All that matters are authors and readers. Publishers will soon be irrelevant

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All that matters are authors and readers. Publishers will soon be irrelevant

11 Apr 2011

Both Cory Doctorow and James Bridle were proposing the motion that ‘publishers will soon be irrelevant’, but for entirely different reasons. Doctorow began by defining a publisher as “the institution that identifies that writer and that audience and then takes all the necessary steps to connect the two.” But because publishers can now no longer claim to be taking all those steps – they are operating merely as contractors and vast teams of freelance workers do all the real work. Doctorow concedes that self publishing is hard work, but that even without a publisher writers can be just as successfully ‘publicised’ in newspapers and by reviewers. The internet has brought writers closer to readers, and vice versa, and that relationship doesn’t include a publisher.

James Bridle argues not that publishers have become superfluous, nor that publishing houses have, in Doctorow’s words, become “hollowed out” – but that publishers must do more to preserve what they do. Publishers have got complacent, and if things don’t change now, they will fail – deservedly. Publishers need to reconnect publishing with the experience of reading, they need to “reclaim the high ground of reading itself.” Currently they are seen as “the enemies of books” – the corporate salesmen. Bridle imagines that the new insights into the reading process that e-books and new technologies will bring (because they make it possible for readers to “interact with the text while they’re reading it”), can inform and inspire the new direction that publishers should take.

Andrew Franklin, the publisher and MD of Profile Books, argued that publishers are still doing a huge amount of work – for the public and for the authors. “Authors are all too happy to leap into the open arms of the publisher”, especially after failed attempts to self publish. Publishers have to do a good job because that’s the only way they can make a living. Yes, you can publish for yourself, in the same way that you can self medicate, or operate on yourself – but it’s hard, painful, and not recommended. Publishers select from a “pile of dross”, and are doing the public a favour by selecting the best for them. The charge that publishers censor out different voices doesn’t stand up because their editorial teams always represent a wide range of different tastes. Only when an author sells well do they appreciate what a publisher is doing. Even if all writing were available on the internet, Franklin reminds us that "free is far far too much to pay for the overwhelming majority of self published books, and even for many of those that are published by a publisher.”

Agreeing with Franklin that publishers are still relevant was Richard Charkin, the Executive Director of Bloomsbury Publishing. He remembered working at Oxford University Press, when the prevailing view was that a good publisher was an invisible publisher. The publishers that are possibly still ‘invisible’ today - but absolutely vital to society – are academic publishers. The educational books that our lawyers and scientists have used to build up their knowledge are irreplaceable. It’s thanks to publishers that these resources even exist in the public arena.

Speakers for the motion

James Bridle

Creator of booktwo.org, Bridle has held a number of roles within the publishing industry, from publicity and marketing to editorial, and from online strategy to web application development
Cory Doctorow

Award-winning author, editor of Boing Boing, publisher, blogger, and activist

Chair

Michael Healy

Executive Director of The Book Rights Registry

Speakers against the motion

Richard Charkin

Executive Director of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and former CEO of Macmillan
Andrew Franklin

Publisher and Managing Director of Profile Books, one of the UK’s leading independent publishers.

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Event Partner

IQ² were media partners for this debate organised by The Publishing Point, a "community of publishing professionals excited by industry transformations and sharing ideas about the future."