Scary Times

I remember studying history in high school and thinking of the people living, say, right in the middle of a hundreds-of-years-long period of peace, or the people who lived right on the edge of one, not knowing their world was about to be upset by a volcano or a big war or a terrible depression. I wondered where my time would end up fitting in--turbulent but historical, or just one generation in a series of years so continually calm that they could be lumped together by the century. As it turns out, I think there will be plenty for the history books, both on a large scale and, should the history books care to record it, in the narrower arena of my chosen industry, publishing. It seems like every day there is a new Big Development, a new trend forming, a new disturbing figure or statistic. It is hard to tell where things will fall, what the long-term impact of all of this will be. The Recession's impact colliding with already-existing difficulties in the business has whipped up a lot of chaos. Some of it will die down--Harcourt can't freeze acquisitions forever--but some of it seems set to lead to permanent changes. I'd like to be optimistic, and there is some reason to be--this downturn is an added, immediate incentive for publishers to break out every practice and idea they have to get people reading. That kind of change could be really exciting to see. But the panic that goes along with all this might also lead to short-sighted, ultimately hurtful changes. I read article after article after article and vacillate on my outlook. The reading habit is eroding--this is ongoing. I think part of the job publishers have is to shore it up--by putting the best books out, obviously, but also by creating new ways for people to incorporate them into their lives, by presenting people with compelling reasons why they should read them, by working to start people reading and to help them keep at it once they do. Maybe they will focus on this even more now. Right now, though, my ever-present fear of the public's indifference is intensified by a fear of what publishers are doing. Are they going too far in courting celebrity authors, ignoring books of lasting quality that can be read for years and that will make those who read them want to read more? Are they pushing authors to self-publishing, and will this ultimately make things even harder for them? Are they shutting down innovation to say money in the here and now? I want to know where things will fall. I'm actually worried that changes other than lack of readership might spell disaster first, something I never considered before. I don't want to imagine a reading public having to get by without publishers, or with some stunted version of them--what they do to sift through projects and refine those they choose, to bring those to the public, can't be replaced. The thought of a thousand self-published voices vying for attention is unnerving (let's be honest, there are MANY more writers out there than ever need to be read). I don't know. I don't despair. I just wonder what some future chronicler will end up saying in his "2008: The Collapse" chapter.