After the death of ‘the death of the author’ comes the birth of booking.
McKenzie Wark teaches at the New School for Social Research and is the author of Gamer Theory and A Hacker Manifesto.
82. Danger: Contains Books – Simon Worthington
The recent proliferation of digital reading devices has led to extreme format paranoia, as if the book is an endangered species, under threat of extinction. This overlooks the fact that there is already a lot of ‘book’ in the digital – the vector of incursion moving as much from print to digital as it does from the digital into our notionally stable, ‘enshrined’ cultural form of the book. As the number of tablets and eReaders in use doubles, and mobiles lose their buttons behind the glass of the screen, the interface behaviour of ‘the swipe’ is in ascendance. Is this not, in the end, also a page turn? And in a similar way, is the tweet not something like a margin note; the cloud ‘bookmark’ just that – a bookmark. If we regarded these categories more openly than we do – as ripe for mutation and adaptation, rather than set in stone, a legacy of history – then we would realize this moment constitutes one of ascendance not death.
More interesting questions, I think, focus on the composition of the publishing market – irrespective of whether that is for digital or print. When it comes to the production of books, the booster mantras – of ‘long tails’ and ‘here comes everybody’ – turn out to be misguided fantasies, distractions from the fact that the top twelve publishers make 65 percent (£1.2billion) of the revenue, at least in the UK. This situation hasn’t significantly changed over the last forty years of publishing innovation and digital ‘revolutions’ and if you look across the EU where, at £20 billion (2009), publishing is the largest creative industry, then it’s clear the long tail hasn’t been benefiting the small publishers as claimed, but instead serves to consolidate network monopolies.
Smaller players and Joe Public are told it’s good to share, while these same network monopolies reap all the associated advertising revenue into their offshore accounts, and social networks just wait for IPO day, their bloated info-bellies replete with our profiles, connections, and traces.
Supporting independent writing and publishing has been Mute’s raison d’être since day one. Then as now it’s infrastructures that appear a prime zone of contestation. Then as now, collaboration appears to offer a way out of the marginalization imposed upon us via our size. A recent project, Progressive Publishing System, looks to help small publishers distribute into ePublishing platforms, hybrid and expanded books, new book channels, and even walled gardens. Infiltrating every channel available, it attempts to allow content to ‘follow the reader’, rather than pretending the network can come good on its promise to deliver the reader to us.
Simon Worthington is the co-founder and director of digital at Mute Publishing.