The above quotation, from a recent article by Andy Beckett on the seeming decline of sections of the publishing industry was interesting to me because of a question I was recently asked myself:
"How do you think bookshops/galleries/specialist shops will adapt to distribute books produced using just digital media",
asks a survey for the University of the West of England's AHRC research project 'what will be the canon for the artist's book in the 21st century?'. It was a question I found difficult to answer at the time, and still do. My attempts at answering it seemed to circle round something of the same attitude as in the first quote. The shops themselves would become more social centres than distribution points. I think that 'distribution' is the key problem. Like libraries, bookshops have to look beyond their original role as distributors. Distribution has been taken over by purely digital media, and by mail order. I do almost all my shopping except food shopping over the web. I almost never buy books on the street. (For two reasons: a- I work in a library, so um... ; b- they're almost invariably cheaper online.) The only exception is the occasional item from Fopp, who pick and choose interesting cheap things. Their sales strategy seems to be that of a cunningly packaged jumble sale, and it pretty much works. Returning to the point in hand,
distribution isn't the thread to pull at here, I think. That's a lost battle.
The future for libraries and bookshops alike lies more in the ways they create real social networks, communities of readers and other interest who can be served (how??) by these shops and institutions. People will want it both ways of course: they will want and expect bookshops and libraries to be fully stocked with all their old favourites even though the public doesn't give this model the support it used to. At the same time, the response from shops and libraries will gradually tend towards trying to encourage participatory engagement through just such social interaction. The two tropes aren't mutually exclusive, but they don't have completely compatible values either. There's always some sort of balancing act going on: some kind of management of engagement and institutional conservatism.
Before public libraries, there were subscription libraries, kept afloat by the charges made on members. Some, like the London Library, still exist and even flourish, partly because of how their patrons identify with the services offered. For the most part, the services offered are deeply traditional. Also, for the most part such libraries wouldn't be very impressive (The London Library is an exception). Whatever failings they do have, public libraries at least benefit from operating on a fairly large scale. Nevertheless, perhaps we, the public, will find ourselves investing in cultural centres as a matter of personal choice: where it might, 175 years ago, have meant subscribing to a circulating library, it could in the future mean subscribing to a space that supports literary, artistic and poetic events and, oh, by the way, sells the odd book, etc, either physically or over the LAN.
Subscription communities are huge today. Think of the web and any paid service you use. Flickr? World of Warcraft? EVE online, etc? Most of these have either no or only a tenuous physical presence. But I think a niche might exist for an institution that would add some sort of real-world physical, social value to these subscriptions by creating a place where they happen. In a sense, some of the surviving internet cafés do this, by playing host to gamers who could perfectly well play at home, but prefer the atmosphere (and perhaps the hardware) available at their favoured LAN/cybercafé. Is it possible to imagine a place that is attactive for some of the same reasons, but offers more than games? It's difficult. One problem is that these communities have global reach. Whilst the book art community might have a thriving website with 2000 active members, in a single town one would be lucky to find a dozen, let alone a dozen who'd subscribe to the local communities café (or whatever we're calling it).
The games industry is itself as pragmatic as book publishing ever was. Both book and games publishing are at a stage where the costs of distribution are falling, as less and less paper and plastic gets shunted around, and the end product is delivered digitally, or printed on-site. Development costs for games are huge, though. While editors aren't cheap, writing is. So there's a comparison there where writing is more competitive than games. I think it's probable, that as we enter our fourth decade of computer games, that it will become easier and easier to create user experiences that are interesting without needing to be intensively developed. A bit like the invention of moveable type, we'll start to see a greater diversity of materials because they're easier to produce. It would be interesting to trace in book history how new consumer markets for the increased takeup of books was developed, because I think we will see more and more branching away from games-proper into other realms. There are inklings of this already. There's a lot of Flash development that moves towards poetry. There are texts produced for consumption on mobile devices. How could this pan out into some sort of community interest that someone can set up a space for and make a living out of?
I still haven't answered the question. Perhaps this is because I'm seeking an affirmative answer, whereas the reality is that such communities will only ever cohere over the network, existing physically only in ad-hoc get-togethers. Maybe the future is publicly-funded and non-profit. Maybe it's libraries?
