A dinosaur that might survive?

My lunchtime trawling of The Age online has come up trumps again. This article was in yesterday’s Technology section. It’s a somewhat histrionic report on the US government’s proposed ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’, that was exposed on Wikileaks a few days ago.

While the Agreement certainly goes far beyond what a sane person would consider reasonable boundaries, and I am no fan of mega-corps milking the creative juices out of artists who feel they have no choice but to work within the current distribution frameworks, I’m still left feeling that somehow the book industry is different. We barely turn a profit, for a start. (Trust me, my wages come out of that profit, and there are PLENTY of people running juices bars bringing home much larger paychecks than mine.) Also, the technology required to make a really beautiful book just isn’t available to individuals. (Except perhaps the Hungry Girls. They’ve done a pretty good job.) And while there is plenty of really great writing out there, especially in the burgeoning blogosphere, it seems unlikely that the online fiction industry will take off in the same way as, say, iTunes.

Part of this is purely commercial. It’s easy for a songwriter to stick a tune or two on their MySpace page for free and include a link somewhere to either buy the rest of the album, or find out where you can see them play, paying them an entrance fee. Sure, they may never hit the big time, but chances are, they’ll do ok. A writer, on the other hand, can hardly post a 3-minute chapter of their novel online and hope it grabs you enough to fork out for the whole 50 000 words. It’s just not the same. A book is a whole, and while purists may argue the same about the lost art of the complete album, there has always been a place in the music industry for stand-alone hits. It’s just not that easy to hypertext a story. (It can be done, but this is a very specific genre.)

I’ve been turning over this question of what the future holds for the publishing industry all semester, and although I’ve always felt that it was just somehow ‘different’ to those other art forms rapidly adapting to the digital era, I never could put my finger on why. But I think, despite all the clammering noise about the ‘way of the future’, the book is somehow both a thing of the past, and something that will never get old. The business models and the bookstores have evolved enormously, and some of the advances being made in the production process are pretty incredible. But the thing at the heart of the industry, the fibre of publishing – the STORY – has barely changed at all. And so long as we yearn to read our stories, long and linear, I think we’ll be just fine.

Ah, the sentimental peace that comes with finishing a semester’s work. Time to curl up with cup of tea and a book…