On the Book Industry and its Byproducts

Across the pond, Two Ravens Press weighs in on the book industry these days:

The further demise of the book review is predicted by Robert McCrum in The Observer today.  “The book world is in full-blown transition,’ he says. ‘Blogs are rampant; Google is digitising every text going; e-readers are transforming the experience of reading. Books (and book reviewing) have been pushed to the margin. It doesn’t help that in a global recession publishing is also feeling the pinch.”

It’s an interesting question, whether blogs really are supplanting professional critical reviewing. I’m a big fan of really good serious literary blogs, which take the level of discussion about books to a place that a typical review, no matter how well done, can’t. A blog enables you to have a debate about books: what worked for you as a reader and what didn’t, and that’s a very valuable thing.

I agree with the value of book blogs (natch!) but would contest that there will always be a place for good writers.  I would go so far as to suggest that this is could become the Age of the Great Writer, not the demise of their kind.  In a world where Google has introduced grading of search results and the Digg/Web 2.0 model takes over, good content, not just high paid searches, will reign.  And at the end of the day, good content is a product of its author and their understanding of the crazy world of Social Media.  While before, a great writer in Chicago could never do better than the Chicago Tribune, or a great writer in small town could never write for the biggest beats in the biggest towns, now writing is without location and it won’t be an issue of “I read the New York Times for arts and the WSJ for business,” it will become “I read Maureen Dowd for politics, Thomas Friedman for economics, I listen to Amy Goodman for further political discussion and I love so and so’s articles about…”  I would find it incredibly refreshing for the best authors in journalism to get more respect as personalities and marketable skilled writers rather than just a feature of a behemoth newspaper.

I spoke to a writer (off the record) from the San Francisco Chronicle the other evening and he said “Newspapers saw radio and did nothing.  They saw TV and they did nothing.  Why would they think the internet would be any different?  They saw the web and did nothing–that had won all these battles before–but now they’re underwater, hopelessly behind with print and web still being treated as two different products while the other industries, who potentially don’t stand to gain as much as newspapers, move with the tide.”  Great writers will always have a place, but they’re going to have to embrace the tremendous sea change that has occured.  You moved away from your typewriter, you can make this shift too.

It goes further to describe the demise of the non high profile author, which is a well noted and a rather sad part of the industry today.  Neil Simon once said of show business that “You can make a killing but you can’t make a living” and it appears that we are headed that way in books.  I only hope that something will change to give promising authors a chance.  I’m sure plenty of people are anxiously awaiting the next Danielle Steele or the next Twilight edition, but for my  purposes you can throw all that stuff out the window.  I just pray that the next David Eggers, David Foster Wallace or “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” doesn’t get buried under the incredible hubris of bestsellers and Oprah’s Book Club selections, regardless of the industries fledgling numbers.  I hate watching the book world turn into late 90’s music where the major question was not “Is it good?” but “Will it make us money?”  Sigh.