Monthly Archives: December 2008

While we were out: a publishing news recap

Uh-oh. While if:book slept, the publishing industry was cast into a tumult from which it’s unlikely to soon recover. Having weathered an increasingly turbulent economic downturn, the industry’s already rickety business models look all the more enervated. The headlines are glum.
Thus far, magazines and newspapers have sustained most of the damage. The Christian Science Monitor announced in late October that it’s shuttering its print iteration; effective in April, the paper’s weekday editions will appear exclusively online. Glossy conglomerates like Time Inc., American Express and Condé Nast have cut hundreds of jobs and folded their lesser brands. (They’ve also canceled their holiday parties.) Even the venerable Times — whose web presence has been valiantly, if exhaustingly, experimental — reported significant decreases in both total and ad revenues for the month of October.
Meanwhile, Playgirl‘s final print issue hit newsstands on 18 November.
Book publishers, too, have suffered. Hoping to occlude further losses, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt opted to halt all acquisitions. Atlas & Co., a notable independent publisher of nonfiction, has postponed its spring ’09 lineup, and Doubleday is in the midst of layoffs. With a consortium of authors and publishers, Google signed a deal to digitize millions of copyrighted, out-of-print books. The publishers’ settlement? $125 million — a drop in the bucket for Google, whose traffic will benefit tremendously from the agreement. Which side got the better bargain?
Amidst such dire circumstances as these, advice is coming from all sides. Lee Abrams, the so-called “Chief Innovation Officer” of the flagging Tribune Co., advocates revolutionary vigilance, by which he means falling in line with the corporate structure. Yesterday, he admonished every Tribune employee in an email littered with solecisms. Its rhetoric is painfully hawkish:

Revolutions are about “we”. The leaders need to engage EVERYone. And EVERYone needs to engage the cause. You are either WITH the revolution or AGAINST it. You will either be embraced by the company and win or the company will beat you. No middle ground. If you are IN–cool–Bear down for battle. If you are OUT—Cool–Good luck with your future. Just figure out where you want to be… Middle ground wastes EVERONES time.

But there’s sounder and simpler counsel. As far as the printed page is concerned, Authors Guild board member James Gleick exhorted publishers in a Times op-ed piece yesterday:

Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered. Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

I don’t mean to be glib; it’s not as if a better business acumen could have prevented the hard truths of this recession, nor is it true that other media have somehow escaped unscathed. Furthermore, the straits of the aforementioned companies in no way suggest a pandemic of layoffs and failures — Hachette, after all, is giving its employees a bonus this year.
Publishers, though, have been notoriously intractable in seeing the threats to their livelihood, even as the music and movie industries have fallen on calamitous times. And yet a stumbling block may prove to be a stepping stone, as the saying goes. If, as predicted, the economy continues to falter, publishing will be forced to abandon its languishing strategies and innovate. Such innovations might well require an acknowledgment that there’s more to life than ink on paper. The long-term result, with any luck, will be more books, better books, and an overdue recognition of how broadly “book” can be defined.
The writing, it seems, is now on the wall — and that’s likely the only place it will appear in print.

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ADDENDUM: But wait! There’s more! Among others, Mediabistro.com reported today on what is being known as “Black Wednesday” in book publishing. A brief survey of the destruction? A Random House memo told of the company’s imminent restructuring, sparking fear of ineluctable layoffs; Simon & Schuster scrapped thirty-five employees; Penguin declared that no upper-echelon personnel would receive raises in 2009, and that it could not guarantee job security in that forthcoming annum; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt continued to scale back, faced with the resignation of its publisher and more firings. Black Wednesday, indeed.

American Social History Project brainstorming

(Thanks for your patience – the blog is back!)
On Friday November 21st, we met with the American Social History Project and several historians to discuss the possibilities for collaborative learning in history. Attendees included Josh Brown, Steve Brier, Pennee Bender, Ellen Noonan, Eric Beverley, Manan Ahmed, Nina Shen Rastogi, and Aaron Knoll.
There was a general consensus that academics tend to resist the idea of collaboration (for fear they won’t get credit, and thus might not achieve tenure) and they prefer not to reveal their work in progress, instead unveiling it only when it achieves publication. There is a popular idea in academia that a single all-knowing expert is more valuable than a team of colleagues who exchange ideas and edit one another’s work. In the sciences, research is exchanged more freely; in the humanities, it’s kept secret. A published literary or historical work is supposed to be seamless. Nina mentioned that occasionally there is a piece published like the recent Wired interview with Charlie Kaufman where edits are visible (one story that keeps popping up in magazines is Gordon Lish’s edits for Raymond Carver). Bob stated that he believes we are on the brink of a whole new sort of editor, one who is recognized for excellent work when the edits she has made are available to readers.
Academics tend to see their goal as becoming the top scholars in their fields. One problem with this is that it limits their digital imaginations. If one becomes transfixed on becoming the single (digital) source for information of a certain subject, or even several subjects, the most one can build is a database. A compilation of such data is not synthesized. In a history textbook, one can read a single person’s synthesis of data. In the Who Built America? CD-ROM, one could view original sources as well as that a single person’s synthesis, so that one could decide whether that synthesis was any good. The group agreed that they do not want to eliminate the single thread of narrative that holds the original sources together, but they want to figure out a way to use the technology available to its fullest extent.
Another problem that attendees agreed this project would face was appealing to different pedagogical styles. If instead of standing before a class and giving a lecture with a bottom line, the teacher were to give students video, audio, and text that were from original sources, and ask them to do their own synthesis, this would be a completely new way to teach. The textbook exists to aid a teacher in presenting her own synthesis of the content. Some teachers will inevitably resist a change in their teaching methods. Ellen suggested this project may change pedagogy for the better. However, there is value for classes at, say, a large community college, in having a single textbook with concrete bottom lines in every chapter, but these will probably not be the market for our project.
Bob said Voyager was especially interested in producing the American History Project for CD-ROM because it was not a textbook, it was a book for people who like history. The AHP has struggled with marketing itself as anything other than a supplement to textbooks, and worries about losing something by slicing the content into chapters to fit the textbook format. The new project would face these same challenges. On the other hand, the AHP has had success especially with AP classes, and it may be possible to market to a small community of teachers who are interested in nonlinear learning.
We spent much of the meeting parsing the meta-issues of taking on networked textbooks, and we feel strongly that there is something to be gained from shifting our focus from “objective” history to participatory history, a history you can watch, break down, and join. Comment sections, links to related pages, and audio/video materials would enhance the new history project and enable students to better understand the process of how history is written. But most importantly, we want scholars and students to learn history by doing history.