Why the future of the book lies in the past

The ancient ways may be the best

A striking piece has recently appeared on essayist and programmer Paul Graham’s website, and attracted plenty of comment elsewhere, on what he calls “post-medium publishing.” The thesis – which Jeff Jarvis has already declared to be seminal (or close to it) – is that it’s a mistake to think that consumers of any kind of medium have ever, really been paying for content. They may have bought things because of the content but, Graham argues, the economics have always been about the cost of creating and then distributing a physical medium (paper, vinyl) that happens to have stories or pictures printed on it, or makes a nice noise. The trading of valuable information is, Graham concedes, a different game, but a marginal one, and from a different world to most publishers’ crumbling houses of entertainment and diversion:

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it… In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more? A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper… Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left to sell. Some seem to think they’re going to sell content—that they were always in the content business, really. But they weren’t, and it’s unclear whether anyone could be.

It’s provocative stuff. But what aren’t touched on here – much as in most of the ongoing debates about what digital media mean – are two themes that I would like to see explored in proper depth: the history of commercial publishing; and what the future looks like not only for the book or the magazine, but for the author. Read more »

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Orwell’s eggs—and the joy of his diaries

Orwell's family home in Shiplake: "lower-upper-middle class"

I’ve been meaning to write for some time now about the delight that is the Orwell diaries—a recent example of that most welcome of online phenomena, the re-publishing of classic diaries as blogs.

George—or Eric, as I suppose we should call him—is currently wintering in French Morocco. It’s December 1938, he’s 36 years old, and he’s there to recover from a severe bout of tuberculosis; it probably hasn’t helped his health, too, that a sniper’s bullet went through his neck in Barcelona in 1937, where he fought against Fascism (and wrote Homage to Catalonia, which was published, and flopped, in April 1938).

His diary, though, has yet to mention a single piece of his own writing in any detail. And he isn’t yet the author of the two books above all associated with his name today, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In 1938, Eric is the author of three modestly successful novels and three works of non-fiction; he has written some striking journalism, and spent some time working as a tutor, teacher, and bookshop assistant—but he is no sense a public man of letters. He’s only in north Africa thanks to the largesse of an anonymous benefactor; much of his writing life in England to date has been made possible by staying with or being helped out by his parents, relations and friends (who aren’t especially wealthy). He has been a policeman in Burma, a down-and-out in London and Paris and a combatant in Spain; but he has also spent a lot of time living in cottages, gardening, and participating in British provincial life. If you don’t pay attention, in fact, the diaries themselves can read like the note-takings of a provincial bore: Read more »

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