Gutenberg invented printing with movable type and not much happened right away.
Gutenberg started the Printing Revolution. The rule for major social revolutions is that they take about a hundred years that break into two parts. In the first fifty years the new technology – or the Revolution – just lets us make the same products we've been making, only faster or more easily.
It took more that fifty years for basic changes to the formatting of books to develop. During this time page numbers, indexes and tables of contents became common.
The books that were printed for the first fifty years after Gutenberg looked very much like the books that had been drafted by hand. They covered the same topics. Of the seven thousand titles published in Europe, in fifty years of Gutenberg’s invention, all but three hundred were the same as books had been before—the Bible, religion and texts from Classical antiquity.
Then in 1513 a book was published whose content was different from what had gone before. It was Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. The Prince did not contain a single reference to either the Bible or classical antiquity. More books like that followed, many of them in languages other than Latin. As time went on more and more such secular books were published.
By about 1550 book publishing had assumed the form that it would maintain until the next social-technical revolution, the Industrial Revolution. Again the effects of the Revolution divided into two approximate fifty-year segments.
During the first segment the innovations of the Industrial Revolution helped people do what they had done before – only faster and sometimes better. Books were no exception. Power presses moved faster than hand presses.
The big change that marks the demarcation to the second part of the Industrial Revolution is the introduction of the railroad. The railroad changed commerce, especially distribution, for everything, including books.
As railroads stretched out across continents they made it possible to distribute all kinds of goods to the most remote areas. Railroads even, in a way, brought about a totally new kind of book – the catalog.
The Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogs were sent out in the mail. The books traveled out into the country on the railroad. And the goods that people bought through catalogs reached them the same way.
Changes in distribution helped bring about a change in the role of the publisher. From Gutenberg’s time through the beginnings of the 19th Century the printer and the publisher were essentially the same.
With the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of mass distribution printers became more specialized and separate publishers came into their own. They were responsible for just about everything except creating the content of what they published. They assumed financial responsibility for the operation and they sub-contracted production to the printers.
The folks who became publishers during this time didn’t get into the business because it was the best possible business to be in or so they’d make a lot of money. Most became publishers because they loved books. That was a good thing, because book publishing has never been the kind of business where you make tons and tons of money on individual products.
With the dawn of the Digital Revolution book publishers were mostly small companies founded by people who did not, necessarily, need the money from the publishing company to assure their quality of life. They were in publishing, because publishing and books were what they loved.
Then in 1951 the Digital Revolution began. We’re just at the end of the first fifty years of that Revolution and so far the changes look pretty much as they have in earlier revolutions. In this fifty years the computer and other digital tools have helped us do the kinds of things we’ve done before only faster – and sometimes better.
Digital tools make it possible to edit copy more effectively and get it into print faster and less expensively. Computers make it possible to keep the records that our mass distribution society needs to make things go.
Technology hasn’t been the only force changing book publishing in the last fifty years. There have been some basic changes in society as well. The biggest of those is probably the move to the suburbs and all of the changes that surround that.
In the middle of the 20th Century America was still a land of cities and towns and rural areas with just a hint of suburbs here and there. Stores were in the towns and the cities. Big cities had department stores. Just about every place had a small bookstore.
As people moved to the suburbs they began to shop differently. A great deal of shopping moved from the center of cities and towns to the malls that began to dot the countryside.
Before all of this every major department store had a book department. The book department didn’t make much money but it was great for bringing people into the store. When those department stores hit the malls they didn’t need a book department to draw traffic.
Bookstores disappeared from mall department stores. The department store companies like Dayton Hudson replaced them with mall bookstores – Waldenbooks and B. Dalton.
These were very different from the traditional local bookstore. They weren’t run by people who started up a bookstore because they loved books. Instead were run by companies who managed the inventory based on rules they’d put into their computers. They were staffed by clerks. They were supposed to be profitable.
Being profitable in a mall is tough. You don’t have a lot of space to store inventory and you face high rent. The result was that the mall bookstores, and later the giant superstores like Barnes and Noble, needed to sell books that could be sold like other kinds of merchandise. They needed to put the books on the shelves that they were sure would make money. They needed blockbusters.
The result has been that the books sold in bookstores and through the entire book publishing enterprise have – more and more – tended to be a few blockbusters written by a limited number of authors. In fact, over a ten-year period in the late 20th Century sixty-three of the top one hundred best selling titles were written by only six authors.
That’s where we are today. Book publishers have become divisions of large publicly traded corporations. A very few authors have generally sold lots and lots of books at a great profit to their publishers and themselves. Other authors find that they need to take responsibility for making sure that books move through the distribution chains if they’re going to make any sales at all.
And so we come to both the beginning of the 21st Century and the second fifty years of the Digital Revolution. What lies ahead? Here are a few educated guesses.
The definition of what we call a book is almost certainly going to have to change. I believe that we’ll see books in three distinct forms.
One of those forms will be the one that we’ve become used to over the past couple of hundred years. The printed book certainly is not going to go away, and I believe it will be the medium of choice for those kinds of books that are read from front to back. To me, that means that most fiction will be published this way, along with some history and biography.
There will also be electronic books. Please note that I did not use the term, “e-book.” The e-book, as it’s been talked about recently and as it’s been something of a failure in publishing circles, is a limited version of the electronic book. Electronic books include everything, where the material is presented in digital form. That means that it includes things such as Portable Document Format (PDF) files, e-books, and digital material presented on CDs and on the Net.
I believe that electronic books will be the preferred medium for reference. That’s already starting to happen. A recent study of physicians found that 72 percent practice medicine using a hand-held computer. That might be a Palm Pilot with the entire Physicians’ Desk Reference on it.
Reference material is generally needed in small bits. It needs to be searchable. That's why reference material is ideal for a digital format. Another reason for that is that most reference material is out of date almost as soon as it’s published and digital material is easier to update.
So far we’ve covered narrative books and reference books. We still haven’t talked about a huge class of books. These include textbooks, many business books, a good deal of self-help literature, and lots of history and biography. These books will be published in a hybrid format.
The hybrids will be part paper book and part digital format. They may include a mix of the formats we’ve already talked about or be as simple as a book with a supplementary CD.
We’ll certainly see some changes in how books are produced. In today’s world it’s common for authors to produce a book in one form and then adapt it to other forms. Most of the electronic books that you stumble upon are nothing more than the text of a printed book that's been "re-purposed" in electronic form. That will change.
Authors will begin to develop material for different media at the same time. We’ll start to think about what portions should be digital and what portions should be in paper and where links and outside resources are appropriate. Tools will develop to help us do that.
The actual physical production of books has already changed dramatically, and it will change some of the ways that publishers work. When I first began with my specialty publishing company we needed to print minimums of five thousand books at a cost of between five and six dollars-a-book. That meant that we needed an up-front investment of some twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars just to stack a whole bunch of books up in a warehouse. With digital technology, that’s no longer necessary.
Today it’s possible for my publishing company to produce a book for an author in quantities of under a hundred. These are not Xeroxed books. They’re coming from digital press technology and assembled and bound by effective book completion technology. They are the basis for what will become print-on-demand.
Today print-on-demand is a small sub-set of self or vanity publishing. People who want to publish a book hook up with a company that will produce the book and arrange for it to be available through outlets than can produce the book on demand. You get a book with a cover designed by the company artist and put together in a few of the formats that are available.
Print-on-demand in the future will be quite different. It will be possible to order a book – either in the store or online – and then have it delivered, freshly printed and bound, in minutes. That will make it possible for publishers to keep all of the material that they’ve got on their “back list” in digital form, effectively in print.
In the meantime watch those public companies who now own publishing divisions to re-evaluate their position. Many publishing divisions will either be spun off or will begin to specialize in the kinds of publishing that they can make significant money at. That will probably be reference and textbook publishing along with certain kinds of business and self-help texts.
Smaller publishers will benefit from digital printing technology in two ways. First digital printing makes it possible to run very small quantities of a book. That, in turn, cuts inventory cost. Smaller publishers will then be able to publish more titles without incurring the risk and expense of printing large quantities of a title that may never sell.
Print-on-demand publishing will also give smaller publishers access to bookstores. At the same time the net and the Web make it possible to reach across geography to small widely dispersed audiences for specialty material
You will also see many small publishers un-bundle the functions that publishers have traditionally done. That's the model I’m using for my own publishing company. In this model financial responsibility for the project is assumed either by the author or by the author and the publisher. An author might pick his or her own editor and leave the rest of the project to the publishing house. We’ll be providing more of a menu of available options, rather than a list of set services.
And what about the bookstore? In the last decade or so, we’ve seen the rise of the giant bookstores and the giant of them all, amazon.com. There are folks out there sounding the death knell for the small local bookstore. I think they’re wrong.
Small bookstores are due for a comeback, because they can offer the things that no mega-store and no online store can offer. They can offer local specialization. They can offer human connection. They can offer many things that go with the experience of reading.
Because many of the titles that they now have to consider stocking will be handled digitally, bookstore owners will be able to concentrate on the things that matter to them and to the people who shop in their store. Expect to see small bookstores doing more with fiction and local history and interest and less with business books and blockbusters.
Will it all work out this way? I’m sure it won’t work out exactly the way I’ve outlined it, but I think these are pretty good guesses. What I do know is that we’re on the cusp of the second half of the Digital Revolution, and that it will transform every aspect of our lives, including book publishing.
This feature appeared on 18 November 2002
