, probably.
@dantjenkins Jordan will be on the Nat curriculum will be printed in student editions by Penguin, Coles Notes will also be available
@KRLitmag I see iPods with AudioBooks, more Kindle, Sony Readers, etc, an upsurge in eBooks and web publishing for 2025.
@nikperring generally, I mean; not suggesting books will be particularly small.
@orbific 2025: novels will seem archaic, like opera. People will see them as solitary and anti-social. Stories will be networked.
@matthewhill There will be no publishing, only Daniel Brown.
@dantjenkins people will reminisce about paper cuts
@jonmhowells publishing 2025. Same old moans, but more jetpacks.
@quackwriter 2025: Books will be beamed direct to people’s brains. Publishers will have to pay for the best brain space.
@KieraG23 publishing 2025: profit share or collapse.
@LaceyTiger In a reversal of fortunes, authors will receive multi-million pound advances and demand jewel encrusted lecturns for . . .
@JosaYoung originality will disappear and and only identical books colour coded for ease of genre spotting will be published
@KRLitmag Printed press still popular in 2025, but more of a “scene” – older gens holding onto past, kids trying to be sophisticated.
@LaceyTiger . . . readings, while struggling would-be movie stars will be forced to produce own films and tout their wares on the net!
@meandmybigmouth There will be a LoveFilm for books. Only one major chain will survive and they will purely stock mass market. All else sold by indies.
@brettlock In 2025 we will be in the middle of WWIII. It won’t be going well.
@magicnose forgive my zero tweets on publishing in 2025. truth is i’m pretty ignorant about all publishing so thought best i kept out
So there you have it, a snapshot of the future generated by the favoured social networking tool of the moment. A fine case of lazy journalism by me, or ‘crowdsourcing’ as @john_self so kindly put it.
Peter Collingridge, Apt Studio
I think the best, or perhaps most credible, futures are those that somehow reflect our present.
For me, this is shown by the enduring appeal of Bladerunner’s grimy, broken, recognisable city – credibility earned by the fact that it’s not a shiny, perfect, city of the future but a wholly familiar one, albeit with plug-ins .
Similarly, when I try and imagine publishing 15 years from now, I’m likely only to see the things that currently preoccupy me professionally about publishing. Those preoccupations are two quite big, but also quite simple, things:
- How enjoyment of literature can be enhanced through relationships with other media; and
- How to bring great writing to a much broader audience.
Looking at that second preoccupation first.
I think that by 2025, the problem of supply will have been “solved”.
We’ll be able to get any writing, from any era, in any language or format we like, immediately, and probably for free. At a time when many are prophecising the apocalyptic end of publishing I think it is both astonishing and comforting that, in 2009, the biggest and most powerful technology companies in our lives (Apple, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, Google) are competing – arguably for the first time – on the same playing field, and it’s to “win” in books.
Whether “winning” means scanning the information in books (Google, Microsoft), or controlling the playback or distribution of the information in the book (Amazon, Google, Sony, Apple – allegedly ) the attention of these giant companies on a relatively small industry suggests that books may just be around for a little longer than some would suggest. Exaggerated rumours of publishing’s death etc. However, doubtless is the fact that this attention will force the business to change shape dramatically – and very quickly.
So what might this “solved” supply world look like? Well, clearly there will still be some died-in-the-wool, hard-copy book fetishists, but we’ll leave them and their print on demand, customised hardback books to one side, the perverts.
Whilst we *might* still have reading devices / physical or screen-based hardware, and getting content onto them will be trivially simple, I like to think that we are more likely to have moved not just to an invisible “cloud” based storage system, but to an invisible consumption system.
Perhaps the heads-up display, or earpiece model is too much to imagine, but I can see that text-to-speech will long have evolved beyond an argument over whether it’s a legal entitlement or a rights violation to the point where most of our interactions will be voice-based, with computers and over the air. And my money is on a Google-shaped company owning all of this, not publishers.
As Amazon demonstrated with its Stephenie Meyer coup of 2011, there are a lot of savings to be made by telescoping the publishing supply chain and cutting out all of the middle men. (The same move also swiftly settled their score with Hachette ) Removing those middle men – the publishers, printers, distributors and, later on, agents – left only author, retailer and consumer. And consumers lapped up the price savings in whatever format (Kindle, Lightning Source, Audible) and in enough numbers to easily justify such economies.
However whilst Amazon blazed the trail, Google of course swept in and did the same – but made it all available for free.
So, in 2025 there will be an ever-growing sea of writing available, and the rights holders of course will move to where the market is and whoever controls that market. Authors will be able to publish direct to Google and Amazon and reach millions, unmediated. As a result, supply won’t be the problem – it will be the creation of demand, my first preoccupation. And this is where I think publishers will need to move to, quickly.
Given the sea of information available – and the uncritical attitude of Google and Amazon to serving up that sea to whatever minority or majority wants it – people will need to carve a curated journey through the sea. Publishers need to get over their fear of going direct to consumers, and embrace disintermediation themselves.
Those publishers left standing – probably the smaller, more boutique outfits not acquired or bankrupted by Googlezon - will offer all sorts of models and products: one-off, subscription, on-demand, tailor-made. The shape these “products” will take will be various, and if my hunch
is right the content will long have moved from just words, to an experience where words, music, film, supporting material, and the idea of the networked book all combine on your terms.
Personally – I’d love it if only parts of this came true. Mainly the Enhanced Editions bits, obviously. And I appreciate that, from the current perspective of publishing, the above is far from rosy. But I also think that the history we are living through right now is a defining one for publishing.
Again, speaking personally, I think that publishers in 2009 have some very hard choices to make – to go wholeheartedly direct to consumer, to embrace collaboration with each other, to fail enthusiastically, to move beyond being editors to become producers and curators, to innovate, to invest in R&D, to attract new and fresh skills and ideas, to move quickly and learn even faster, and above all to execute really, really well.
But I believe, and I hope, that books will remain at the centre of our culture well beyond 2025. Who makes sure that happens – beyond the authors at the centre of it all – is what is up for grabs.
Sam Shone, Marketing Manager
In 2025 publishing will look almost exactly as it does today. People will still buy hardbacks mainly in the autumn and paperbacks mainly in the summer. Katie Price will, tragically, still manage top the charts with her 19th biography Confessions of a Silicon Grandmother. Publishers will be trying to guess what the next technology to revolutionise the industry will be (e-readers, Tablets, iPhones and their descendants will have become so mainstream and readily available that the novelty will have worn off and everyone will have realised that it is, in fact, easier and nicer to buy a book).
The thing about all this technology is that it’s new and it’s fun – it’s the novelty of it that is fuelling the debate. Don’t get me wrong, it is changing the industry but what it’s changing isn’t how people consume their books but how we introduce people to them. It’s a marketeer’s dream; everyone has one device onto which we can send multi-format information to engage them with our books: videos of the author, audio and even text (how novel!). What excites me about publishing 2025 is the development of even more platforms we can use to tell people about our authors and finding new ways to reach more people quickly and effectively. It will be incredibly targeted and with very little of the wastage we see in print and outdoor advertising because we will know exactly who we are advertising to, and to what frequency.
Publishing and the coming changes due to digitisation are often compared to recent and radical changes in the music industry, but let’s take a step back and look at those changes. What exactly is radical? Have you changed the way you listen to music? When you download your album from itunes do you get it bundled with artist interviews, music videos, behind the scenes footage or live tour tickets? No, you buy the music and you listen to it. You probably saw all that other stuff on TV or through a podcast and that’s why you’re buying the album. The product hasn’t changed because you still listen through speakers at home and through earphones on the move. The major change has been that music is now instantly accessible through the same product you use to consume it. There it is, that’s the radical change: ‘instant access’. I just can’t see someone wanting or needing that kind of instant access to a book because books are not designed for the same kind of instant gratification; you have to commit a fair bit of time to them in order to get anything from the experience.
It’s fair to say that the current e-reader platforms have not revolutionised the industry. I would personally love an e-reader as I wouldn’t have to print off any more manuscripts (which, lets face it, are not easy to read when stood up on a busy train), but general readers don’t have that problem – reading a book as soon as it comes in, regardless of whether it’s a word doc, PDF, handwritten or on stone tablet, isn’t their job. They don’t need an e-reader because it doesn’t solve a problem they have with the current format, nor does it provide any function that enhances their reading experience. We’ll all use them in the industry and a small section of consumers will too, but they won’t become the main format – promise.
The Tablet is likely to be the platform that brings about the biggest changes in the industry. It will be an iPod (and I assume at some point iPhone), e-reader, internet provider, portable TV and lemon zester all in one cool, stylish, Apple iTastic touch screen box. It gives the consumer something they ‘need’ – one device for everything (and an amazing marketing campaign that will convince you that you are not cool unless you own one). But will this change the way people read? I still don’t think so, but as I said before it will change the way which we introduce people to our books. These devices are about instant and short-lived gratification: a song, the news, a music video, a viral video, TV programmes on demand. Books are not about instant gratification and so the Tablet will not be giving you anything you don’t have or anything you need. Newspapers, on the other hand, are screwed. Sorry.
Did you enjoy this series? If you have any ideas for topics you’d like us to explore, or want to contribute to our next blog series contact fifthestate@harpercollins.co.uk
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.
- A trend that might be called ‘Punk publishing’ via POD. Might involve ‘writers’ markets’ — cottage publishing, etc.
- 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.
- A new age of pulp (see 1 and 2).
- 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.
- Speed. Books will come to market FAR more quickly (giving hacks something to do after the likely death of the newspaper industry).
- 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.
2025. Skynet has taken over. Machines and androids rule the world. When not orchestrating genocide against the last remaining specimens of the human race, they read only on Kindles equipped with hologram colour screens. The permanent cloud of nuclear dust from the last world war has made most animals extinct and turned surviving specimens into luxury items sought after by the rich - excluding the possibility of luxury leatherbound editions of Tolkien reissues.
Barring apocalyptic nuclear war and a renaissance in robotics, this horrifying vision, (which draws heavily on the plotlines of Terminator and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), is hopefully not what lies ahead for publishing. But what does the future look like?
This week on Fifth Estate, we’ve asked some of the top talent at HarperCollins to outline their vision of what might be in store for publishing by 2025. 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 first in a three part series.
John Bond, MD Press Books
My heavily tattooed, surgically-enhanced daughter is as old as the century. After years of wearing those metal discs in ever-increasing diameters as earrings ( the ones that always used to be the preserve of elders within Amazon tribes ), she can finally use her earlobes as skipping ropes. At 25, she has already been married and divorced twice, the second time to an itinerant antiquarian bookseller who has bequeathed her his charity shop in fashionable Croydon. The shop sells second-hand paperbacks that range in price from 1p to 10p each which have all been reset to have larger type for the ageing browsers. She also sells unique editions of certain authors, one off printings and packages of short novels and poetry customisable on the premises. These and other items in the shop – paintings, maps, photographs – sell fom £10.00 to £100.00 and are frequently supported by live events and an academy where membership brings you direct access to the tutoring skills of the most successful artists and writers who have collectively made Croydon the Rive Gauche of the day.
Although she sometimes likes to smell and feel the old books, she has not bought or read a physical book for ten years. Everything she absorbs on her smart phone is non-fiction, constantly updatable and enhanced with perfectly realised video, audio, news, games and with the ability to be simultaneously translated into her second language, Mandarin. Her mother works in the loft editing on a by now ancient touch screen wireless tablet the 14th novel from Marian Keyes. Her father,in the early stages of dementia, can sometimes be seen wandering around the same shop, trying to persuade people that he used to hold down a job that involved reading paper manuscripts by showing them the elastic bands he still has on his left wrist, and asking their help in assembling a flat-pack dumpbin.
I have no idea what will have unfolded by 2025. Someone writing recently about the death of newspapers said that experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. And they’ll be plenty of experiments before 2025. But even if the method of delivering words has changed by then, all I know is that it is impossible to imagine a world without writers.
Simon Johnson, Director of Business Development
The things we as publishers aspire to are the same, helping in the creation, discovery and promotion of great stories, brilliant writing and trusted information. BUT in 2025 we will do it so much better…and here’s why:
- everything ever written will be instantly available wherever you are
- writing becomes a living thing that improves with time
- words, pictures, video and sounds collide and new products emerge
- the book as we know it becomes an object of beauty
- publishers and their authors have daily interaction with their readers
- like minded groups of readers from across the globe connect, create and share
- the publisher and author will be even closer as we move towards managing the authors brand and intellectual property in all media rather than a single book product
Clare Smith, Publishing Director
By 2025 I believe we will have electronic paper (hurray!) that will feel, look and act like a book. So instead of many books, you will own your one ‘hyper’ book. The Kindles and EReaders of today will look to us like the mobile phones of the 80s do now — clunky, stiff and not particularly user-friendly. For readers of fiction, you will be able to download a novel to flick through, read bits of and then buy — so the high street bookshop will be right there in your office and your home. You will be able to create your own library — and get your own customised hard copy from a local print-on-demand machine which will let you choose finishes (ok, that’s REAL wish fulfilment for an editor, no-one to say no to embossing and foil). For non-fiction readers, it is even better: they will be able to click on hyper-text links to film, author interview, soundbites and pictures.
Katy Whitehead, Graduate Trainee
What the publishing industry looks like in 2025 will depend on how it faces the challenges posed to it in 2010 — and whether it gets caught up in Kindle dread and Sony e-hysteria. People won’t stop reading physical books unless publishers stop producing them — or divert so much resource into e-books that the physical counterpart get neglected and ends up shoddily made and distributed. An oft-quoted argument in publishing is that a generation who grows up comfortable with screens will prefer to consume all their entertainment in this way — but there is a fair deal of hard evidence to counter this. Studies suggest that frequent use of screens shorten our attention span and that we retain less info from screens than print.
So what I see in 2025 for publishing is a split — whilst the majority of reference books will have made the leap to various electronic forms because of the convenience this affords, narrative books shall retain their physical form. This is for two main reasons:
- We are physical beings. To hold a book in our hands triggers our baser senses of touch and smell — senses that are linked from primal times to the pleasure centres of our brain. Part of the pleasure of reading is physical — and on an e-reader this aspect is lost.
- The format of narrative is all about delayed gratification. Books work because they hold your attention by denying you answers. But the internet is the antithesis of suspense. It’s about the convenience of having answers at your fingertips.
I will give one caveat to this prediction and that is the green issue: if the need for trees becomes so pressing that it’s considered morally unethical to print books on paper, or if virtual reality becomes so realistic that the sensory experience of reading books can be exactly replicated by technology, then the era of print might be over. But in that scenario, with us all slowly suffocating from CO2 poisoning, and living under the steely glare of a Cyborg Thatcher, how to read will probably be the least of our worries.
Over the next couple of weeks we will be posting Parts 2, and 3 in this series – so keep tuned in!
A month or so ago, the top story on the Bookseller’s home page featured a glass of red wine and a headline announcing that the publishing industry was the UK’s ‘booziest’ business. When the story broke, it rapidly turned into a legendary anecdote, a fact proudly recounted to grinning colleagues clamouring around the tables at the Distillers pub after work.
So far, the various events I’ve attended throughout my short career in publishing have done nothing to disprove this.
The HarperCollins summer author party was held last night at the V&A and I was lucky enough to be invited along. Ordinarily, attendance is restricted to more senior HC members – however, last week the organizers recruited a group of top notch badge-distributors and I made the cut. I’d never been to the V&A before, and was blown away by the imposing eloquence of the Victorian architecture: the sleek marble pillars, the lofty domed roof and the extravagant glass sculpture that dangled down from the ceiling like the tongue of a trans-dimensional being out of Lovecraft. To a native Californian, epic architecture like this excites the imagination easily.
Stationed at the S-Z badge table, my colleagues and I immediately set to work: first provisioning ourselves with glasses of champagne, and then becoming friends with the guys who top up empty glasses. From where we stood, we had an excellent view of the straggling paparazzi slumped outside the entrance with their giant cameras. Whenever their flashes went off, my eyes automatically lowered down to the S-Z badges hunting out potential targets for such media adoration. Notable on our table were Nigel Slater, Penny Smith, Ariane Sherine, Francis Wheen, etc. The lucky crew manning the E table were treated to one of the biggest entrances of the night – Chris Evans, who parked his £200k Ferrari on the street outside and bounded up the stairs bathed in the photographers’ flashes.
Badge duty complete, it was high time to walk through the maelstrom of caterers, past the statues in a gallery hall, to mingle with the crowd outside in the garden. The atmosphere was identical to what you imagine a London publishing party would be like before you get into the industry: set against a learned backdrop of ancient museum walls enclosing a bubbling pond, I spent my time drifting through a gathering of people dressed along a fashion spectrum ranging from quirky professors to slick venture capitalists. The first author I spoke to was Daniel Clay, whose book Swap we are publishing early next year. He was an exceptionally nice guy and I nearly persuaded him to write a piece for this very blog! In turn I chatted to a handful of authors which included the historian Dan Snow — whose brain I wracked for secret London historical finds.
Mingling my way through the constellations of book industry people I managed to talk to a fascinating array of authors and publishers. Being a publishing event, the only useful metric for measuring the arc of the evening was the type of drink that was in your hand. The event was divided not into hours, but into eras filled by different drinks, so you could identify where you were by what you were drinking. In retrospect, the sudden appearance of deserts and the fact that I was shunted onto a strange red cocktail because all the beers had vanished should have been an indication that the night was winding down. However, I was still surprised and a bit disappointed when they finally kicked us out of the V&A because it meant that a great night had come to a close.
Well, almost.
It being a publishing event, a few bold and courageous ringleaders directed the stragglers to a nearby pub where the night was winded down in proper publishing fashion. One short jog to catch the last tube later and I was in bed – dreaming of the next fabulous boozy publishing event.
It was inevitable that when The Friday Project became part of HarperCollins, there would be much hand-wringing in the trade, as well as both negative and positive comments from those who stood to lose most from it, but, from the perspective of one on the inside of the behemoth that is a large corporate publisher, I wanted to offer a different take on what it might mean, and represent, both for us and for the small company that has just become part of our operation.
The Friday Project is tiny compared to some lists in a company of this size, an imprint amongst dozens now, and perhaps as one person commenting points out we, in-house, and the staff of The FP believe that, like the TARDIS, they can be bigger on the inside than on the outside. But I think this is much bigger than adding a few books and staff to our lists. It raises the sort of questions that the likes of other book-bloggers are asking all over the net, and have been for a while: how can publishers, in a notoriously slow-to-market business, with massive overheads and tiny margins, make the most of the exponential changes offered by the internet? How can we find the best writers and help them reach their readers as efficiently, as profitably and as successfully, as possible? How can we mimic the success of the music business, and find new talent, and new ways of distributing that talent, worldwide?
The Friday Project has, as far as I’m concerned, been trying to do just that, discovering writers in non-traditional ways, in ways that are much more akin to the way new generations are discovering them, via blogs, websites and social networking sites. From inside the very traditional iron gates that adorn our offices, where advances and agents generally still rule our acquisition process, that is a challenging, disturbing and yet refreshing approach.
It questions how we publish on every level. Why do we usually pay advances, sometimes unearnable ones? Why pay so much for a book that it creates a publicity splash but also a backlash if the book doesn’t work (the inevitable ‘ner-ner-ner’ that follows the failure of a high-profile and expensive purchase) and prevents us buying the next one, because the unearned is so huge? Why do we often publish into hardback first, even when the writer is unknown and many consumers will wait for the paperback, or forget and move onto another, available in paperback now, title? Why do we still distribute our titles primordially through shop retailers, rather than our own online channels?
The Friday Project hasn’t answered all these questions for itself, but it was, and is, actively asking them. And being so much smaller, it can try out possibilities faster than a larger corporate. Because publishing is an incredibly slow machine, with what I sometimes think are far too many cooks. Writer friends are always asking me why it takes so long from the delivery of a manuscript to its publication and sometimes when I try to explain that process, I ask myself the same question. Some of the answer comes from the fact that, by the mere fact of working in such a large company, a lot of different departments have a say and a stake, mostly, but not always, for good reason. We also have systems that were developed in the past, and need moving into the future. The Friday Project will gain TARDIS-scale from us, but I’m hoping that we’ll gain from learning how a smaller company operates, how it produces books on time with fewer people, digitally and with shorter lead-times.
In some ways the arrival of the likes of the Friday Project in the publishing trade is reminiscent of the rapid development of internet business models in the late 90s. Cities like Cambridge in the UK and San Francisco in the States were full of start-ups and every venture capitalist with money to spare was throwing money at them, determined to be part of the revolution, even if the business plan consisted of nothing more than an attractive website.
Few of those initial businesses survived: Amazon did but who remembers BOL now? Many of those eager vc’s lost thousands. But that insane period of development gave us the internet sites and companies that do work, sites that have changed the way we consume everything, from food to news, the ones where the business model was not just based on a dazzling website with no idea how to make money from it.
The Friday Project was, is, a pioneer, an attempt to re-shape a publishing model that desperately needs it. Yes it hasn’t worked, yet. And although it may be the first and most high-profile publishing company to suffer for trying something new, it won’t be the last. The new models that spring up outside the established and slow-moving infrastructures that most publishing houses inhabit, will eventually be at our gates, not behind them. Those who learn from and embrace different models, and the possibilities of change that they suggest, may still be here in twenty years. Those who don’t, well, they will go the way of the written letter, into history.
