I\u2019ve been stealthily avoiding all of the talk about how the publishing industry is dying because, really, are we surprised?
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\nThe various blogs belonging to publishers, agents, and authors go on and on about the root cause of the death of publishing.\u00a0 Is it the ebook revolution?\u00a0 Is it the economy?\u00a0 Is it the alignment of exoplanets orbiting Polaris? A butterfly flaps its wings at Houghton Mifflin and\u2026<\/p>\n
I wonder if anyone has thought about how it\u2019s not really the death of publishing that we\u2019re witnessing, but the death of America\u2019s middle class.\u00a0 Having not followed the news or discussions, I have no idea if I\u2019m just repeating a tired old theory, but publishing has always thrived on the back of the middle class.\u00a0 Whether electronic or print, the industry relies on disposable incomes and free time.<\/p>\n
The publishing industry as we know it \u2013 the pile of books at the Barnes and Noble entrance that you have to climb over \u2013 pretty much saw a smooth birthing in the middle of the 18th century, when the luxury of middle class life emerged from the squalor of the Industrial Revolution across Europe.\u00a0 People were making more money, seeking personal refinement and escapist activities, and had the time and means to do so.\u00a0 So why not bury yourself in a good novel?<\/p>\n
You see a strong shift in publishing throughout the 18th century.\u00a0 From weird high-brow satire and philosophy to adventure trash like Robinson Crusoe<\/em>. By the 1750\u2019s, as the urban middle class emerged from their cocoons, the comic caper novel Tom Jones<\/em> hit the stands, and Voltaire pioneered the science fiction genre.\u00a0 Walpole put out the first gothic novel, soon to be a bodice-ripping movie in theaters near you.\u00a0 Goethe shifted towards Romanticism, and the path was cleared for Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Cooper, and the Big, Bad 19th Century\u2026 Which is where publishing runs to the end of its thread.<\/p>\n Publishing houses rose up in the mid 18th Century, trading off of the idle time and extra income of a moderately educated middle class and, by the time we got to Dickens 80 years later, they were already completely rotten to the core.\u00a0 Dickens is the first writer of note to be told that his work isn\u2019t suitable for our current catalog.\u00a0 So fuck off and die, Chuck.\u00a0 Dickens is also the first writer of note to self-publish his work, though the purpose is lost today on the self-publishing legion of hacks.\u00a0 He was doing it to prove a point and win over a publisher in a time when publishers actually did recognize the quality of the written word once you stepped on their necks and read it to them.<\/p>\n Some might suggest that the publishing houses never recovered.\u00a0 From the greats of the 19th Century into the weirdness of the 20th, where they desperately cast around for whatever was hip.\u00a0 Embracing the flashes in the pan instead of the work, because the fast buck is the best buck.\u00a0 An attitude driven, largely, by debt and the realization that the entire book industry is built on sand.\u00a0 Or maybe bones.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s okay because, in the 20th Century, the world was America.\u00a0 The greatest consumer market Human history has ever seen, where even the poor and homeless are well off in comparison to most nations.<\/p>\n So you get the entertainment bonanza.\u00a0 Stories about how your grandparents packed their lunches to go see impossibly cheap back to back movies in local theaters.\u00a0 Television yelled at us day and night.\u00a0 And publishing took off, embracing the generational shifts as time wheeled towards the 21st.<\/p>\n But now there\u2019s a darkness in America.\u00a0 At some point between Vietnam and today, we started to become heavily medicated, fearful, and overworked.\u00a0 The middle class shifted wildly and morphed into the credit card class, the working poor.\u00a0 They say that, today, we work more than a medieval serf.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s just because we have electricity.\u00a0 We\u2019re certainly popping pills like there\u2019s no tomorrow.\u00a0 Getting ourselves to the ultimate wage slave heaven where we can just painlessly live paycheck to paycheck while dulling our brains with television shows that are more about the commercial breaks than the story.\u00a0 We\u2019ve traded out the absolutism of a monarchy for the absolutism of corporations, telling us what to do and when to do it.\u00a0 Controlling every aspect of our lives \u2013 sports, entertainment, health, happiness.<\/p>\n This so-called \u201crecession\u201d of ours, which is only hurting the idiots, is simply a symptom of the larger death of the middle class.\u00a0 The not so controlled plummet into mass debt.<\/p>\n And when you have that sort of environment, who\u2019s going to read books?\u00a0 Why bother?\u00a0 The publishing industry has painted itself into a corner by embracing the idiot fads that can so easily be recreated on TV.\u00a0 Why read the series if it\u2019s being done better, and with plenty of tits and ass, on Showtime? Why put in the time and effort to mush through 300 pages when you can get a version of the story in two hours with your favorite actor and a few extraneous explosions thrown in to dazzle?<\/p>\n Publishing, having turned its back on art, authors, and talent since the 1880\u2019s, now pays the price for attempting to ride the cultural bandwagon of the season.\u00a0 And it pays the price for not moving forward since the 19th Century.\u00a0 That much is evident when a book is released as a $34 hardback.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 Keep doing that and books will start to show up online at all the pirate sites.\u00a0 In fact, that\u2019s already beginning.\u00a0 A year or two ago, it was pretty much just audiobooks being pirated.\u00a0 Now, I\u2019m seeing more and more ebooks showing up on the torrent circuit.\u00a0 HTML files and PDF\u2019s leaked by disgruntled interns or the authors themselves.\u00a0 Now, if a big name book is released by a big name author, you can easily steal it online.\u00a0 That\u2019s pretty much a new development in 2008, and it\u2019s starting to trickle down to not so big books and not so famous authors.\u00a0 By this time next year, everything will be available for torrenting.\u00a0 A quick and easy way to keep your ratio up!<\/p>\n You think publishing is suffering now\u2026 Just wait for when the pirates catch up.\u00a0 And more power to piracy, because high-priced hardbacks are just about on the level of deforestation of the Amazon in terms of excess and ill-planning.\u00a0 And while you may know some hardback collectors, there\u2019s no way the publishers are making real money off of them.\u00a0 They\u2019re borrowing money from the future paperback release.\u00a0 And as books fail and the old ways are called into question, then publishers begin to collapse.\u00a0 Again — no surprise.<\/p>\n And the books are failing.\u00a0 All because we\u2019re a bunch of Zoloft-addled misfits working 12 hours a day and too exhausted to change our underwear.\u00a0 Just collapse on the couch, cram fast food down our throats, and watch about six hours of Law and Order<\/em> in a row.\u00a0 Pass out covered in Popeye\u2019s chicken, wake up before the sun rises, hurry up and commute to our low-paying job for a pitiful paycheck that belongs to Chase Manhattan before you even have a chance to cash it.<\/p>\n The mere fact that the educated and literate people I know complain about having to make the time to read is all I need to hear to know that the 90% of the population that isn\u2019t educated and literate probably doesn\u2019t even comprehend what a book is.<\/p>\n Oh \u2013 what\u2019s the solution?\u00a0 There is none.\u00a0 Until we have another cultural shift like the Industrial Revolution, and decades pass while the dust settles and a revitalized middle class emerges with the leisure time and emotional wherewithal to idly row around the reservoir on a sunny day reading Jane Eyre<\/em>.\u00a0 That concept seems alien to you right now, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n That\u2019s the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been stealthily avoiding all of the talk about how the publishing industry is dying because, really, are we surprised?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[402,176,127],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-books","tag-publishing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}