Hugh McGuire - Book: A Futurists Manifesto: A Collection of Essays from the Bleeding Edge of Publishing

The ground beneath the publishing industry trembled in 2007, when Amazon released the Kindle and Apple released the iPhone. Digitalwhich had wrought havoc on the music and newspaper industrieswas finally coming to the consumer market for books. Certainly digital had been reshaping reading, and much of what we call publishing since at least the 1970s, but for the mass market, 2007 was when the general population started to consider that books might come in pixels rather than pages. In the few years since, these devices and their spawn have brought digital reading of long-form text from the realm of it might happen sometime to it is happening right now, and faster than anyone predicted. Many questions have been answered, resoundingly: Will readers read ebooks? Yes. Lots? Yes. Dedicated reading devices, or smartphones, or tablets? Doesnt matter, as long as there is cross-device accessibility. Browser reading? See previous. Shakeup in publishing? Sorta, but the sky is still overhead.

That rapid shakeupfrom print to digital buying and readinghas been massive, but its really only a transitional phase to a radically different future.

We used to live in a paper-based model: Publishers sent print books to distributors and retailers, who sold print books to readers, who took those books home or to work and read them when and where they liked.

We are now effectively replicating this model for digital: Publishers send digital files to distributors and retailers, who sell those files to readers, who download them onto various devices and read them when and where they like.

Of course much else has happened. Pricing structures have changed (the 99-cent best-seller, as well as the agency model), the barriers to entry have crumbled (Bowker estimates 2.8 million print-on-demand and self-published print books came into being in 2010, versus an estimated 270,000 traditionally published books; Smashwords currently distributes some 30,000 ebook authors and 80,000 titles), and the role of the publisher in this disintermediated world is in question (crime writer Joe Konrath claims he does much better without a traditional publisher, and Amanda Hocking sold more than a million copies of her self-published paranormal novel through Kindle, and then went on to sign a multi-book deal with St. Martins Press).

But there is a greater shift afoot than just pricing and delivery mechanisms, and that is what this book aims to explore. We want to examine how digital changes the process of making a book, as well as what we do with it afterwards.

The move to digital is not just a format shift, but a fundamental restructuring of the universe of publishing. This restructuring will touch every part of a publishing enterpriseor at least most publishing enterprises. Shifting to digital formats is part one of this changing universe; part two is what happens once everything is digital. This is the big, exciting unknown.

What happens when all books are truly digital, connected, ubiquitous? Were starting to put the infrastructure in place now, so we can start doing things with books that have never before been possible.

This book is meant to be a guidebook for the futurea collection of essays from thought leaders and practitioners about the bleeding edge of publishing. Weve organized it in three parts:

In this section, we explore what digital means right now for publishers, and how we need to rethink critical practical matters like design, metadata, and workflow, as well as the underlying assumptions about what a book is