Thursday, January 29, 2009

Self-Publishing, -Destruction

The rise of the self-publishers is upon us already, apparently. It seems more sinister than it did when it was just a theoretical caveat to the future of publishing. I'm sure there is a positive way to construe this. In and of itself I guess there's nothing terrible in it--so far self-publishers aren't really in competition with traditional publishers. Even if they were, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. It would be a change--the good books would be harder to find with no pre-screening, and that would have to be dealt with somehow, maybe through a class of super-readers, as someone suggested, or maybe a resurgence of book review sections. As everyone keeps saying, music itself hasn't been ruined by the demise of the big labels, it may even be better, and that's what really matters here--the books, not the business. But I fear self-publishing is more pernicious than it seems, or at least its rise indicates some very disturbing book and reading trends. My worry is not for publishers, but for the books themselves.

A line in a Slate article about all this clarified some of my fear. "Books are the new blog," they say: everyone can have one, but most shouldn't. Maybe this is what worries me most about the rise self-publishers: what does it say about the people who use them? It seems to me that an appreciation for truely well crafted books is slipping lower than ever. The ease of printing one's own, the sense that this is a common and appropriate thing, both reflects and reinforces a very casual attitude, even a disrespect, for the medium. I really doubt that most of the people commissioning these books are real readers. They're like that lady on Real Housewives of Atlanta, perfectly convinced that she was a great singer and deserved a record deal, without having ever done the slightest study or even really listened to her own voice. You can't be so confident in your horrible prose if you're in the habit of reading actual books. Of course this doesn't apply to all who self-publish. I'm sure there are some genuinely unfairly neglected geniuses out there. But, as the Times article quotes one bookseller as saying, “'For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,'”

Like I mentioned in my last post, I worry about internet reading affecting book reading. And this trend towards seeing books as just a sort of physical blog, a medium of the people and open to all, confirms that worry in a slightly tangential way. Mabye it doesn't say anything directly about how or whether internet media-drenched people read books, but it does show a drift away from respect for book-reading and writing as a sort of institution. The very fact that self-publishing is on the rise just as publishers are selling fewer books and people are reading fewer of them confirms this. It reminds me of newspaper publishing and how it has declined. People cite, rightly I'm sure, the rise of the internet as a reason. With so many blogs and other sources online, why get an old-fashioned paper? Why rely on someone else to assemble the information and trivial entertainment stories you want, when you can assemble them for yourself online? But I don't think there has been anything like a direct transfer from newspaper reading to online reading. Something has been lost in the way that people look at the news. This is why papers can't be just as successful by transfering themselves to the internet. People want something different now. It seems that books are headed the same way. Perhaps everything will stabalize at some point far in the future when a generic media form will at last be reached, a sort of blog with a narrative, but not requiring too much sustained attention or loyalty, with options for shorter or longer reads. I don't look forward to it. I'm all for self-expression, and I think internet media are great within their own sphere (I'm not oblivious to the fact that I am, at present, BLOGGING), but these two individually commendable things seem to be seeping a little to far into something I want kept sacred. And I don't like it.

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