I’ve been working in publishing long enough to know that anybody who tells you they know what the industry will look like on a ten or twenty year time scale is probably either deluded, or trying to sell you something. Quite probably both.
In fact predicting the future in publishing is actually quite paradoxical. The short term is in some ways quite predictable — because it takes long enough to publish a book that our planning horizons are typically 6-18 months into the future. The medium term, however, if we’re talking about 5-15 or 20 years, is quite radically hard to predict. Some of today’s trends in book publishing and academic publishing could have been foreseen in 2010, but only to a very limited degree. Many wildly over-predicted the importance of ebooks, few anticipated the huge growth (in book publishing as a whole) of audio. On the back-end, someone in 2010 predicting the advances in the quality and affordability of print on demand that we’ve seen since, would have seemed incredibly optimistic.
Looking more specifically at the academic sphere, the idea of Open Access was only just starting to take shape in 2010, and the idea that it would dominate many journals, and that a sizeable minority of books would routinely be funded to the tune of over $10,000, would have seemed far-fetched to many of us. Indeed, even in 2015, when we books commissioning editors were first beginning to be pushed to look for Open Access book projects, it seemed unrealistic to many of us that this would ever be more than a tiny minority of books. In practice, this trend seems to have plateaued for the moment, like ebooks finding a more or less sustainable proportion of publishing and then broadly sustaining that level.
The final element to this paradox, in my view at least, is that the long term view on publishing (longer than the medium term, but not quite so long as the long term “in which we are all dead”, to misquote Keynes) perhaps isn’t so very unpredictable.
The particular prompt I had to look at it in this way, was during a session I attended (remotely, alas) at Universiti Malaya a few weeks ago. I was on a panel consisting of publishers and seasoned professors, who had been providing feedback on book presentations. We ended with a Q&A session where, as you might expect, the questions were directed mostly at the publishers. The question in question was something along the lines of “Isn’t publishing inevitably a dying industry? There are too many books and nobody reads anymore?” This was one of those times when I was quite glad not to have been physically in the room, where nobody could see or hear me belly laugh at the shear slap-in-the-face of the question. There is nothing like being asked if your industry is totally moribund at 7 o’clock in the morning, before you’ve had any coffee.
I, of course, rejected every premise of the question. Not to be overly Polyanna-ish about this, but taking the view from 10,000 metres or so, there have never been more readers in the history of the world than there are today. This is a function both of an absolute rise in population, and a proportional rise in literacy almost everywhere. Even if on average many of those literate people read less than the average literate person a generation or two earlier, the shear weight of numbers compensates for this. Video may indeed be increasingly the dominant form of the internet for younger users (even if I find this hard to believe), but reading will remain an important means of accessing information efficiently. For that matter, the increasing popularity of subtitles for both scripted video content and short form vertical videos on Tik Tok and Facebook rather underlines the value of the written word to today’s median internet user, even if I’d have to concede this isn’t quite the same thing as reading a 50,000 word book.
So much for fewer people reading, are there too many books? To which the obvious rejoinder is — how many books is too many books? Provided books are being written properly (I’ll get to LLMs and their slop a little later) it seems pretty implausible that there are more books in total being written than there is time for people to read them. There will surely always be more people spending more time reading than they spend writing. Not least because almost all authors spend more time reading than writing. I’d go further, I suspect most authors, and particularly non-fiction (in its broadest sense) authors read more books than most non-authors. An increasing number of new books published is therefore a strong indicator of the health of book-reading as part of our culture, rather than a threat to it.
The obstacles to producing a book are fewer than they used to be. Basically anybody can publish anything they want using Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark or various other platforms, some of which produce print copies as well as ebooks if you want them. That means the role of publishers pivots somewhat, with curation, quality control, quality improvement and promotion becoming more important than production and distribution. We at Tithebarn Press, for instance, invest a lot of time in helping authors ensure their manuscripts are as readable as possible, while also making sure the research and argumentation of their books are robust. We also help our authors clear what is still for many the most challenging obstacle to writing a book — sustaining the effort to actually write the manuscript in the first place.
Changes in the economics of book production have meant that relatively smaller numbers of book sales can still be at least minimally profitable — most books won’t make much money, but fewer will actually lose money. That means it’s possible to sustain books with relatively specialised audiences, which seems to me to be overwhelmingly a positive thing. Some books will be read by fewer people than they might have been if they’d been published 20 or 30 years ago, but many books will be published that wouldn’t have seemed commercially viable in the 80s or 90s. Funnily enough the scale of the internet also means that a relatively few really big hits can be absolutely massive, and can become so without necessarily having the huge promotional resources that were invested in the big hits of previous eras.
The elephant in the room when it comes to forward projections is the aforementioned Large Language Models. These fall well outside my technical expertise, but most of us have been able to make a few observations about them after the last couple of years. The obvious threat they represent is the capacity to produce essentially infinite amounts of material for virtually no effort from the “writer”. More insidious is that their very nature is to produce something which looks and sounds plausible but which doesn’t necessarily have any basis in facts, evidence or logic. To some extent I suspect this is also why the threat such models present to mainstream publishing is limited. Publishers will need to be very clear about when they will and won’t use LLMs (this will doubtless be the subject of at least one update from us before too long), but should err on the side of not doing so. As consumers I think most of us want to read books (and articles, etc) that have been written by humans with something to say, and preferably edited by other humans who understand what they are reading and don’t just apply a set of relatively arbitrary rules.
So what does the future of publishing look like? One way or another books will very likely survive, perhaps with some new formats becoming dominant, but likely with print retaining its place as the medium of choice for most readers. The trend of increasing numbers of books aimed at smaller groups of readers (but with very occasional break out hits) is likely to continue. LLMs will probably produce lots of junk, but while publishers hold the floodgates shut and keep the distinctions clear, they’re unlikely to supplant real books written by real people to a significant extent. They may help remove some of the friction from the publishing process and they may also help people to find more specialised books they might not otherwise have discovered, but broadly any use that replaces the role of human judgment is likely to be viewed (justifiably) with suspicion.
As always really, the future is bright, scary, unpredictable and exciting. It will also be what we make of it. Why not commit to making it just a little bit (or maybe a lot) better by writing a book? Get in touch at proposals@tbarnpress.com.
