“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Today he might say “No man ever writes the same text twice.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Wall Street Journal, contends that digital word processing “is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse…Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen.”

For better:  “It makes it easy for writers to correct errors and update facts. Guidebooks will no longer send travelers to restaurants that have closed or to once charming inns that have turned into fleabags. The instructions in manuals will always be accurate. Reference books need never go out of date.

Even literary authors will be tempted to keep their works fresh. Historians and biographers will be able to revise their narratives to account for recent events or newly discovered documents. Polemicists will be able to bolster their arguments with new evidence. Novelists will be able to scrub away the little anachronisms that can make even a recently published story feel dated.”

For worse: “The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today.”

It was not long ago that when we thought of books we thought of immutability, fixity, indelibility.  Now we’re going to have think about them another way.

Books That Are Never Done Being Written

Richard Curtis

Good morning, Earnest Young College Graduate, and thank you for coming in for an interview with our publishing company.  As you noticed on the walls of our waiting room, in our 150 year history we have published many of the world’s most distinguished authors. And behind every one of them was a great editor.  We think you have the potential to be one too. However, we have some questions about your qualifications.

I don’t see on your resume any proficiency in XML programming, statistical analytics, e-book formatting, metadata management, Web design, information architecture and app development. Surely you are aware that these are the skills that editors must bring to the modern publishing process. What’s that you say?  You got straight 4.0′s in English lit?  That’s very interesting. We’ll get back to you. Next candidate, please.

We’d hate to think that that’s what tomorrow’s job interview is going to sound like but if Joseph Walker, writing for FINS, is right, students will have to rethink their curriculum selections if they hope to become tomorrow’s Maxwell Perkins.

Walker reached this conclusion after covering a conference sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group attended by 80 book publishing execs pondering “how to transform their stagnating print empires into thriving businesses by 2020.”

“Their radical solution,” Walker writes. “Invest in digital.”

“Two years ago if we had this conference, these issues wouldn’t have even surfaced, but now they’re front and center,” BISG’s executive director said.

Though representatives from Simon & Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins and other houses tried to be upbeat about the future, others were pessimistic.  Bob Stein, former director of a book-related think tank, suggested that traditional publishers drag too much weight to make the transition to digital. “In all likelihood, the innovation won’t come from one of the big six publishers. It’s likely to come from someone who doesn’t even consider themselves to be a publisher,” Stein said.

One reason he may be right is that publishers just can’t compete for top-notch talent in the technical arena. “According to Payscale.com,” writes Walker, ” the median salary for a software developer at a book or newspaper publisher is $61,100, compared to $69,000 at Internet companies like Google or Facebook. For an IT product manager, the salary gap can be as much as $20,000, with book publishers paying $66,200 compared to $84,900 at an Oracle or Microsoft and $83,200 at a Google.”

Read Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle Boost Job Growth at Publishers, then retrieve your resume, delete the senior thesis on the influence of Chaucer on Dickens and start boning up on XML.

Richard Curtis

Agent? What’s an agent?

In the mid-1990s, as the Digital Age dawned, I published an essay called Author? What’s an Author? In essence I said that digital technology would force authors and publishers to redefine themselves. Implicit was that agents would have to do so, too.  But the time has come to get explicit.  How are agents redefining their role in the publishing process in the twenty-first century?

In Part 1 of this article we described the forces squeezing agents out of the middle. Now let’s explore a few ways that agents are reinventing themselves to restore their value both to authors and publishers.

Client Services. Over the past few decades, as economic woes forced publishers to curtail editorial services and courtesies that were once taken for granted, agents have stepped into the breach, doing things for their authors that are a far cry from the wheeler-dealer profile of the old ten-percenters.

Among the activities agents routinely perform today are writing proposals, editing manuscripts, composing cover copy, designing covers, developing websites, media and social networking coaching, and more. Folio Literary Management‘s Paige Wheeler “offers the services of a marketing department, a licensing arm and a speakers bureau,” she said in The Evolution of the Literary Agent, a forum conducted by Writers Digest‘s Jane Friedman. (For some unusual services that agents perform, read What I Have Done for You Lately)

Until now, many of these services were proffered gratis, but some agents have begun to feel that in order to perform them competently and professionally they must monetize them.  For some that means raising commissions, for others, charging management fees. Such arrangements are more common in Hollywood, where the talent pays managers to handle legal matters, public relations and social networking. But of course, in Hollywood the talent is a lot richer than garden-variety book authors.

Marketing and Media Coaching. Some agents specialize in training authors in self-promotion and professional speaking. Agent Wendy Keller of Keller Media says “My agency has been working since 1991 to not only sell books, but also train people to become paid professional speakers and to become the type of self-promoting, marketing-savvy authors whose books actually sell. Most important, we teach authors how to test their content before it is turned into a book, so that all possible risks are reduced in advance.” The forward-looking Keller says “Keller Media has always striven to stay on the cutting edge, forcing our authors to build websites or blogs long before most people knew what that meant. Now, we push them to do YouTube shorts, vlogs and sometimes iPhone apps.”

Agent-Publishers. Some agents have started e-book publishing companies.  I launched E-Reads in 2000, Arthur Klebanoff started RosettaBooks in 2002, and Scott Waxman founded Diversion Books in 2010. The former two are dedicated more to reprint of previously published books, whereas Waxman’s venture issues originals. “Through Diversion, Waxman stated in Friedman’s round-table, “we can publish some of these books and therefore offer authors a new alternative. Instead of relying entirely on the big houses, authors now have a real opportunity to pursue a different road, one which gives them more control over their book as well.”

As the publishing industry rebuilds itself from the ground up, every denizen of the ecosystem must not just adapt but reconstitute.  Agents are no exception, and it is entirely possible that a decade from now their role will have only the faintest resemblance to that of hustling for commissions today.

Richard Curtis

“The most influential member of the editorial board of your publishing company is the literary agent.”

It seems like a century since I wrote that. In fact, it was a century ago. I wrote it in the twentieth. Is it still true in the twenty-first?

Literary agents stand at a crossroads, and the vista in every direction is cloudy. On the one hand, publishers – the buyers – are fewer and more selective. On the other, many authors – the sellers -  expect more attention and service from their agents to fill the vacuum left by a shrinking publishing industry.  And some authors are choosing options that don’t include agents at all. Boyle’s Law seems to be at work here: the more pressure exerted on publishers and authors by a compressing marketplace, the more heat they generate, and a lot of it is focused on their agents.

Like brokers in every other field of endeavor, agents are supposed to add value to the relationship between buyer and seller in order to justify their commissions. I could write volumes about all the things agents do and have done to make publishing a better place for both parties (actually, I have written volumes***). Does that matter as much as it used to?

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: agents are intermediaries in a rapidly disintermediating world. The pitiless march of digitization that has eroded, and in some cases destroyed, so many other go-betweens now menaces the agency profession like a siege army outside bastions that have stood for a century. As in so many other fields where digital technology is squeezing middlemen out of the middle, agents have become vulnerable.

Is there any reason to believe that agents are exempt from the cruel laws of the marketplace? Given my vested interest in the answer, it’s hard to render an opinion that sounds like anything other than wishful thinking. But if one can try to be objective, one does have to wonder why book agents in the age of Smashwords and Kindle are more fit to survive than travel agents in the age of Orbitz and Expedia. Tomorrow, in the second part of this article, we’ll look at ways that agents are adapting and reinventing themselves to meet these challenges.

What are the factors forcing middlemen and women out of the middle?

Buyers. The pool of viable buyers – big, established trade publishers with nationwide bookstore distribution – is shrinking like a lake in a drought, and so is their wealth. It was only a few decades ago that they numbered one thousand or so. Today it is closer to a few dozen.

Though the top six or eight are well heeled enough to pay giant advances for blockbuster novels and celebrity tell-alls, they have almost nothing to spare for the platformless newcomers and midlist authors who have traditionally been a staple of the publishing industry and a nursery for talent. If an agent doesn’t represent household-name writers and has no place to go with garden variety ones, the options are nasty, brutish, and poor. The collapse of Borders and the struggles of Barnes & Noble have eroded the marketplace even further, reducing the pool of markets and money to spread around.

Sellers. Given this contraction, the author community has understandably become disenchanted with the allure of traditional publishing. Even big-name authors – indeed, some shockingly big-name authors -  are disgusted and have begun exploring self-publication options, options that are seldom commissionable by their agents. And they are finding a host of compelling options that only serve to accelerate the centrifugal disintegration of what, not very long ago, was a dynamic, agentcentric industry.

A decade ago authors dissatisfied with their agents sought new representation, and there is still intense competition for seats at the grand table. But there are fewer of them, and authors who can’t find one have begun seeking alternate ways to get their books discovered, published, distributed and publicized. Unfortunately, their agents don’t always have the technical skill set necessary to be of assistance, and reports of fabulously successful self-published newcomers only add to the sense of futility with the establishment.

As a result, many agents are struggling to find significant ways to add value to the work of their clients in the emerging digital paradigm, where self-publication has become a lure that for many writers is intriguing and, for some, irresistible. Editing, formatting and uploading books, managing content and promoting oneself have become so easy that authors are not as reliant on traditional agent services as they once were. New authors who once desperately pursued agents as the key to a professional writing career now put their books directly into Kindle, Sony, iPad and Nook, even issue them as print on demand paperbacks, and manage their own marketing and publicity.

The dream of being discovered by a major house or attracting an agent is so remote for new authors that many no longer bother. Even elite, privileged, and affluent authors have begun to sell their work directly to their fans, leaving their agents bewildered, helpless and – commissionless. Where are tomorrow’s agents going to find clients?

In the second installment of this article we’ll see what agents are doing, or trying to do, to maintain their relevance in this rapidly evolving paradigm called Digital Publishing.

Richard Curtis

*** See What I Have Done for You Lately

If content is king, is distribution queen? That appears to be the lesson to be the derived from the saga of Netflix, the hugely successful video distributor. In fact, after reading Tim Arango and David Carr’s story about Netflix in the New York Times, you could easily reverse the pecking order and no one would give you a serious argument.

Netflix “has gone from being the fastest-growing first-class mail customer of the United States Postal Service [half a billion dollars annually] to the biggest source of streaming Web traffic in North America during peak evening hours,” they write. Thus a major brick and mortar operation has transformed itself with lightning speed into a major digital one.

By virtue of its very efficiency, however,  Netflix has provoked the hostility of the very business it was created to serve, and therein lies a story with obvious parallels to the book industry. In the following paragraph substitute “printed books” for “DVD’s”, and “e-books” for “streamed videos” and “publishers” for “cable companies”:

“For the first time, the company will spend more over the holidays to stream movies than to ship DVDs in its familiar red envelopes (although it is still spending more than half a billion dollars on postage this year). And that shift coincides with an ominous development for cable companies, which long controlled home entertainment: for the first time in their history, cable television subscriptions fell in the United States in the last two quarters — a trend some attribute to the rise of Netflix, which allows consumers to bypass their cable box to stream movies and shows.”

Once again, digital delivery of content has disintermediated traditional means of delivering tangible content. The closest analogy to Netflix in the book world is probably Google.  When Google Editions finally comes out of the clouds – and it will very soon – we may see a similar phenomenon of the distribution queen capturing the content king.

Read Netflix’s Move Onto the Web Stirs Rivalries and see if it rings bells for you too.

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Can you produce a vook?  What skills will you require to make one?  And will you be more of a writer when you finish it?

This essay was written in the mid-1990s, but except for a few dated references like CD-ROMs, which I’m going to leave in for the fun of it, it seems to be completely relevant to what is happening in the media this very day.

****************************
How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can’t process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of “author” will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

The evolution of authors from unimedium creators to multimedia producers has been gaining momentum since the replacement of manual typewriters with electric ones, a phenomenon that any living soul in his or her mid-thirties or older has witnessed. The addition of computerized memory converted these dumb and passive typing machines into utilities possessing the potential for genuine partnership with writers. Each refinement in memory capacity, miniaturization, automation, and audiovisual display exponentially accelerated the typewriter’s curve away from mere laborsaving device and toward a purely organic extension of the writer’s mind.

At this point in time, we are at a place on the curve where typewriting has been supplanted by word processing, and word processing, in turn, has advanced into desktop publishing. This means that writers are capable of assuming the role of publishers in every function except distribution of their works to the consumer, and even this condition is on the way to being satisfied with the ongoing creation of electronic networks delivering intellectual creations directly to users.

The closer writers come to realizing that potential, the greater will be the pressure on them to expand their skills beyond effectively delivering the written word in print mode. It will be incumbent on them to navigate, and enable computer users to navigate, through a world of sights, sounds, colors, action, information, and special effects. The introduction of the optical disk, with its almost unimaginable memory and versatility, into the writers repertoire, makes their ascent to the next rung of evolution a foregone conclusion. But what is that rung, and how many others loom above it?

Technological growth is seldom achieved without a price, however. The same refinements that liberated writers from some kinds of concerns have saddled them with others. Our relationship with text has become complicated, if not obscured, by our need to master new writing tools. More and more of our creative energy has become dedicated to the selection of hardware, software, peripherals, and options. Each improvement challenges us not to become better writers but to become better engineers.

To read this essay in full click here.

Richard Curtis

Stanford University is about to take its physics, engineering and computer science library virtual.  Calling it a “bookless” library, the learning center will pack away its paper and replace it with digital information.

“Stanford is running out of room, restricted by an agreement with Santa Clara County that limits how much it can grow,” writes Lisa M. Krieger in Mercury News.com. “Increasingly, the university seeks to preserve precious square footage. Adding to its pressures is the steady flow of books. Stanford buys 100,000 volumes a year — or 273 every day.”

Other colleges have similar problems, but Stanford is taking the most aggressive measures to solve them.  Replacing the paper library will be a state of the art study center. “It is only half the size of the current Engineering Library,” writes Krieger, “but saves its space for people, not things. It features soft seating, ‘brainstorm islands,’ a digital bulletin board and group event space. There are few shelves and it will feature a self-checkout system. It is developing a completely electronic reference desk, and there will be four Kindle 2 e-readers on site. Its online journal search tool, called xSearch, can scan 28 online databases, a grant directory and more than 12,000 scientific journals.”

Not everyone is tickled pink. The Physics Librarian, not surprisingly, has mixed feelings.  “When I look back, then there is a certain sadness for me. Any change is hard. And there are moments of joy, when I see bookplates of former faculty who owned and donated the book, and sometimes made notes on the side,” said the librarian, Stella Ota. Imagine her emotions as she triages such Nobel Prize winning physicists as Douglas Osheroff, Robert Laughlin and Steven Chu, current director of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Details in Stanford University prepares for ‘bookless library’

Richard Curtis

A few years ago a pair of reporters for a now-defunct publication called Inside ran an interview with three men from the old world of publishing who were in the process of reinventing themselves.

The article was titled “Publishing’s Grumpy Old Visionaries” and the three were depicted as “wundermenschen of the brave new book world”. One of the three was former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein. Another was literary agent John Brockman. To understand my reluctance to reveal the third, you’ll have to click on the article. (And incidentally, one of the two reporters was none other than Sara Nelson, who went on to become editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.)

Though their projections differ in a number of particulars, the Grumpy Old Visionaries accurately foretold the place where we are now and the rock-strewn path that led us here.

The three ageless hotshots are still working their visions and walking both sides of the publishing street – the dusty, decaying old one and the gleaming but bewildering new one. One of these three caballeros, Epstein, has tried to fix his coordinates in both past and future in a reflective article in the New York Review of Books. Like the rest of us he has mixed emotions about the two worlds but he lets his predilection show in this poignant summing-up:

“I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.”

Read his elegant and elegiac essay here.

RC

After two intense days of speeches, panels, presentations, celebrations and debates, breakout sessions, networking and exhibits, there was so much to take away from the Digital Book World conference that my head swam. But after contemplating it all in tranquility I was able to reduce the takeaways to one simple but powerful impression: the paradigm shift in publishing from a tangible culture to a virtual one has finally begun to take hold, and its grip will endure.

The moment I beheld a CD-ROM I knew that a day would come when I would behold an electronic book reader. For years I have chronicled the evolution of digital technology, noting its incremental but inexorable trajectory toward a tipping point. I cannot say that we have reached it – indeed, Impelsys’s Sameer Shariff told an audience at DBW that the industry is where the primitive video game Pong was in the early 70′s. Nevertheless, the conference attendees clearly grasped that the gravitational pull on their home planet has weakened and the tug of a new world has become palpable.

How to characterize that new world? It’s no longer about the product. It’s about community, the impossibly tangled, virally sprawling, thrillingly energetic, intoxicatingly imaginative web of writers, editors, readers, entrepreneurs, aggregators, curators and technologists in the service of authors and books, utilizing tools of staggering complexity and power. It’s bigger than any of us but publishing people, even old timers (over 40), have lost their fear and accept the new medium and its tools not just as inevitable but as benign.

Indeed, it took an over-40 veteran, publisher-turned-agent Larry Kirshbaum, to remind the assembly that however dazzling the delivery systems may be, the real magic of books is produced by authors and publishers, and it always will be. Good for you, Larry! And a big shout-out to Mike Shatzkin, F+W Media and the other sponsors for creating an event that would enable us to grasp how vast and wonderful our community is.

We are told that “May you live in interesting times” is a curse. I cannot remember a more interesting time for publishing than today, and I feel blessed to witness and be part of it.

Richard Curtis

We who are about to die salute Jenna Wortham. Like most of us she has ruminated about the end of life but rather than writing her own eulogy or selecting a coffin, she has been making provisions for disposing of her digital archives and leaving encrypted instructions for her survivors.

“Not to be morbid,” she writes in the “Internet Protocol” feature of the New York Times, “but I have a lot of private information and details stored on my computer — in various Google Chat logs, e-mail and social networking accounts — that I wouldn’t want to be revealed when I log off for good. Who should I consult or what do I need to do to ensure my cache is cleared and e-mail and social networking sites accounts are deleted when I die?”

A good idea, she writes, “is to appoint someone as your digital executor who is responsible for cleaning up your accounts, clearing your browser cache, deleting secret e-mails and trashing appropriate files.”

For other suggestions, read The Digital Afterlife and Morning-After Messaging or forward it to your estate lawyer or next of kin.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times