Digitalization: The Next Step

Filed Under Age-Old Debates, Publishing | Leave a Comment

Ah, the age-old debate: book vs. e-book. Do we go the traditional route, smell the fresh ink, flip crisp pages through our fingers? Or gaze into lit screens with never-ending data?

I can see the pros and cons of both, so I’ve never been one to cause an uproar over e-readers and their destruction of life as we know it. It didn’t make sense. People say publishing is dying, but that doesn’t seem right either.
        Too true, Belkar.

And then in my first grad class on Monday, I realized why.

My professor talked about publishing as a tension between a cultural and business industry. As we followed the book through its long history, the pendulum was always swinging between the two, and it was possible to see certain eras as extremes of one or the other.

In the last few decades, publishing has been enjoying a business-focused model. But digitalization is pushing us back toward a culturally-focused one. We’re adapting new attitudes toward information and media and entertainment.

These business-savvy publishers are scrambling for a foothold to keep money in the industry, but they’re forgetting to simultaneously adapt their practices. So, as have many newspapers across the country, they go out of business.

The birth of new technology is driving the industry in completely new directions. And that’s why people are freaking out.

But this isn’t the end of civilization. It’s just the next step.

Technology has long driven the publishing industry. The invention of paper, the printing press, computers, all of these have revolutionized the industry. I’m sure illuminating monks feared for the end of civilization when Gutenberg invented the printing press, but civilization got over it.

I’m sure civilization can manage yet again.

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    Hi, I'm Jenn, new grad student and old YA fantasy writer. I've long dreamed of being a novelist, and I bet you have too. I hope you find my blog helpful, inspiring, and maybe just a little bit fun. (But not too much fun. Writing is serious business, you know.)

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