Book Wars. John B. Thompson
Читать онлайн книгу.
to compose their texts by typing on the keys of a computer rather than using a pen and paper or a typewriter, the text became a digital file from the moment of creation – it was born digital, existing only as a sequence of 0s and 1s stored on a disc or in the memory of a computer. The material forms of writing were changing,2 and, from that point on, the transformation of the text that leads to the creation of the object that we call ‘the book’ could, at least in principle, be done entirely in digital form: it could be edited on screen, revised and corrected on screen, marked up for the typesetter on screen, designed and typeset on screen. From the viewpoint of the production process, the book was reconstituted as a digital file, a database. To a production manager in a publishing house, that’s all the book now is: a file of information that has been manipulated, coded and tagged in certain ways. The reconstitution of the book as a digital file is a crucial part of what I call ‘the hidden revolution’.3 By that, I mean a revolution not in the product but rather in the process: even if the final product looks the same as it always did, a physical book with ink printed on paper, the process by which this book is produced is now completely different.
While all these steps in the production process could in principle be done digitally, it was never so easy in practice. Digitization did not always simplify things – on the contrary, it often made them more complex. The digital world, with its plethora of file types and formats, programming languages, hardwares, softwares and constant upgrades, is in many ways more complicated than the old analogue world of print. A central part of the history of the publishing industry since the early 1980s has been the progressive application of the digital revolution to the various stages of book production. Typesetting was one of the first areas to be affected. The old linotype machines, which were the standard means of typesetting in the 1970s and before, were replaced in the 1980s by big IBM mainframe typesetting machines and then, in the 1990s, by desktop publishing. Typesetting costs plummeted: whereas, in the 1970s, it typically cost $10 a page to get a book typeset from manuscript, by 2000 it was costing between $4 and $5 a page, despite the decrease in the value of the dollar produced by two decades of inflation. While the shift was decisive and dramatic, it was a confusing time for those who lived through the changes and found themselves having to adapt to new ways of doing things. The job of the typesetter was redefined and lines of responsibility were blurred. Some of the tasks formerly carried out by typesetters were eliminated and others were thrown back on in-house production staff, who suddenly found themselves on the front line of the digital revolution in publishing, obliged to use new technologies and learn new programmes that were themselves constantly changing.
By the mid-1990s, many of the technical aspects of book production, including typesetting and page design, had been thoroughly transformed by the application of digital technologies. Progress was more erratic in other areas, such as editing and printing: here too there were aspects of the workflow that became increasingly digital in character, though in ways that were more complex than a one-way shift from analogue to digital. While many authors were composing texts on computers and hence creating digital files, their files were often too full of errors for publishers to use. It was often easier and cheaper for the publisher to print out the text, edit and mark-up the printed page, and then send the edited and marked-up manuscript to a compositor in Asia who would re-key the text and add the tags for the page layout. So while in principle the author’s keystrokes were the point at which the digital workflow could begin, in practice – at least in trade publishing – the digital workflow typically began at a later point, when the edited and marked-up manuscript was re-keyed by the compositor, who supplied the publisher with a file that included additional functionality.
Printing is another area where digitization had a huge impact, though again in ways that were more complex than a simple one-way shift from analogue to digital. Until the late 1990s, most publishers used traditional offset printing for all of their books. Offset has many advantages: print quality is high, illustrations can be reproduced to a high standard and there are significant economies of scale – the more you print, the lower the unit cost. But there are disadvantages too: most notably, there are significant set-up costs, so it is uneconomic to print small quantities. So backlist titles that were selling a few hundred copies or less per year were commonly put out of print by many publishers, and the large trade houses often drew the line much higher. It simply wasn’t economic for them to keep these books in print, taking up space in the warehouse and reprinting in small quantities if and when the stock ran out.
The advent of digital printing changed all that. The basic technology for digital printing had existed since the late 1970s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the technology was developed in ways that would enable it to become a serious alternative to the traditional offset presses. As reproduction quality improved and costs came down, a variety of new players entered the field, offering a range of digital printing services to publishers. It was now possible to keep a backlist title in print by sending the file to a digital printer who could reprint small quantities – 10, 20, 100 or 200 copies, far fewer than would have been possible using traditional offset methods. The unit costs were higher than they were with traditional offset printing but still manageable for the publisher, especially if they were willing to raise the retail price. It was even possible to turn the traditional publishing fulfilment model on its head: rather than printing a fixed quantity of books and putting them in a warehouse to wait for them to be ordered and sold, the publisher could give the file to a print-on-demand supplier like Lightning Source, who would hold the file on its server and print a copy of the book only when it received an order for it. In this way, the publisher could keep the book permanently available without having to hold stock in a warehouse: physical stock was replaced by a ‘virtual warehouse’.
By the early 2000s, many publishers in the English-speaking world were using some version of digital printing for their slower-moving backlist titles, whether short-run digital printing or true print-on-demand. Those in the fields of academic and professional publishing were among the first to take advantage of these new opportunities: many of their books were specialized works that sold in small quantities at high prices, and were therefore well suited to digital printing. Many trade publishers were accustomed to dealing in the larger print quantities for which offset printing is ideal, but they too came to realize – in some cases spurred on by the long-tail thesis first put forward by Chris Anderson in 20044 – that there was value locked up in some older backlist titles that could be captured by using digital print technology. Publishers – academic, professional and trade – began to mine their backlists, looking for older titles for which they still held the copyright, scanning them, turning them into PDFs and re-releasing them as digitally printed books. Titles that had been put out of print many years ago found themselves being brought back to life. Thanks to digital printing, publishers no longer had to put books out of print at all: they could simply reprint in small quantities or put the file in a print-on-demand programme, thereby keeping the title available in perpetuity. This was one of the first great ironies of the digital revolution in publishing: far from killing off the printed book, the digital revolution gave it a new lease of life, enabling it to live well beyond the age at which it would have died in the pre-digital world. From now on, many books would never go out of print.
These developments in print technology, together with the substantial reduction in costs associated with the digitization of typesetting and book design, also greatly lowered the barriers to entry and opened the way for new start-ups to enter the publishing field. It was now easier than ever to set up a publishing company, typeset and design a book using desktop publishing software on a PC or a Mac, and print in small quantities – or even one at a time – using a digital printer or print-on-demand service. The digital revolution spawned a proliferation of small publishing operations. It also opened the way for an explosion in self-publishing – a process that began in earnest in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the appearance of a variety of organizations using print-on-demand technology, but took on a new character from around 2010, when a plethora of new players entered the self-publishing field.
While these developments were dramatic in their own way, they were only the first stages in a process of transformation that would soon prove to be far more challenging for the established structures and players of Anglo-American trade publishing. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the weaving together of information and communication