NPR is my best friend during my hour long commute to work every day. Like so many other mornings, I fired up the iPod and pointed it to the NPR:Shuffle podcast which is a best of mashup of their various shows. Then a segment from the May 26th airing of All Things Considered caught my attention. Author Mark Helprin, who published a book Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, told a story of his father’s wisdom.
Mark’s father, remembering the first time he saw a full motion picture movie, was awe inspired. He then pondered the short evolutionary time frame that had transformed celluloids into a movie, noting that overtime more and more information is compressed into a smaller space. All of this, of course, was before the concept of Moore’s Law. Mark’s father estimated that his son, who had just published his first novel, would have 25-30 years before book publishing would have a major evolutionary change just like the movies of his youth.
Fast forward 30 years to a prediction that has came true. Today authors can have their 500+ page novels compressed into an audio CD bought at Barnes and Noble or into an electronic book wirelessly downloaded from Amazon to a kindle. Even the definition of the author and way in which a book is written is slowly changing thanks to sites like Blurb and eBooks respectively. A recent Wall Street Journal article by Steven Johnson exposed the changing landscape for authors in which they will be as concerned with search engine optimization (SEO) as the content of their writing.
A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens’s day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results,
crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. – Steven Johnson of WSJ
Book and commercial printers have also seen a similar shrinking of information into a smaller space. Much of the work that, in the past, would require a printed piece is now replicated into a digital format. Brochures, annual reports, business cards, stationery, post cards, and promotional items that were commercial printer mainstays have morphed. Brochures, stationery, annual reports, and the like have been digitized and posted online. The new business cards have names like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Even direct marketing is more regularly being conducted through Google Adsense or e-mail campaigns administered by companies like Constant Contact. Similarly, book printers are starting to face the possibility of much smaller print volumes as the eBook readers and their distribution methods mature.
Authors, unlike printers, still retain a trump card in the form of copyright protection. (Admittedly, this is what the real point to the NPR story was about.) Their business model and distribution may change but their potential to earn an income through royalties is still intact. Printers, whose income stream is not legally protected or otherwise guaranteed, will have to identify new markets to profit from as old ones disappear. Some printers will move into highly automated, reduced labor cost commodity printing. Others will identify segments of printing with a longer shelf life such as packaging. Still more printers will fail to recognize the changing dynamics and cease to exist. The most forward looking printers just may stumble upon the “next big thing.” Does anyone know what the next big opportunity will be? Probably not, but just like Mark’s father we know printing is having an evolutionary change.
Listen to the full NPR segment here.
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