365-207: My Digital Manifesto-The Future of Our Publishing World

The purpose of this blog post is not to share some great, close-guarded secret that’s been in my back pocket all these years; instead, I would like to reveal some of my experiences with eBooks, eReaders, and Print-on-Demand technology—all stretching back to the start of the Internet.  And all along the way, I’ve been able to come up with some solid thoughts about technology’s impact upon the publishing industry, thoughts that can only form after many years of reading, studying, thinking about, and participating in the process.

If you don’t believe me, that’s fine: no problem. Heck, maybe I’m wrong. After 44 years on this planet, way-too-many jobs, a wife, and a couple kids, I seem to be wrong about scores of things most all the time. I am aware.

But perhaps, just maybe, in some way, a bit of truth may reveal itself throughout the writing of this post.  So please, pour a cup of tea, kick off your shoes, sit back, and do some time traveling with me. 

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Fifteen years ago, I transformed myself from a newspaper reporter on a small, county paper in Tennessee to something called a technical writer. (I had no idea what a technical writer produced, but I knew that someone was willing to pay me a living wage and offer my family health benefits for my putting nouns and verbs together on a computer screen.) I worked for a long-vanished company that created accounting software for city and county governments throughout the American south-east. After being on the job for about a month, Microsoft injected Windows95 into the atmosphere, and it replaced WordPerfect on my desk. My bulky CRT screen and clunky keyboard sizzled and evaporated, as well.

In their place: a desktop computer materialized. It was not new to me, completely. In early 1990, I was an illegal immigrant working for cash just outside of London, England (another story for another time!), and I sold electronics to American service people at the United States Navy Exchange department store. Among the usual stuff you’d expect to see, there was a machine called a Commodore Colt. Looking back on it, I think it was the evolutionary link between a Commodore 64 and the first PC, much like the one that was now on my desk.

Each weekend for a month, I took this computer home. My wife was putting herself through nursing school by working in the laundry room of the local county hospital, and I had the spare, alone time to tinker with this machine for hours and hours.

Not long after I learned how to use it, I discovered the first pages that started to form on the Internet. And soon, these grammar-school-project-esk sites started to migrate into professional-looking places. And then, Yahoo and Amazon screamed at me through the computer screen.

A Key Moment: For Then and Now

As fast as I could type, I put together a presentation for my two managers (the co-owners of the business) on the Internet, its impact to their company and customers, and why they should create a site.  Quickly, one of the owners called me into his office and offered me the chance run the new Internet company that he was going to create to service their customers.

I had to turn him down for two reasons. First, he didn’t want to pay me any more money. I may have been a poor guy from Kentucky, but I wasn’t stupid. And second, it was the wrong decision. Even way back then, I knew that money could be generated in at least one of two ways: 1) selling products and services to generate new cash; and/or 2) forcing money to appear by spending less of it. 

Way back then, and in a lot of ways now, the second method was the Internet’s secret power.  I explained to the boss that this venture needed to be a department in his current company—where it could help generate revenue by the second method. In the early days, the real margin was to be made in the Intranet, not in the Internet.

He ignored me and sent me back to my technical writing cube, and he started the company. Within a month or two, it failed and closed. Not long after, I left to create Web sites and do technical writing in Nashville.

My key point with this part of the story is that this is where we are with technology’s impact to the publishing industry today, AT THIS EXACT MOMENT. And again, the correct choice is the second choice: to force cash to materialize by using technology to streamline processes and inventory control.

And how can this happen?  How is that happening? Print-on-Demand technology.  But more on that in a moment.

Paperbacks: 1     eReaders: 0

I first learned about eBooks and eReaders around 1999. They were expensive and awkward, or so it seemed to me.  And while I couldn’t afford them, I was able to download the software that ran on them and participate in the experience on my PC. I knew that the experience wasn’t for me. (No amount of hype or predictions was going to cause me to surrender my paperbacks.) And apparently it wasn’t for a lot of people either because it didn’t take too long before these machines had vanished.  It was funny to watch and experience. In March of 2000, the industry was focusing on the digital download of Stephen King’s novella, and magazines and writers were wondering this and pondering that. And when I did a search for these readers a couple years later, I couldn’t find them for sale, at least not new.  The great eBook experiment was over.

Printing on Demand

Flashing forward several years placed me in my current Technical Writer II position. While my career goals had me earning a MFA in Writing and other interests prompted my teaching English online for a local college, my growing family continued to need health benefits and a steady paycheck.  As a result, I have continued to put verbs next to subjects on the computer screen: not a bad living.

One foot in the literary world and the other in high technology, I was starting to see the future of publishing form in front of me—because (from a certain point of view) I had entered the publishing business by accident.  For the last several years, I’ve created, maintained, and managed a product called literature: marketing literature for our sales force and service literature for products on an assembly line.

An important part of my job in the beginning was inventory control. Making sure enough literature was on the assembly line. Monitoring stock levels in warehouses. Working with printers to mass produce and restock, when/as needed.

Then--one day--someone in the office had a project to see how moving to print-on-demand technologies would impact the business. Throughout the process, I was shocked to realize all of the costs associated with maintaining massive quantities of physical paper products. To be charged by the “cubic” feet was a shocking and expensive realization.

It didn’t take long before we were a true Print-on-Demand shop, and I was involved in migrating physical pieces of literature and product to “invisible,” digital versions. A large part of my annual employee personal evaluation was tied to the amount of physical stock and products that I could push through the process and destroy. The future was immediate and without shape or form.  And yet somehow, I knew that it all existed.

While this was going on, I was reading Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future by Jason Epstein. His words were in line with my experiences. After I read it, I did extensive searches for more of his words, and that led me to his new business and invention, On Demand Books and its Espresso Book Machine.  Over the last few years, I’ve read more and more on this company and this technology, and I’ve enjoyed seeing it evolve and improve.

Publishing’s Evolution

From everything that I’ve experienced and learned throughout the last 15 years, I know that print-on-demand technologies (perhaps even Mr. Epstein’s invention!) is the next step in our industry’s evolution. I know this because I’ve seen it happen.  Heck, I’ve participated in it. I’ve seen companies enjoy the positive financial consequences of it happening. And when a company…enjoys profit “margin,” there’s no going back.

The Return of Mobile Readers

I watched with great interest the return of the eBook with first Amazon.com’s Kindle, and then with Sony’s eReader. The technology has improved the reading experience, and some people are buying the devices and purchasing/downloading books. After a lot of reading and research, I happened to catch an interview with Stephen King that was conducted as part of the New York Times TimesTalks series. (This has not been long ago.) His interview included an exploration of eBooks, and he did a survey of the crowded room.  About ten percent of the audience members (active readers, of course) indicated that they owned and used eReaders. To me, that felt like a realistic percentage.

Mobility: The Savior of American Journalism

While I would never buy a Kindle or Sony eReader to read or replace a physical book (something I prize and value a great deal), the Kindle DX (and now Apple’s iPad) is a whole other new, exciting world. These slightly-larger eReaders with their landscape reading capabilities have (in a realistic way) unchained newspapers and magazines from the PC and workplace workstations.  These new devices and their ability to offer journalism in a readable and pleasing fashion have (finally!) made journalism mobile again. Newspapers and magazines are back where they started: in motion throughout the world, verses being trapped inside a computer's web browser. And no physical trees are being destroyed in the process. Sure, snippets of media have been available for mobile devices, but nothing has ever been able to come close to the quality of the paper versions.  That’s no longer true.

Conclusion

Most of us will still be reading our paperbacks as usual: they having been freshly-printed at the local public library or perhaps at a machine on the sidewalk in front of our favorite restaurants. Some of us will be reading those same books in a digital form on a small eReader. And still more of us will be once again walking around and reading newspapers and magazines in more and more numbers, but we’ll be doing it digitally. It’s gonna be a brave, new, exciting world, indeed.

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For a more detailed Print-on-Demand discussion, please see the following two articles:

http://www.pw.org/content/digital_digest_print_on_demand_answers_ebooks

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

Comments

[Charlotte Rains Dixon]

And don't forget the Ipad. It is going to take digital publishing a whole new step forward and I can't wait to get my hands on one.

Great article, Roy.

[Book Calendar]

I like this comment because it matches with the way thing seem to be going. The one thing that bothers me is the concept of the digital divide. Hopefully things will get cheap enough where ereaders and pocket computers are very affordable.