The first, Europe Between Oceans, by the renowned archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is a masterful work, combining history, archaeology, geography, anthropology, and a smorgasbord of other disciplines in explaining the transformation of human culture and society in Europe from prehistoric to the dawn of the modern, encompassing a ten thousand year period from 9,000 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. Cunliffe writes with erudition and clarity, never oversimplifying, but without the befuddling writing designed more to impressed than to illuminate that is so common in academic circles. The publisher, Yale University Press, is clearly at the top of its game here: the layout is splendid, with plenty of pleasing white space, yet full of helpful maps, photos, and charts. Europe Between Oceans covers much familiar ground, but drawing from the latest research in a multitude of disciplines it provides strikingly new insights.

The second is Lapham’s Quarterly, a literary journal edited and published by former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham. I wasn’t enough in the cognoscenti, I’m sorry to say, to get on board for the first issue, nevertheless I’d learned of the journal’s existence by the second issue, had subscribed by the third, and purchased a gift subscription for my parents by the fourth. Published quarterly, each issue covers a theme—thus far War, Money, Nature, Learning, Eros, and the current issue, Crimes and Punishments. Lapham mixes and mashes genres and primary sources in his investigation of each theme, from ancient to modern, employing excerpts of stories, essays, poetry, art, charts, and photography. Imagine Herodotus and Lazarillo de Tormes slapping high-fives to Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler because they made it into the latest issue. Reading Lapham’s is like being an observer to the musings of an accomplished collector gripped by bibliomancy during an extended weekend visit to his abode.

Both of these works, at the apex of modern publishing, might cause one to wonder how they could possibly be improved upon in electronic form. Surely they prove the point that e-books could never fully replace print. And yet, and yet…

Jumping just a bit into the future, let’s grab our podkinfliptop, with its color touch screen and multimedia capabilities, and run. Placing the cursor next to an unfamiliar term in Cunliffe’s book, like Bosphorus, brings up its definition. Clicking on the place-name of Tyre deploys Google Earth. Maps of migrations or empires, instead of static, depict the spread and flow over time. Instead of a single picture depicting the ancient city of Miletos, or a bronze warrior god from the 12th century, a gallery of photos is embedded in the e-text. Links lead to further scholarship or modules about topics of particular interest to the reader. Cunliffe’s tome is a big book, nearly too hefty to curl up in bed with comfortably for a nice reading session, but in its e-format it poses no problem on the podkinfliptop, which you read while touring the Aegean region with your family. At the ruins of the Byzantine fortress in Anadolu Kavagi, you take a striking photo and instantly upload the photo to the book’s gallery.

With Lapham’s, the electronic version might explore the theme over the course of a few months with a daily or weekly segment, loaded automatically onto the device, instead of a quarterly publication. Links abound between and among volumes; users add links to other content in order to further illuminate the theme, sharing the links with other users. The podkinfliptop version includes old newsreels, film segments, Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” or Johnny Cash at Folsom, a poem read by its author.

All of these capabilities exist today, in one form or another. A central question is, of course, who pays for all of this? I’m not optimistic that many publishers can, with a positive ROI, create both a beautifully laid out print version and a link- and multimedia-rich electronic version, but nor is it yet clear that many electronic-only publications are financially viable. As I point out in my recent article, larger publishers like Cengage or Pearson certainly have the resources to create resource-rich electronic publications for higher education, and a number of non-profit initiatives, like Connexions or Yale Books Unbound, are underway. But while readers may not balk at forking over $35 for the beautiful hardcover Europe Between the Oceans, customers seem to expect a lower price for electronic versions. Perhaps instead of selling 20,000 copies at $30.00 each of the hardcover, and dealing with returns, YUP could sell 250,000 copies at $10.00 of the e-version. Lapham’s could get a larger number of subscribers at a lower price, or offer it free under a government grant, or corporate or foundation sponsorship. The “publisher” provides the platform and content, encouraging the community to contribute additional links and resources, building on the “book.” I have to remain optimistic that this type of publishing can survive and prosper in the digital age. The University of Michigan Press seems to be betting on it.

What also stuck me, besides the exhaust, while wondering at that car in the intersection, was that the iPod Touch in my pocket had at least thirty books on it, even though I’d had it for about a month. Say what you want about e-books, it’s not the same as paper, right, but try carrying 100 books in your pocket, or in your car, let alone the 1.5 million that Google is already providing for mobile devices.

I enjoy learning about technology, and take a keen interest in how it affects learning, networks, and society. Still, I’m not really much of a gadget guy, that is, I don’t feel I have to go buy every gadget that comes along. No video game consoles in my house, an ancient yet hardy stereo, no cable TV. My DJing rig is laughable. Traveling around South America, to use one example, tends to wean one from over-consumerist tendencies, not to mention thinking seriously about the condition of the planet and some of its possible futures.

So it’s been with both a sense of wonder and a bit of trepidation, perhaps, that I’ve been able to start playing around with both the iPod Touch and Amazon’s new Kindle 2. I remember reading about a study that tracked over time people’s attitudes about what they thought were necessities, versus what they considered luxuries. Things like cell-phones, iPods, and flat screens keep getting added to the list of necessities, but nothing ever comes off.

The iPhone and Touch portend much more the future than the Kindle. While the Kindle works great as a reading device, accomplishing that feat with panache, I don’t think that enough people really want a reading device, and a separate talking device, and a writing device, and so on. Do I want to carry around all that stuff with me, or take four or five devices on a trip? The Kindle will indubitably evolve more toward the direction of the iPhone than the reverse. Doubtlessly Apple, Amazon, Sony et al. have in mind to create a device slightly bigger than the iPod Touch that combines facets of the cell phone, iPod, Kindle, Flip camera, and laptop. Let’s call it a Podkinfliptop. There is, of course, more than a little speculation already that Apple is on the verge of such a release. Its educational potential, in particular, are enormous. With thirty million iPhone/iPod Touches in use already, and the huge success of the App store, Apple seems natural to expand its dominance with a netbook type device, but many others will follow.

But, of course, TBR already does have a sale outside the Times itself, both as a separate subscription product and as a stand-alone purchase available in many, if not most, bookstores.

Distributing TBR inside the Sunday Times is “inefficient” in some ways because most purchasers of the Sunday Times don’t crack every section. So they’re printing (and distributing, although bundled with the paper, distribution costs are relatively low) many copies that don’t get read and that advertisers wouldn’t want to pay for. The dedicated subs and bookstore sales, on the other hand, are to an audience that is focused on the TBR content.

I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on monochrome screens some ten to fifteen years ago; even the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal started printing color pages about then. E-Ink displays are kind of like dancing bears — it’s not great dancing, but it’s remarkable that it dances at all. Amazon’s Kindle is an interesting exception, because it’s not really about reading. It has several features which distinguish it:

• An always-on no-subscription-fee Sprint EVDO connection. This means that it’s always connected (or at least tries to be that way), and that connection is part of the sale price, not something extra to sign up for. No WiFi hotspots to hunt for, pay for, and sign on to. How much is Amazon paying for this? I’m told that access to Sprint’s EVDO network for unlimited data transfers is on the order of $50/month — surely Amazon has negotiated a deal here…
• But still — how do they pay for that EVDO? Perhaps with the fact that the Kindle serves as an always-connected consumer-carried sell-me-something terminal for Amazon. Think of this: the consumer carries around with them a sales terminal which only connects to your store, and makes buying something very very easy. What’s more, it’s big enough that it preempts any other retailer’s similar store-in-your-pocket. They sell one big flat-screen TV and they’ve recovered the cost of the Kindle. Do they give a cut to the EVDO provider?
• Amazon has moved agressively into the book market, both with paper books and then with ebooks, buying both Mobipocket and Audible.com, the big seller in the spoken book market. And any of these can be purchased from the Kindle (and then “read” on the Kindle). Book purchases are not an important factor for Amazon here, but the fact that it’s a book reader is. This gives the consumer an excuse to carry it around, a critical factor for success as a impulse-purchase terminal.
• The Kindle has an “experimental” web browser, email support, a keyboard so that you can type into it. In fact, it’s sort of like a butterflied laptop with a bad screen — looks a lot like those old Alan Kay DynaBook mock-ups. So Amazon is pushing into the “Internet tablet” space; this isn’t really just an ebook reader. The apps are not great, and the keyboard is pretty stiff, but at least they are there.

In short, I think the Kindle may have a future, despite its technical shortcomings, because it directly supports Amazon’s very agressive selling (books and otherwise) business plan. I expect the Kindle to evolve as technology does, perhaps a bright color OLED screen, possibly with a touch surface, coming eventually. This seems to be an example of a perceptive and forward-looking business strategy, perhaps somewhat hampered by relative inexperience in consumer product design.

Note the similarities to the iPhone: always on, point-of-sale terminal for iTunes music and movies, agressive moves into the music and movies businesses, Internet tablet apps. Different design points, to be sure; Apple had to go with bright color to sell movies, and “it’s a phone” is the excuse for the consumer to carry it. I wonder if the bright color screen, plus the woeful state of current battery technology, dictated a pocket-sized phone rather than a larger tablet — would a big screen wear out a small battery too quickly? MacBook Air and iPhone 3G reviews suggest as much. Or was the “phone” necessary as the excuse for the consumer to carry it?

The competition isn’t exactly head-to-head here; one can’t buy soap or basketballs from Apple (yet). However, as a point-of-sale terminal, the iPhone has a number of differences from the Kindle, most of which seem to be advantages:

• Both products have high-dot-pitch screens (163 dpi for the iPhone, 167 dpi for the Kindle), which gives a crisp sharp detail to the edges of text. However, the Kindle screen is limited to 8 (4?) shades of gray, and relatively slow to update (to save on battery life), while the iPhone appears to be 32-bit color, and updates quickly enough to play movies and games. In addition, the iPhone screen includes a backlight, so it can be read in the dark without additional lighting. Perhaps most importantly for a retail device, the iPhone can display mouthwatering full-color alpha-blended photos of products for sale, while the Kindle has to settle for that 2- or 3-bit grayscale. The iPhone’s screen is a fair bit smaller, 320×480 (3.5 inch diagonal) versus 600×800 (6 inch diagonal) for the Kindle.
• The “excuse” of buying a phone, rather than buying a dedicated ebook reader, is much more palatable for many many people. As I explained elsewhere, a dedicated ebook reader competes with much cheaper and more durable book technology, while buying a cell phone has become a standard practice for many people, and is subsidized by the phone companies. What’s more, Apple has reversed the income flow for connectivity that Amazon must be paying; the consumer pays Apple (indirectly through the phone company) for connectivity, rather than the other way around! Beautifully done, Apple.
• The iPhone fits in a pocket; for most pockets, the Kindle doesn’t.
• The iPhone is designed as a communication device; the Kindle isn’t. This seems to me to be a huge advantage for the iPhone; human beings are natural communicators, and they flock to anything that gives them cheaper/better/different ways of talking with each other.
• A consumer can “watch TV” on the iPhone (which should speak for itself).
• The iTunes App Store opens up the iPhone to other uses, and to other retailers. Fictionwise has already released an app to sell books in eReader format from their bookstore. Stanza connects a reader to a huge free backlist of out-of-copyright (or open source) books, stories, and articles. A variety of free applications connect readers to news stories and RSS feeds, and the full-color standards-compliant Web browser is there for other sites. You can even shop Amazon from your iPhone. Where’s the Kindle equivalent of this?
• What’s more, the App Store creates an incentive for developers to imagine and then create new uses for the iPhone. This makes it more useful to consumers, thereby increasing sales. Nice market penetration strategy. Apple keeps 30% of the sales price for their efforts, and sends the other 70% off to the developer.
• The iPhone handles HTML, PDF, Word, and Powerpoint formats. The Kindle supports HTML, PDF, and Word through its mail-us-your-document conversion service, which installs the document in Amazon’s proprietary AZF format, but this is a problem — corporate clients would like to be able to convert their reports and presentations in-house, or better yet not convert at all. The iPhone now supports that mode of operation. Neither device has a good strategy for managing collections of documents or syncing documents.
• The Kindle has a hardware keyboard; the iPhone doesn’t. This seems an advantage for the Kindle.
• The Kindle supports an SD memory card; the iPhone doesn’t. The iPhone has a camera (which supports communication); the Kindle doesn’t.

(Looking at these differences, I’m very tempted to assign Myers-Briggs personality profiles to each device. But I’ll leave that up to our readers; what do you think the personality of each is? :-).

Overall, I’d say that the iPhone 2.0 firmware release, and the iTunes App Store, has raised the bar a good deal in this competition for the pocket of the consumer. I expect to see a competitive release from Amazon in the near future, but I wonder how they’ll compensate for the shortcomings of the E-Ink screen?

But the iPhone might be kind of different. Buying a book to read on the iPhone isn’t about buying the iPhone. The reader already has the iPhone, and they bought it for a different purpose. So paying $5 for a book to read on the iPhone would be much more reasonable to the consumer. Sure, you’ve got all the same fragility concerns, but now it’s about your phone, not your ebook reader. The direct competition of the $300 reader with the $5 paperback isn’t there; it’s more of an oblique competition.

I dug out this article by Anna Louise Genoese to see if a $5 book on the iPhone could compete. And it turns out to be an interesting price point.

Of that $5, Apple will keep $1.50, and give $3.50 to the “publisher”. Compare that with a paperback: For a typical $6.99 paperback, the publisher might get about 60% of the cover price for the book from “direct outlets” (Barnes & Noble, Borders), or about $4.19, but only 40% from “indirect outlets” (airports, gift stands at hotels, grocery stores, Walmart), say $2.80. Actually a little bit less for the direct, because of something called “coop” (for co-operational advertising), say $4.15. And the indirect is the lion’s share, say 2/3. So the revenue to the publisher for that $6.99 book might average $3.25 per copy, or less. Before returns.

The cost structure is a bit different, too. In a typical print-book mass-market paperback deal, a starting author might get royalties of 8-10% of the cover price (perhaps a bit more if the editor misjudges the advance, and the book doesn’t sell well). Suppose the author got 10% of the $5, or $.50, from the $3.50 that Apple will send to the publisher. That would leave $3.00 per book, to handle editing, art, promotion, “printing” (conversion to an iPhone format), etc. With a paperback, the publisher might have to spend $.40 – $.60 per book for printing, paper, binding, and associated costs. With an iPhone book, that cost might shrink to $0.05. So in the paperback case, the publisher would have $3.25 – $0.70 royalty – $0.50 PPB (printing, paper, binding) – $0.40 art, promotion, etc. for a not-so-grand total of $1.65, and in the iPhone case the publisher would have $3.50 – $0.50 royalty – $0.05 PPB – $0.40 = $2.55 from a $5 book.

So by selling books as $5 iPhone books instead of $7 paperbacks, the publisher makes $0.90 per book. And, of course, if the publisher charged $6.99 for the iPhone book, the numbers would be $4.89 received from Apple – $0.70 royalty – $0.05 PPB – $0.40 art, promotion, etc = $3.74, or a profit of $2.09 over the paper book.

But now suppose the author decides to self-publish the book at $5.00 on the iPhone App Store. Suddenly that $3.50 is going directly to the author, who we’ll assume has spent some money on a book-”printing” program that takes their (proofread, edited) manuscript and turns it into an iPhone app. Suppose this still translates into a $0.05 “PPB” cost for the author (x 8000 copies sold would be something like $400 to cover the cost of the program). Suppose, too, that the author has much higher costs for the equivalent cover art, promotion, etc., say 5X higher, for a cost of $2.00 instead of the publisher’s $0.40. The author still makes $1.45 per book, instead of $0.70. More than a two-fold increase in profits from self-publishing.

The iPhone App Store might be very, very interesting…

No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional supply chain along with much of its cost and infrastructure. Publishers of the future will function much as agents do today, depending upon free lance editors and publicists, and serving their authors as business managers.

Research materials, technical data and the contents of dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, manuals, journals and so on, which are often obsolete upon publication need no longer be printed and bound but transmitted on demand to users screens either for a fee per use, by subscription, or free. This process is already far advanced.

But for books that embody the ancient and ongoing dialog that constitutes our civilization and without which we would not know who we are or where we came from or where we may be going, the format of printed and bound sheets is optimal and irreplaceable. I am not a Luddite. I have been responsible for major and disruptive innovations in our industry beginning with the introduction of trade paperbacks fifty years ago. My Readers Catalog in the mid eighties anticipated on line bookselling and I saw the revolutionary implications of digitization soon thereafter. But the market for hand held readers will, in my opinion, be marginal, serving mostly recreational readers and by no means all of them. The inference that because content can now be transmitted electronically books will necessarily be read on electronic screens overlooks such factors as cost,convenience, reliability and human nature as well as the peculiar nature of books. My philosophical friends used to say “for example is not a proof,” but the failure of such devices so far to find a compelling market may suggest more than that the market for them is still unripe because publishers have not released their full digital catalogs. Had the market for e-readers responded as the market for the iPod has, publishers, for all their notorious caution, would by now have responded accordingly.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver visits the airborne island of Laputa, inhabited by so called projectors – what we today would call inventors. The projectors were growing quantities of cucumbers on the plausible but incorrect assumption that because cucumbers absorb heat and energy from the sun they can replace traditional sources of heat and light: biofuels 300 years avant la lettre. Gulliver also wonders why Laputan coats fit so badly until he visits a tailor and finds himself being fitted by quadrant and compass.

The new kindle from Amazon, like its several failed predecessors are Laputan biofuel technology and tailoring. Take for example Kindle’s price of $400: the first book downloaded will cost the reader $410, assuming ten dollars per download. The first twenty books purchased will cost $30 each and the first forty, say a year’s supply, will cost $20 each, by which time the device will probably have failed, been lost, or replaced by a newer, perhaps cheaper model. But if the next version sells for about$160 the price of the new Sony model, amortization will remain an issue. Or consider function. The designers of handheld readers aim to approximate as nearly as possible the characteristics of a physical book -including I am told pages that actually feel like paper and in the case of the new Sony device a leather-like cover. But why bother when the physical book already embodies these characteristic to perfection?

The practical solution to the presentation of digital content is not a handheld reader posing as as a book but an actual library quality paperback that has been printed, bound and trimmed automatically, at low cost in a matter of minutes at point of delivery by a machine like an ATM designed for that purpose. In the interest of full disclosure and not as a solicitation, test versions of this machine sponsored by On Demand Books of which I am a founder, are currently making books in several locations in the US and abroad. A commercial version will be ready later this year.

I’m pretty sure my demos sold three Kindles this weekend. I am more convinced than ever that the overall value proposition here — easy connectivity and the fast and direct acquisition of many of the books it would occur to people to want — will create success despite the real flaws in the product design.

I made the leap long ago to reading books on a hand-held device, currently a Palm Pilot. The always-with-me aspect combined with the back-lit screen for reading in bed in a dark room created book-reading opportunities no paper book could fill. And I learned to like the small page and short line width; I have come to notice when reading something forces my eyes to move and to have to work to find the beginning of each new line on the left. Doesn’t happen on the Palm. Or the Kindle.

For straight narrative reading, there are two serious disadvantages to the Palm, both solved by the Kindle. One is the purchasing and loading experience, which for the Palm is time-consuming and often frustrating. You shop either at Powells.com, which isn’t bad, or EReader.com, which is atrocious. Then you download to your computer, open the file, and load it to your Palm by hot-synching it. Failures can occur at every step. The other issue is the battery life. I can only read the Palm for a couple of hours before it starts needing juice. And I have other things I need the Palm to be functional for. So it isn’t a good tool to provide airplane reading for a trans-Atlantic flight.

The Kindle gadget itself is actually pretty seriously flawed. You have to get used to holding it while you read in a way that avoids inadvertent page advances. The “cursor” and selection wheel is limiting and, consequently navigation is over-involved. If using the iPod and iTunes defines elegant, using the Kindle and Amazon through it defines clunky. And yet…

Once you get used to keeping your fingers off the page-turning bars, reading on it is just fine. I hate right-justified lines, which it’s got (and why no way to choose out of it?), but the page width and depth are very paperback book-like. I’m fine with the default type size, but changing it to a larger (or smaller) one is two clicks. It’s lighter to hold than a book and advancing through pages is no harder or more distracting than with a paper book. Halftones and line drawings are okay — not great. I have a feeling, as I’m reading it, that I’m missing a lot of visual elements in the Stephen Colbert book. Like maybe they just left them out of the Kindle version. But I don’t read that many books that have visual elements.

It is solving my two prior ebook complaints: ease of title acquisition and battery life. And it is adding something fabulous: Amazon offers quick-loading samples of every book that are free. What you get in the sample, which you have about ten seconds after you click for it, seems to be all the front matter and a chapter or two. In an otherwise busy week, I’ve downloaded about ten samples, bought two books (and read big chunks of both of them) I’ve only had the device for ten days, but it looks to me like I will actively be reading two different books on devices from now on: one on my Kindle and one on my Palm. Which I’m reading at any time will be a function of circumstances and, of course, the urgency of reading the next chunk of one book or the other. The Palm is in my pocket all the time; the Kindle will travel in my laptop case and be with me at home, at the office, and in my hotel room and in transit when I’m travelling.

When I show people the device, they’re intrigued. When I show them the reading experience, they’re satisfied and accepting. But when I show them the buying procedures, they’re entranced. Amazon’s core competence ain’t devices, but they sure know how to maximize the shopping experience.

As you’ve read elsewhere, the Kindle takes you quickly and directly to Amazon, where you shop selections (bestsellers or new and noteworthy) or search the site in the normal way. Then you get the full Amazon data set, including those reviews they have. And you are offered an opportunity to buy or download the sample with a click.

I didn’t know the price of either of the two books I have bought when I bought them, so quick and seductive is the purchase button. And, of course, I was “sold” because I had, in both cases, read the sample. But I was pleasantly surprised. Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth”, for which the new paperback costs $11.99 at Amazon, and the cheapest used copy is $11.05, was $6.39 for my Kindle edition. And Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America (And So Can You)”, a current hardcover bestseller for which the publisher’s list is $26.99, the new book is $16.19 at Amazon and the cheapest used copy is $12.48, was $9.99 for my Kindle edition. Based on this very limited sample, savings (over Amazon prices) are $2-5 per book. If that holds up, it would take 100 or so books to repay the $399 (current) cost of the device (assuming one didn’t plan to re-sell the print editions after reading them.)

I have seen Jeff Bezos quoted to the effect that ebooks should be cheaper because you can’t pass them around like printed books. On that basis, the price comparison above might not be accurate. But one of the people I showed the Kindle to, who travels a lot and reads lots of books and who does not re-sell her printed editions, did the arithmetic for herself about the same way I did above.

And the Kindle does more than deliver you cheaper books; it also, in a way most people wouldn’t use a lot but which can certainly be helpful from time to time, delivers the Internet.

The dynamic the book business needs to wrap its collective brain around is that the more straight text narrative books you read, the more useful Kindle is and, on balance, the less it costs. And once you have a Kindle, it will take some real reason to make you buy a book of that kind another way. This is fraught with implications, which will be the topic of another post.

I want to first talk about a surprisingly little-known phenomenon in Eastern Europe, that I observed in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Empire.

Between 1990 and 1994, I worked a lot with scholarly publishers across Eastern Europe, including some seminars organized by Peter Kaufman, from whom you’ll hear later. My deepest experience was in Czechoslovakia, before it split.

The Soviet scholarly publishing model was to have every university publishing its own stuff–introductory biology coursebooks, collections of essays, lecture notes, monographs, research–at the professor’s behest. There was heavy subvention from the universities, which were of course subvened by the state. There was no economic feedback system, because there were no cost recovery systems beyond a token fee of a quarter or so per “scripta,” as the class publications were called. Traditional hardbacks cost the equivalent of a pack of cheap Czech cigarettes.

Editorial selection scarcely mattered. Every year, a few works were designated as worthy of being put in hardback, usually in an attempt to give their universities a medium of exchange — trading books for books from the outside, non-Soviet world.

The overall system separated to the point of immeasurability, by massive bureaucracy, all publishing costs, and in fact discouraged cost containment systems based on merit or audience. Instead, decisions were [often] based on old-boy status. By having the right connections, an important professor could arrange to have 50,000 copies of his book on the aerodynamics of bat wings printed, in Czech; this was to his advantage, because his royalty was based on numbers printed, rather than numbers sold.

Other publishing houses published scholarly work in philosophy, science, metaphysics, etc.; they had somewhat more freedom of choice of what to publish, but their work was also heavily subsidized by the government, and even in smaller specialty houses, prices and print runs were at the whim of, ahem, important people.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were warehouses with hundreds of thousands of copies of the writings of Stalin which nobody would ever buy. And the warehouses also held about 49,800 copies of that bat wing book.

In the prerevolution days, a socially supported, exceedingly expensive publishing industry created very inexpensive books, and that deeply affected the Czech culture. New books came out once a week, and the bookstores were like flowers in a field — every square had bookstores, every tram stop had a cardtable selling books. When I first spent time in Prague, about nine months after the Velvet Revolution, I saw everyone — and I mean the butcher and the hardhat and the professors alike — reading on the trams, the metro, the streetcorners, and lining up to pay a few crowns for new titles — and not escapist trash, but history, philosophy, science, metaphysics, in Czech. This system of subvention created a highly literate, well-educated populace, who read ideas for fun, all the time.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet centralized economy, suddenly universities, whose subventions were being completely reconsidered by new governments, were telling their “presses” that they had to become self-sufficient in two years, and many were told they had to start giving money back to their universities. For most of the Czech university policymakers, their naive recipe for capitalism was a pinch of slogan-level ideas picked up from Dallas reruns and the Voice of America, a dash of Hayek, then spiced with understanding gleaned from dinnertable conversations over the years.

Their consequent policies had no consideration of the realities of publishing costs and cost recovery, no understanding of the infrastructure (like editorial selection, distribution, and warehousing, not to mention computers, databases, predictive knowledge of the market) required to have a viable publishing marketplace, no understanding of the place of scholarly publishing in the educational system, and no recognition that in a revolutionary economy, nobody would have spare money to make discretionary purchases.

Four years after the revolution, the prices for books had become ten to fifty times as expensive as they used to be. The publishers who were surviving were subvening their own translations of Derrida by publishing – literally – soft-core pornography.

Bookstores closed down everywhere. Publishers closed down everywhere. And people stopped reading every day. By 1995, nobody was reading metaphyics on the tram. A quarter of the university presses I knew of were closed, over half of the small scholarly publishers I’d known, well over half of the bookstores I knew of in Prague were closed, and the scholars I’d befriended were telling me that they couldn’t get anything published anymore — there were fewer outlets than ever.

Neither model was right–the absurd redundancies and inefficiencies of the Soviet system were far too costly, but its result was a marvelously high level of intellectual discourse. The follow-on naive-capitalist model was far too brutal and had consequences that they are still feeling–far fewer high-level publications in their own languages, far fewer high-quality scholarly publications in general (a significant problem in a small language group), and cultural costs that are hard to quantify but easy to identify as causing a sort of poverty in the intellectual culture.

What this has to do with the current revolutions may not be fully clear, since it’s about content scarcity, not content abundance. But the story is also about how a society can change its habits and patterns, and how quickly that can transform the culture. In those three or four years, among the unintended consequences was that quality content, and a society of ideas, was trumped by convenience, capital, and entertainment.

Lessing is quote as saying:

And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.

Nate Anderson responds with more sensitivity for evolving patterns of information creation, distribution, and consumption:

And yet, perhaps book lovers will need to accept that the “great tradition” of literary art is moving into a new medium. It’s not the first time. Print did the same thing to an oral culture, and recorded pop music has largely replaced poetry for most in the modern world. But television, films, and web sites can all offer powerful stories. And print, far from dying out, is being consumed in massive quantities online. The issue, as it has always been, is pointing readers and viewers to the sort of material worth their time and attention, material that tells true stories about the world or enlarges our sense of what it means to be human or offers real entertainment. What needs to be avoided is the content, online and off, that is little more than pabulum spoonfed to those who want fare just rich enough to keep them from boredom. …

Lessing tells an anecdote about a visit to a posh London school. She goes to the library. She is told, “You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.” If true, it does seem a sad story, but the answer simply cannot be a fetishization of books. We need instead to encourage the consumption (and thoughtful digestion) of artful fiction and nonfiction on whatever page or screen it appears.

Yep.  We need to get over the concept that the book offers a primality unmatched.