Open Access News

I just saw a printed copy of the New York Times Magazine issue that contains Kevin Kelly's brilliant essay What Will Happen To Books? (It's called "Scan This Book!" in the online version.) Kevin did an amazing job of bringing the potential of the universal electronic library to life, and highlighting both the issues and the opportunities. So I was really disgusted to see the cover treatment of the article bearing the subtitle, "Reader, take heart! (Publisher, be very, very afraid.)"

This is yellow journalism, pandering to fear of the future. Publishers need to get with the opportunity, not be afraid of it! As I've argued previously, in essays like Piracy is Progressive Taxation, the role of "publishing" is rediscovered in each new medium after a period in which everyone argues that the playing field has been leveled once and for all.  I was writing about music and film being threatened by peer-to-peer networks, but the same argument applies to books:

The music and film industries like to suggest that file sharing networks will destroy their industries. Those who make this argument completely fail to understand the nature of publishing. Publishing is not a role that will be undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandated by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers cannot find one another without one or more middlemen who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market into more manageable pieces....

Those of us who watched the rise of the Web as a new medium for publishing have seen this ecology evolve within less than a decade. In the Web's early days, rhetoric claimed that we faced an age of disintermediation, that everyone could be his or her own publisher. But before long, individual web site owners were paying others to help them increase their visibility....

The means by which aggregation and selection are made may change with technology, but the need for aggregation and selection will not....For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.

In the five years since I wrote that essay, things are turning out much as I predicted....Let’s be clear: Kevin doesn’t make the arguments that publishers are dead -- I’m just complaining about the cover treatment of the article. In fact, Kevin gives a compelling description of the new kinds of curation that publishers will need to perform. There is a lot to learn in the new world, but the biggest fear that publishers should be thinking about is the fear that they will be displaced by new publishers who are better at mastering the rules of business than they are....