Reed Books Australia
22 Salmon Street, Port Melbourne 3207
jonroper@ozemail.com.au
http://www.reedbooks.com.au/~jroper/
Offering enormous possibilities in terms of communication and the delivery of information globally, this convergence of technologies may well become focussed and defined through the Internet, creating the single most important channel of information in the world.
This is the era where you can access information from around the globe and have it delivered to your desktop in seconds. How then does print media and in particular the book industry fit in with this future? You could certainly make a case that newspapers and magazines have successfully carved out their own niche on the Internet, after finding their television equivalents years ago. But what will happen to the book?
Since the sixteenth century the book has played a vital role in the transmission of knowledge and culture, and book publishers are extremely reluctant to give up their traditional role as conduits of information. Is the book an outmoded format, or a concept ready to be re-invented.
A world wide paper shortage has led to an escalation of costs. Publishers are expanding their lists in order to cater for wider interest, while the retail price of books is under great downward pressure. Poor trading in book shops seems the order of the day, with characteristically high levels of returns to the publisher.
Consumer books (novels and biographies for example) are also under threat >from a general cultural shift that has begun to devalue reading, giving preference and priority to graphic rather than textual representations. This is due in large part to changes in leisure and is manifested in the shift to videos, TV, movies, and magazines.
What part is the Internet playing in the displacement of the book?
The great selling point of the Internet, according to the mass media, is that it offers access to literally a world of information.
This promotion has ignited the interest of the whole community. In particular the educational sector, backed by government at the state and federal level, is convinced of the great opportunities that the Internet can offer students in providing access to an incredible range of material, greater motivation in learning, and in exploring and engaging in completely new experiences and modes of communication.
But the sheer amount of information does not ensure its value, and many people, once the initial fascination with the new technology has worn off, find this new realm confusing and overwhelming in its scope and disappointing in its detail.
For students and teachers a major concern has been the lack of consistent and authoritative information available on the Internet. These concerns are now being met in a variety of ways. Most importantly we are witnessing the emergence on the Internet of large content providers who are well established in the print world. These include commercial magazines, newspapers, TV networks, as well as government and non-government organisations, who are committed to providing a wide range of material with authoritative editorial viewpoints.
Yet to emerge on the Internet are large collections of copyright material, characterised as material that is regarded as most valuable in our society. Copyright owners are still waiting on the establishment of a secure viable marketplace on the Internet. Such a marketplace need not only to be secure in terms of transactions between retailer and consumer, and against digital piracy, but also vibrant, with a steady stream of consumers ready to buy.
While short articles, magazines and newsletters abound on the Internet, there is relatively little in traditional book form, save the grand collections of enterprises such as the Guttenburg Project, which digitise and distribute classic works which are out of copyright. However the reference book is beginning to make its presence felt, and will become one of the most economically viable publications on the Internet. Already more dictionaries and encyclopaedia are sold in electronic form than in print form, and given the development of the Internet marketplace, it is success is more than likely.
Why reference books? Because digitisation adds value. The reader usually only wants to look at one small section of the text at a sitting, and so digitisation enables the provision of fast natural language search facilities adding. Further reference books are typically large and expensive, both for the publisher and the consumer. So by eliminating overheads such as printing, storage and distribution the overall cost is greatly reduced.
How will the Internet impact on other types of books? The formats of the novel or the illustrated book do not lend themselves to the Internet for various reasons. Richard Charkin (1995), Chief Executive of Reed Consumer Books, summed it up neatly when he wrote that the book 'has survived numerous technological threats, the greatest of which - television - has proved to be a marvellous marketing support. The book's intrinsic qualities of low cost, durability, independence from an external power source, and aesthetic appeal will serve readers well beyond my own lifetime'. You will still want your racy novel at the pool or your cookbook propped beside the stove.
The Internet will not survive and expand because it is a good place to locate and access digitally what we currently have in print, but because of the development of new forms of writing and publishing which have no print equivalent.
You could well pass over many of these emergent forms if all you are doing is browsing the Web. These new forms of writing reign supreme in the monochrome worlds of e-mail, news groups, and Internet relay chat, and are temporally-based, owing more to oral than literary traditions.
Without doubt their chief virtue is in the creation of a new sense community in a world where geographically based communities are increasingly difficult to maintain. For who is looking for more information after a day full of work? What we want instead is to be taken out of our own personal sphere, to be transformed, to be entertained, to feel connected. It is through these new forms that people are building communities, sharing their lives, insulting and enraging each other, giving advice and beginning relationships. It is these forms that have no equivalent in the publishing world and could well challenge the power of the novel and the soapie. It is these forms, more than any number of electronic books, that give life to the Internet. Will publishers try and capitalise on this? You bet but hopefully in the best possible ways.
There are many unknowns regarding the Internet. What will it look like after the impact of big players such as the Microsoft Network? Will it develop into a diverse marketplace? What processes are involved when we read electronically? Will the new emergent forms of writing flow over and affect the print world? Will these new forms be sidelined once broadband services become a reality?
While book publishers will use the Internet to market and distribute their print works, there are many indications that the consumer dollar will increasingly go elsewhere. It is critical that publishers attempt to redefine what they are doing, rather than simply repackage their content. The challenge is to publish under this new regime, and to develop the products that fit. All of which is, to quote Barry Diller (1995), is 'slow brainbending work.'