The BBC’s World at One recently asked five leading figures in the literary world for their thoughts on the ‘future of the book’. Here is what they had to say:
1.) Notorious literary agent, Andrew Wylie – aka ‘the Jackal’ – worried that the industry is at a crisis point. He argued the book industry is in danger of mirroring the fortunes of the music industry by giving too much power to distributors like Amazon. ‘Publishers have been trying to reconcile themselves with the demands of the digital distributors,‘ he said. ‘I think if they allow the digital distributors to set the music then the dance will become fatal…The music business ended up needing to go on the road to support the musicians who were part of it. It would be a fairly dire situation if writers had to give public readings in order to support themselves.‘
2.) James Daunt, new Managing Director of Waterstones, talked of increasing the attractions of the physical book. This, he suggested, was an area publishing needed to focus on in the face of the e-book threat: ‘The attention to the quality, the physical quality of the book, has been lax.’ He said he thought there would emerge ‘much more attractive physical books’ partly as an ‘ironical’ reaction from the industry with ‘the digital alternative being there.’ Though he cautioned against inflated expectations: ‘The digital book will take a largish proportion. We don’t know how big it’ll be. I suspect it’s nowhere near as big as some of the pundits are expecting…’
3.) Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins, predicted a mixed economy in the future. She said: ‘I don’t think the printed book will die. I think it will shrink in terms of the volume that we sell…We are going to see a sort of hybrid of both physical books and digital books.’ She also forecast that e-books would in particular take hold in some sectors: ‘fiction really lends itself, I think, to digitization…it’s growing at an enormous rate. So I would predict that within two years we could be looking at fifty per cent of our fiction sales coming from digital.’
4.) From the other side of the fence, Graham Swift aired concerns that e-books might put off potential writers. ‘I wouldn’t envy a young aspiring writer now,’ he said. ‘The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers…I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work. And, sadly, that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can’t make a living, they will give up, and then the world will be poorer for the books that they might have written. So, in that way, it’s quite a serious prospect.’
5.) However, Kate Pullinger didn’t share Swift’s pessimism. She saw the change to digital as offering a host ‘of creative opportunities that we’ve only just scratched the surface of…the potential for new forms of storytelling, new ways to bring stories to readers, is expanding rapidly. And the traditional world of writing and publishing has been…slow to grasp those opportunities. But I do think that they are beginning to emerge now and the kinds of things that we are seeing come available because of the proliferation of tablets and smartphones’ is in many ways, she thought, only ‘the very beginning of what is possible.’
Comments