The Future of the Book

by Brett Rutherford

Sometime in 1988 or 1989, I talked to a writers' group, The Rhode Island Writers' Circle, about the future of the book, and what I expected to see happen in book publishing. This was back when the Adobe Acrobat PDF format was becoming the world standard for document publishing, making it possible to design a book, and then to view or print it on any device. It's interesting to see what I predicted 30 years ago, against what has and has not not happened. I was still working as a journalist and as a consultant to publishers at that time, and had not yet started my "back to school" adventure.

Every fact you know today about books, their production, their publication, their distribution and their sales will be only history in less than ten years. Every one of us will have access to a personal library bigger than the Great Library of Alexandria, from our homes, and costing us nothing. Universities will lose their "monopolies" over the storage, preservation and dissemination of printed knowledge. All the rare and obscure and out of print books you want will be available in virtual copies you can read on a thin sheet of plastic no heavier than a magazine, in full color. The portable plastic book will be an appliance that you carry to school, into the bathtub and, yes, even to the beach. You can read War and Peace while listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with your headphones connected to your portable book.

Yes, new ink-on-paper books will still exist. They will be luxury items -- coffee table art books, gift books, photography books, commemorative and historical books. But for all the books that the multitudes crave for instant gratification -- Tom Clancy novels, Steven King tremblies, political exposes, and celebrity gossip, half of us will read these things without killing a tree, while others will continue on their merry way paying $40 to $90 for a single book. Meantime, printing plants are already shutting down, paper mills are closing, and the squirrels and bald eagles are rejoicing. By my estimate, 500 North American printing presses are shut down every month, and not replaced by new capacity. And even though there are some 15,700 magazines published today, and more books published every year than ever before, the press runs are shorter and shorter. I have heard one estimate from book printers that 80% of all books now how have runs under 1,000 copies. This means that most book distribution is either local to the author, or is being done by on-line or mail order.

The generation that comes after ours will have no interest in reading or owning books or periodicals on paper. Only the old and eccentric will haunt used bookstores. The physical books on the shelves at libraries will dwindle since virtual copies of most old books will be readily available. No waiting lists, no overdue books, etc.

Traditional book publishers, consumed by media giants, will go down screaming. They will bolster their profits short term by banking all their annual profits on a few bestsellers, whose authors will gamer 80% of all the money paid to authors. For all other books, the original art for every new book will exist as a virtual or e-book, and either a bookstore or an on-line service like Amazon will process orders for single copies of books for those stubborn enough to want a physical book. The book publishers will throw up their hands in despair and become multimedia entertainment companies. War and Peace in print will be in a gift box with the DVD of the mini-series. Most copies of the "mid-range" books printed will continue to wind up sold as "remainders," which I regard as a pre-planned way to achieve break-even on printing costs. Authors receive NO royalties on all those books sold in the remainder bins or from remainder catalogs.

Where do writers fit in all this? There will be fewer large publishers, fewer magazines that pay, fewer opportunities for writers seeking to have others publish them. There is little incentive in the real world for a Random House to publish a book that will sell 2,000 copies. Yet paradoxically, the new technologies that are transforming "the book" are going to give writers more power than they have had at any time in history. If the word "publish" means "to send abroad," every writer has power to publish his or her work undreamt of by our ancestors. Imagine the Bronte sisters with a web site and e-mail. Imagine Emily Dickinson peddling a book she designed herself on Amazon.com. Imagine Walt Whitman updating "Songs of Myself' in a daily poetry blog. Imagine every word you have ever written and will write, and every word everyone in this room has ever written or will write, contained on a disk that costs 29 cents to make.

The act of publishing, and the mere fact that one person writes and another publishes, is the result of the fact that few authors are rich enough to produce their own books, and that the means of production -- design, paper, ink, binding, printing presses, bindery equipment-- are scarce and expensive. The physical book is one of Western civilization's two greatest inventions (the other is the modem piano), and it is complex enough to daunt most people. Even the making of a shabby paperback makes most people quail. Publishers, and the printers who do the actual labor for them, have always banked on their monopoly over the means of production. Only they could efficiently and profitably design, produce, and distribute books. Booksellers were those grubby people at the bottom of the food chain who put the books out in front of the great unwashed.

The production of books was complicated and involved a long list of craftspeople. Designers, typesetters, platemakers and engravers, printers, binders. The materials consumed were staggering: metal type, film, plates, paper, ink, glue, varnish, cloth, leather. The machines included cameras, linotypes, phototypesetters, computers, stat machines, plate burners, presses, folding machines, a whole medley of case binding devices, and ominous guillotine cutters. It was a maze of conveyor belts, knives, folders, rotating drums, gears and a hundred places where something could go wrong -- and something often did. The consumption of natural resources to make books and magazines the traditional way is staggering, and our descendants will judge us mad.

In all this, all the author did was write down the words - first on a typewriter, and later, onto a disk inserted in a PC or Mac. That was it. Authors sat around like spinsters waiting to be married off - a few were summoned, but the rest languished. And as for money, the bookstores and book distributors ands publishers, and the IRS, got theirs, while most authors -- well, you know the story ...

Since 1985, when desktop publishing hit the personal computer, all that has changed. The author now has the power and ability to take his or her work, typeset it, design it, illustrate it, and make it up into a "virtual book." What you view on the screen is exactly what you would see in the physical book. That author's book can be instantly turned into the futuristic e-book, or given to a printer who produces as few or as many books as you want. The same original can also be sold to any traditional publisher foolhardy enough to publish the work.

All the creative steps in making a book have now been transferred back into the author's control, if the author is willing to learn some of the basics of how to transform a raw manuscript into a book. Many of the "rules" developed during the days of metal type and hand presses are still good rules today because they produce beautiful and highly legible pages.

The biggest breakthrough in the last ten years has been the worldwide adoption of Adobe's Acrobat, or Portable Document Format (PDF). By now, probably 100 million copies of Adobe's document reader software have been downloaded. It's free, and the ability to read PDFs is now built into many web browsers. What this means is that I can design a book here in Providence, and someone in Nairobi or Beijing can view and read my book, line for line, character for character and dot for dot. The printing industry is throwing away all its old photographic and mechanical production methods and is saying to publishers, "Just give us the PDF and we'll print it."

Open Source software is also bringing design and typesetting power to everyone. It used to cost about $1,000 to get into the desktop publishing arena. Now it's just a few hundred dollars, or nearly free if you use Open Source software, created by computer fanatics and distributed free on the Internet. Simply put, if you have a computer, you can make your own book.