The Future of the Book, by Clay Shirky

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I often get asked what I think about "the future of the book", which is such a complicated question, and so shot through with hidden assumptions, that it is impossible to answer in a few words. It is an important question, though, so I want to try to answer it in a lot of words.

First things first. In these conversations, "the book" is an overstuffed metonym, standing in for everything from the physical object to the viability of independent book stores to that one time when you were reading in the college library and the late afternoon light was streaming in and everything was just perfect. And the only coherent answer that can be given about the future of all those things and more is "It depends." The economic logic of the age is unbundling, and nothing is being unbundled from its traditional context faster than the written word. And once the unbundling happens, different parts of the system will have different fates.

Once you stop thinking of "the book" as both an object and a reference to the current system, it becomes clear that books qua books do some things well and others badly, and the question becomes how to keep the good bits while transforming everything else.

The key virtue of the physical book is readability -- ink on paper has better contrast than the screen, and at various angles in everything from direct sun to candle light. Reading on paper is so profoundly good, in fact, that a recent Xerox study found that the majority of office paper is only used on the day is is printed or copied -- electronic documents are manifested on paper, in other words, mainly to enhance readability, rather than to store, transport, or organize them.

This makes sense because ink on paper is completely terrible as a medium of storage, transport, or organization. It is heavy. It is bulky. It is hard to search. It is also hard to copy from, hard to edit, hard to share with people far away, and impossible to share with an entire group at once.

So the first change, already visible in the distance, will be less reliance on paper for the things it does badly. Every time someone searches an electronic database and then prints the result, we see this pattern in operation. The obvious solution is to keep all written material in digital form until the moment they are needed, and then print-on-demand to create a nice book, out of physical materials plus digital data, in a matter of minutes.

This change would take all the pointless costs and delays of the current system -- no expense or wait for shipping or warehousing or stocking, and, critically, no seller would ever be out of a book, nor would they have to return unused copies. Ranganathan, the great Indian scholar of library science, once proposed a world where there was a book for every reader and a reader for every book; print-on- demand would be that world.

Such a change would also transform all of the institutions that handle books as physical objects. A library would just be a database plus a printer, and it could fit in the size of your average juice bar while holding everything ever written. All the stuff that makes running a library awful -- missing copies and late returns and restocking -- would disappear. A bookstore would run on the same model, but would charge more than the cost of materials for a copy, without having to run itself like a sloppy, low-density warehouse.

Even if you want to preserve browsability, a bookstore would only need to keep a single copy of any given book in advance, allowing either a reduction in scale or an increase in offerings.

Readers will even be able to create their own books -- Anne Lamott and Mark Twain in a single volume, "mix-tape" collections of favorite essays made for friends, and so on, paralleling the playlist explosion in the music world.

When you think how much better such a system will be for the readers, it becomes clear that the book, as an object, will do just fine. What needs new kinds of support is the _input_ to the book, long-term thinking that results in long-form writing; there's little on the Web today that replicates that.

We currently have two standard models: 'pay me and I'll write it' (commercial publishing) and 'write it or you don't get promoted' (the academic model.) Other models, though, like books sponsored by think tanks and non-profits, or self-published by the authors, are marginal in the current book culture, but I think they may not be as marginal in the future, and we may want to look for some useful hybridization.

As James Frey and Margaret Seltzer demonstrate, commercial publishing has a bad track record of policing its own work, but the academic press doesn't. What about putting drafts of memoirs out for volunteer peer review, as the academics do? Subsidy by think tanks can support arguments that don't benefit from being sexed up for a broader audience. Self-publishing changes the risk/reward curve for the author, and will encourage quite a lot of experimentation. We could even add financial engineering, where publishers find groups of readers who cover some of the up front costs in return for early access.

Most of that is still in the future, but not the distant future. In the same way the desktop publishing revolutionized production, making the book an object produced 'just in time' will free us up to try new things. Such a change will inevitably disrupt much of what regard as book culture, but most of that culture is just a frozen accident based on the expense of printing and distribution. What matters most is readers, and anything we think has even a chance of improving their lives is something we ought to try.

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