Publishing Update

Further to my in class presentation on publication on Zulu, I still find evidence that this is the direction that web publications will take in the future. Imagine one central library located somewhere in the world with massive storage facilities which can provide immediate access to any publication in any desired language at the touch of a button. Obviously there will be a commercial aspect to this and users could be expected to pay for the service. However the elimination of printing, bookbinding, storage, shipping, and distribution costs could make it a cost effective operation for some of the web service providers like Google or Yahoo. It could also be a benefit to the environment through the reduction in the use of timber for paper, not to mention the savings on the carbon footprint. Jason Epstein in his recent publication The Revolutionary Future, would argue that digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. He says that in this world “the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats's nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary's haikus”[1]. He celebrates the possibility that the contents of the world's libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse, and possibly considering personal storage capacity on a home computer he welcomes the fact that another click might obliterate these same contents, which would ask the question why do we need physical copies of books in this digital age?. Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate—one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide Web. Titles will also be posted on authors' and publishers' own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. Epstein would contend that with inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their cumbersome and costly infrastructure, will survive and may prosper.

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[1] Jason Epstein, The Revolutionary Future, New York Review of Books, Volume 57, Number 4 · March 11, 2010