Topic: Pontification

September 2009

The book business as Benjamin’s Angel of History (my take on Ted Striphas’s THE LATE AGE OF PRINT)

So I’m now in the review business (and damn, it’s a lotta work…). Daniel Pritchard has a lovely new literary review site, The Critical Flame and he asked me to review an awfully important book, Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print. I’d originally heard of the book via Scott Esposito’s superb interview in Quarterly Conversation this past Spring and urge you to check it out pronto.

In the meantime, a couple of my favorite bits below, and the link itself, natch.

We tend to view history in terms of one age succeeding another, the greater vanquishing the lesser, or the tawdry always winning out over the elevated. The reality, Striphas demonstrates, is that we’re a populist capitalist democracy, a world where people are trying to get ahead, and the information contained in books, and the social status books have occasionally offered, are tools for getting ahead. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism; they virtually began it, they are part of the fuel that drives it, and they are key for understanding ways in which consumer capitalism is changing and evolving, in some respects into a whole other beast. That is book culture. Books are not apart from commerce. And because that is book culture, it is far less in peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of the imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and separate from the everyday (a word Striphas is fond of, more of which anon) than it actually is…

[B]e it in the 1920’s or the 2000’s, not so much changes. Faced with a scenario in which they can’t cost-effectively match supply and demand, publishers seek to use the new arts and sciences of marketing to persuade people to buy more. In 1930, a consortium of trade publishers hired Edward L. Bernays, the “father of spin,” to concoct a juice-up of the book business. Quoting Bernays’ biographer:

“Where there are bookshelves,” [Bernays] reasoned, “there will be books.” So he got respectable public figures to endorse the importance of books to civilization, and then he persuaded architects, contractors, and decorators to put up shelves on which to store the precious volumes.

While the bookshelf trick is truly ingenious, it only reinforced what was already happening, in that the burgeoning American middle class needed to communicate “respectability and plenitude,” even during or perhaps especially during, the Great Depression — libraries were an excellent way to accomplish that. Bernays was merely surfing an existing wave. Obviously the use of celebrities to coax America into reading is a hobby-horse of the present time too, but it is not the only echo. Bernays’ stunt in particular and the obsession with advertising in general (which Striphas catalogs for much of the twentieth century) reminds me of the current infatuation with social media. Then as now, publishers seize on the most superficial aspect of a social phenomenon — then it was the need for the growing middle class to ratify its status through books; now, it is the transformation of consumer-producer relations from monologue to dialogue. Yet, all that publishing provides is bookcases and all we offer now is Facebook fan pages for authors and publishers, as well as Twitter feeds that mostly (though, to be fair, not exclusively) still seek to push product.

Richard Eoin Nash, Sep 09, 2009

August 2009

The End of Indie

I awoke in the middle of the night last night and checked email and Twitter around 4am (they say when you can’t sleep, it’s best to get up, and tire yourself out, before returning to bed). A Twitter follow announcement came in from Kaya Oakes, with whom I had been trying to scheduling an interview off and on in 2007 and 2008—I felt a pang of guilt as I checked out her tweets and saw that the book, for which the interview was to be conducted, was done. Finished, published. Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture is more or less what the subtitle say it is. I’ll spare you the appalling copy from the publisher, which manages to be both glib and patronizing, and give you a little of Publishers Weekly’s description:

“[A] lively and highly literate explication of various American indie scenes and art forms . . . [Oakes’] focus on independent publishing and writing—provides a worthy parallel narrative to Michael Azzerad’s essential indie music history, [Our]Band Could Be Your Life . . . Oakes begins the book with a much appreciated primer on some of the intellectual forebears of her book’s central characters, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the revolutionary street theater group the Diggers. As an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading.”—_Publishers Weekly_

I was momentarily rather bummed that I’d missed out on a chance to discuss the topic with Kaya when it dawned on me that I’d have had nothing very useful to say eighteen months ago. All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all.

You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly replicate the indie production process—how could they seize the means of production? They already had it! And now the means of production has devolved yet farther down, past the indie publishers and indie record labels and pirate radio stations of yore.

This is not to say we’ve entered Nirvana. Just because we’d seized the means of production in the 1990’s didn’t mean that poverty had been eradicated, racism ended, and the intellectual property land grab thwarted. We all have to use the tools we’ve been given, find value in, rather than discard, the tools of the past, hold feet to the fire, undermine monopoly, and so on. All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. Its how we use it.

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them.

Richard Eoin Nash, Aug 10, 2009

July 2009

Eoin responds to Richard Eoin who reciprocates, gratefully…

So the excellent Irish publisher Eoin Purcell reviews my Publishing Perspectives editorial and provides a nice exegesis.

He is concerned about a few dimensions of it, and I thought it would make sense to respond to this, as I think that the problems he perceives lie in my poor expression of the ideas, rather than the not-poor ideas themselves.

HIs chiefest concern has to do with what he’s coined “Publishing as a Service (PaS)”—“the idea that if publishers want to survive they should adapt to become facilitators of the people who are creating and consuming content.” He contrasts this notion with one recently elaborated by Mike Shatzkin who believes “the focus should be on curating those niches and in re-engineering a publishing portfolio around a vertical segment.” He advocates that a new publishing enterprise not choose only one of those options, especially not the first only, lest “they have become software engineers.”

in large part his concern is that publishers not reinvent the wheel—“I don’t think that most publishers should spend their time creating design software or better printing presses, leave that to the odd genius who happens to also be a publisher or the software programmer.” I absolutely agree. I can’t specifically speak for Andrew Savikas (who outlines his most current thinking here in a excellent essay, Content is a Service Business) but I know that I have no intention of building anything from scratch. My understanding of Publishing as a Service Business is to distinguish it from one that sells a product in a supply chain, a peddler of tchotchkes. It does not exclude the notion that we would create physical objects, preferably gorgeous, expensive, high margin ones that are never returned and that the purchaser passes onto the next generation, it rather advocates for a mentality, a philosophy, a corporate culture, that is a service, rather than manfacturing-and-distribution one. Much in the way that Zappos is a service business.

Indeed, I concur still further with Eoin in that, as he writes, “far better for us to spend time curating and filtering content, because filtering is what the web needs.” Even more so when he argues that “that doesn’t necessarily mean gate-keeping [for] we may be facilitating the filtering-by-readers within a community, rather than choosing what floats.” Nicely put, sir!

He again warns, don’t reinvent the wheel, and I again concur. I do use (in fact in the “About” page of my blog) the admonition “Now is time to build their infrastructure” but I mean it more metaphorically. I don’t mean invent the infrastructure—I simply mean let’s take all the existing tools out there and start to put them together in the appropriate configurations. This will involve levels of customization, tweaking, both of the software itself and of the user interfaces, and of any number of business processes. And that’s the process I wish to embark on, as soon as possible. I’m not going to invent a new kind of brick, but it is time to figure out the architecture of the right kind of niche publishing houses. Indeed, my goal is to create a small portfolio of houses, in order to see how much is similar, how much is different, what the user preferences are with writers, and readers, and reader-writers in different areas and styles of story-telling.

Richard Eoin Nash, Jul 19, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. Here's why I left. I'm now consulting on how to reach readers (details here) and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade. read more »