Jonathan Karp on Disposable Books
Posted on June 30, 2008
Jonathan Karp, the publisher and Editor in Chief of Hachette Book Group imprint Twelve, has a most interesting piece in The Washington Post today. He dishes on editing books by everyone from Manuel Noriega to Clay Aiken (Aiken was harder to work with) and discusses what he calls the phenomenon of "disposable books": books that sell easily but which don't stick around for posterity. You know, the far left and far right wing political diatribes, the pop culture books and the endless array of increasingly bizarre memoirs. But there is hope.
The barriers to entry in the book business get lower each year. There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively. Those who publish generic books for expedient purposes will face new competitors. Like the music companies, some of those publishers may shrink or die.The entire article is well worth your time. Karp really needs his own blog.Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it's hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.
Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books -- works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.