Pan Macmillan’s Digital Manifesto of Doom
During the current Doctor Who story, The Doctor and Catherine Tate have ended up in the biggest library in the universe. “People never really stopped liking books,” The Doctor comments, giving an optimistic point-of-view for publishers everywhere. However, reading Pan Macmillan’s ‘Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st Century‘ it would seem that the book is as dead as the Dodo and no amount of DNA jiggerypokery will bring it back to life. Sara Lloyd’s piece is an interesting, if wordy (it’s heavy on the 2.0 marketing lingo) wake-up-and-smell-the-digital-coffee call for publishers everywhere.
Amongst the long tails, vertical niches, and prosumers, Lloyd raises some very pertinent points. This is a world beyond the eBook reader, where everything is online, accessible from any device. It’s not far off. Distribution will become irrelevant, Search will be king and the content of a piece will have to be networked to every other piece of content. Your book is no longer a unit, it’s a fluid gathering of information that changes the more people write and comment on it. Publishers therefore need to safeguard the information that they distribute, but if readers want that information and authors want to be read, why bother with a publisher in the first place?
Alright, let’s assume that the whole publishing landscape was level. Everything would be User Generated Content, distributed everywhere. Where would you start? With Search perhaps, so you’d need at least a subject heading. You find a piece of writing on a subject you like, you note the original author’s name. Only, this piece was first written 100 years ago and has been modified, mashed-up and hacked about so many times that the original no longer exists. How does that make you feel? Does it matter?
From a historical perspective it matters entirely. Keeping of the past is key to learning in the future, a constantly altering text is not a fixed point, therefore you have nothing to compare the ‘now’ to. How would you learn? Preservation is therefore part of what a publisher needs to address in order to offer something unique to the digital table. It’s all very well to make a book’s content available for manipulation, to allow ‘generation upload’ to play and comment, yet conservation must also be maintained. It may not be ‘now’, but it’s state is kept as an asset both intellectually and commercially.
In Lloyd’s manifesto crowdsourcing will become an absolute must of the future. She writes: as a new generation of readers interacts with texts online publishers will be wise to place themselves in a position to harness the network data and collective intelligence produced by social annotation and media creation, the sum of the “Wisdom of Crowds,” and to apply this to its future content development and to its marketing. Cisco Networks are currently showing this in a TV ad. Wise old man builds skateboard, he gives skateboard to skateboarders, they refine the product by altering the look, the wheels, sawing a bit off, all results transmitted over the internet. Wise old man takes board to the, erm, company board, big smiles and high-fives all round (one imagines). It’s a simplified view of crowdsourcing, so much so it’s more like an author nervously punting a few first drafts around to his mates waiting for reaction and considering changing it accordingly. Crowdsourcing has its inherent problems, generating interest is one, will people like your product enough to care? And hey, if they’re supplying all this input to you, shouldn’t you be paying them? And finally, anyone who watches ITV should know how easy it is to rig the results of a crowdsourced decision. What’s to stop the Wise old man telling the skateboarders that they’re actually wrong and that it should be done another way? Nothing… after all, the crowd hasn’t said it will buy your product, it’s just a tiny bit more likely to.
Lloyd comments: There will still be a place for that deeply immersive solitary reading I hope in the future. Notice the emphasis is on reading and not writing, the author doesn’t seem to enter into it… The manifesto seems to suggest that content can still originate from authors while at the same time forecasting the death of the single unit book. Well, surely the author will have something to say about this? You don’t spend years lovingly crafting your masterpiece only to have others change it into something they prefer. Also notice she uses the word ‘hope’, it’s all so gloomily prophetic!
It’s not only the book and author as units we need to watch, but also the publishers. We’re moving from a world where the consumer didn’t care about a publisher’s name to one where the publisher will have to stand up speak out to avoid getting swallowed by bigger media agencies. Not only that but in order to create new revenue streams via direct selling, people will need to know who you are. If you don’t have a brand identity, maybe it’s time to get one. That doesn’t stop you working with other media partners, but from an intellectual and conservation perspective publishers will still have a standalone job to do. Publishers become guardians, authorities, they make recommendations, as Lloyd puts it the input will be more qualitative.
Pan Macmillan’s manifesto has certainly been a thought-provoking exercise in talking about the future of publishing (and driving more people to your blog). However the destruction of the singular book, the singular author and the singular publisher is by no means as guaranteed as the doomsayers believe.
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