For as long as observers of literary matters can remember, there have been predictions about the end of the book. The radio will supplant reading. Films will supplant reading. Television will supplant reading. Video games will supplant reading. Now, we are told, the technology itself will become redundant. All sorts of innovations—CD-Roms, the internet and electronic book readers—have been hailed as replacements for print on paper.
The book, however, has put up a strong fight. Sales continue to rise. Some—the Harry Potter series, celebrity memoirs, the selections of the Richard and Judy book club—are selling in record numbers. Even literary fiction, that apparently outmoded and elitist genre, continues to find large audiences. The book's resilience is hardly surprising when you consider its advantages as an entertainment medium: you can carry it around with you, read it in bed, and flip backwards and forwards through the pages, without having to worry about battery life or electronic failures.
What gets less attention is the book as source of information. Here, technology is having a big effect on traditional publishing models. Sales of dictionaries and English-language usage guides have declined by 40 per cent in the past four years, while maps, atlases and encyclopedias are also in less demand. Looking up street directions, I use Multimap or Google. In a house full of books, my daughters rely on the internet to research their homework.
One can easily see how reference and professional publishing are suited to electronic delivery whereas Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is not—or not to any yet devised. Last year, amid much fanfare, Sony brought out the Reader, the most sophisticated electronic reading gadget yet produced. It features something called "E Ink," which is much easier on the eye than normal, backlit screens; it can store hundreds of books; and it has a long battery life. But early reviewers complained about the lack of a search facility—a surprising deficiency—and about the difficulties of dealing with Connect, Sony's online eBook store. Sales have been modest. As I write, there are rumours that Amazon is to bring out its own electronic reader, the "Kindle." But no one is expecting it to report big sales either.
These devices will become more sophisticated and desirable, and one should not underestimate the extent to which readers of the future will find it natural to read on screen. In Japan, there are authors who specialise in fiction to be read on mobile phones. One novel, What the Angel Gave Me, by someone who writes under the nom-de-plume "Chaco," has recorded more than 1m downloads. Nevertheless, such ventures are likely to remain outside the publishing mainstream for some time.
While technology is not yet transforming our reading habits, it is transforming the industry that caters to them. Most obvious has been the growth of internet bookselling. Amazon now accounts for about 10 per cent of the books sold in Britain. It has made more books readily available than ever before. It has also, along with the supermarkets—which have increased their book sales by 70 per cent in the past four years—taken sales from chain and independent bookshops. And, again with the supermarkets, it has contributed to a culture of discounting that has opened up a gulf between record-breaking bestsellers and so-called "mid-list" titles, which struggle to get noticed.
The huge sales that these discounted titles generate have intensified the competition to acquire and sell them. This has resulted in conglomeration, intensifying the competition still further. Now only the biggest publishers can afford the advances such titles command, and the budgets to market them; and only the biggest retailers can afford to give away the discounts that the market now expects. Those retailers are Amazon and the supermarket chains. Borders recently announced that its British stores were up for sale, and even Waterstone's, the country's largest specialist bookseller, is feeling the pinch.
A survey of Amazon and the supermarkets might lead one to conclude that they are all promoting Jodi Picoult and Marian Keyes, and little else. But most trends in the book industry are accompanied by countervailing ones. As the conglomerates get bigger, there is a new optimism among enterprising independent houses like Atlantic and Profile Books, who believe that they can offer distinctive titles that the giants, with their concentration on the mass market, overlook. And although many independent booksellers have closed, plenty of others are in good spirits.
Technology is responsible for another countervailing trend. While the costs of publishing the likes of Dawn French escalate (her forthcoming memoir cost Random House a reported £2m), the costs of simply making a book available have plummeted. Once, aspiring authors who failed to get a publishing deal would have to pay a vanity press upwards of £6,000; now they can put their texts up on the Lulu website for nothing. Thanks to digital technology, printing and binding books is also cheaper.
Websites such as MySpace and YouTube offer new ways to carry out inexpensive promotions—as the big publishers are discovering. The head of digital publishing at Random House says that publishers' strategies should be to "fish where the fish are." The biographer Kate Williams wrote recently of her exploits on MySpace, where she communicates with potential readers both as herself and as Emma, Lady Hamilton, the subject of her book England's Mistress. A video promoting Richard Wiseman's science book Quirkology recently topped the charts at YouTube.
The most popular form of self-publishing is, of course, through blogs. Blogging is often dismissed as just another way for authors not to make money, but it can lead to conventional publishing contracts. A company called the Friday Project specialises in books based on material from the web, and celebrated bloggers, such as La Petite Anglaise, Wife in the North and Belle de Jour, have won large advances from mainstream houses.
More significant than these deals, though, is the effect on literary culture of blogs and other forms of web commentary—readers' reviews on Amazon, for example. Cultural discourse is no longer determined by a small group of professional critics and authors who write for newspapers and journals; others are exerting an influence. Yet the literary pages are still, mostly, unaffected. For instance, the newspapers and journals covered Hermione Lee's recent biography of Edith Wharton very widely. Quite right too—it is an important book. But it is unlikely to have sold more than a few thousand copies. With the market ruling just about everywhere else, for how much longer can the content of the literary pages bear only a tangential relationship to the commercial prospects of books? The people who want to see different kinds of books covered, and in more accessibly written reviews, are the ones whom the newspapers are courting with book clubs and solicitations to make comments on websites. A shift to more "inclusive" reviewing seems inevitable.
The digitising of texts is the most revolutionary trend in publishing—but not particularly because it enables texts to be read on-screen. At present, some 150,000 new titles come out in Britain each year, and the figure is rising. The market for many of these titles is highly specialised. Yet they are all being printed on paper, bound, shifted to warehouses, shifted from there to bookshops—and quite possibly shifted back again to be pulped. It is a wasteful business, but until now it has been the only way of ensuring the variety that keeps the book industry healthy.
This is set to change. As we have seen, the gap between the successful titles and the rest has grown. The largest publishers and bookshops will want to carry on publishing and selling the likes of Dawn French and Richard Dawkins: demand for these books is stronger than ever. They will also want to carry on publishing and selling specialist titles, for a variety of reasons—maintaining a large pool of talent, attracting a variety of shoppers. But they will look at new ways of distributing these titles. Web-driven, print-on-demand technology will soon reach a level of excellence that will enable readers to order books to be printed specially for them, and to get them in minutes while they wait in a bookshop. This development could kill off large, stockholding bookshops—which are already struggling. Readers will lose the chance to browse among books, handling them before they buy. But they will gain access to a greater variety of books than has ever been available before.
The arrival of print-on-demand technology, and to a lesser extent the eBook, means that control of digital content will be the key battleground of publishing in the future. Publishers know what happened to record companies once it became practical to distribute music electronically; they are anxious to avoid the same fate. Many are taking early action: Bloomsbury has set about building a digital warehouse, as have HarperCollins and Random House (which has set aside £5m for the purpose). But they face a potential rival in Google, which is engaged in no less ambitious a project than to make all the information in the world available online. The early fruits of this project can be found at Google Book Search (see Jonathan Rée's essay, "The Library of Google," Prospect February 2007). Ultimately, Google's aim is to build a digital collection of all the books ever published; so far, it has reportedly scanned more than 1m.
Some publishers are wary of Google's ambitions. Nigel Newton, chief executive of Bloomsbury, has described its policies as a "land grab" and "positively indecent." He fears that Google is setting itself up as a rival disseminator of digital texts, in which it is establishing its own copyrights. At present, Google offers only "snippets" of in-copyright works; but, if it owns the digital files, why should it not decide in future that it is entitled to offer more, or even all, of the files? Google is reported to have said—though it has not answered requests to confirm or deny this—that it will be the copyright holder for the digital files it makes.
The next few years will not be easy for the book industry. Many publishers still have to work out how they will make money from the provision of online information, and how they will adapt to online distribution of their most popular titles. Securing copyrights in the new age is another challenge. Booksellers are already finding that the changes technology has wrought will no longer sustain large shops in which slow-selling titles occupy most of the space. But technology has not challenged the book itself; it has promoted it. For the book, the future is bright.
