The Content Machine

Michael Bhaskar

Description

A ground-breaking study that demonstrates how publishing can survive and thrive in the digital age.

Publishing is in crisis. Publishing has always been in crisis, but today’s version, fuelled by the digital boom, has some frightening symptoms. Trade publishers see their mid-lists hollowed, academic customers face budgetary pressures from higher education spending cuts, and educational publishers encounter increased competition across their markets. But over the centuries, forced change has been the norm for publishers. Somehow, they continue to adapt.

This ground-breaking study, the first of its kind, outlines a theory of publishing that allows publishing houses to focus on their core competencies in difficult times while building a broader notion of what they are capable of. Tracing the history of publishing from the press works of fifteenth-century Germany to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, via Venice, Beijing, Paris and London, ‘The Content Machine’ offers a new understanding of media and literature, analysing their many connections to technology and history. In answer to those who insist that publishing has no future in a digital age, this book gives a rejuvenated identity to this ever-changing industry and demonstrates how it can survive and thrive in a period of unprecedented challenges.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Useful Middlemen; Chapter 1: The Problem of Publishing; Chapter 2: The Digital Context and Challenge; Chapter 3: How Content Works; Chapter 4: The System of Publishing; Chapter 5: Models; Chapter 6: Addressing Problems, Meeting Challenges; Conclusion: Inside the Content Machine; Bibliography; Index 

Sujets

• Communication studies
• Employabilité, métiers et formations

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857281227
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Content Machine
ANTHEM SCHOLARSHIP IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Anthem Scholarship in the Digital Age investigates the global impact of technology and computing on knowledge and society. Tracing transformations in communication, learning and research, the groundbreaking titles in this series demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the digital revolution across disciplines, cultures and languages.
Editorial Board Paul Arthur (series editor) – University of Western Sydney, Australia Willard McCarty (series editor) – King’s College London, UK Patrik Svensson (series editor) – Umeå University, Sweden Edward Ayers – University of Richmond, USA Katherine Hayles – Duke University, USA Marsha Kinder – University of Southern California, USA Mark Kornbluh – University of Kentucky, USA Lewis Lancaster – University of California, Berkeley, USA Tara McPherson – University of Southern California, USA Janet Murray – Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Peter Robinson – University of Saskatchewan, Canada Geoffrey Rockwell – University of Alberta, Canada Marie-Laure Ryan – University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Paul Turnbull – University of Queensland, Australia
ANTHEM PUBLISHING STUDIES
The Anthem Publishing Studies series publishes high-quality research, innovative guidebooks and trenchant trade titles exploring publishing and the book trade at large: the authors, editors, publishers, booksellers and librarians who together produce, disseminate and preserve the world’s knowledge and culture through books, periodicals and digital media. Publishing is changing as never before and this series aims to document and push forward this unique period in publishing history.
These works address general, professional, student and academic audiences through their relevance, rigour and readability, and serve as a critical interchange for all participants in the book world – creators and consumers alike. Anybody who cares about the future of books, publishing and media will benefit from this path-breaking series.
Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality of their writing, the diligence of their research and the high quality of their production.
Editorial Board Tej P. S. Sood (series editor) – Anthem Press, UK Adriaan van der Weel (series editor) – Leiden University, the Netherlands Miha Kova č – University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Angus Phillips – Oxford Brookes University, UK Claire Squires – Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication, University of Stirling, UK Ted Striphas – Indiana University, USA Zhuge Weidong – University of Oxford, UK
The Content Machine
Towards a Theory of Publishing from the Printing Press to the Digital Network
Michael Bhaskar
Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2013 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Michael Bhaskar 2013
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bhaskar, Michael. The content machine: towards a theory of publishing from the printing press to the digital network / by Michael Bhaskar. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85728-111-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Publishers and publishing. 2. Publishers and publishing–History. 3. Electronic publishing. 4. Frames (Information theory) I. Title. Z278.B48 2013 070.5–dc23 2013034708
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 111 1 (Pbk) ISBN-10: 0 85728 111 9 (Pbk)
This title is also available as an ebook.
CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction Useful Middlemen 1 Chapter 1 The Problem of Publishing 13 Chapter 2 The Digital Context and Challenge 41 Chapter 3 How Content Works 79 Chapter 4 The System of Publishing 103 Chapter 5 Models 137 Chapter 6 Addressing Problems, Meeting Challenges 167 Conclusion Inside the Content Machine 193 Bibliography 197 Index 213
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to everyone who read drafts and commented on them. In particular thanks go to Sharon Achinstein, Roy Bhaskar, Chris Bunn, Iain Millar, Angus Phillips, Padmini Ray Murray and William St Clair for their thoughtful and invaluable comments. Digital publishing is alive with conversation and the many chats, Twitter debates and, yes, the odd beery discussion at the Frankfurt Book Fair, have helped shape this book. Thanks to Stephen Brough and Andrew Franklin of Profile Books for letting me write this book – they along with my colleagues at Profile are what the spirit of publishing is all about. The staff of the British Library, which was essential to my research, proves what an irreplaceable institution it is. Tej Sood at Anthem has championed the book with style and judgement throughout, for which I am hugely grateful. Rob Reddick and everyone else at Anthem have handled the process with serious aplomb. Lastly, thanks above all to Danielle for everything.
The technology of the book publisher is so out of date, he hardly has a technology.
J. G. Ballard
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word ‘publishing’ means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says ‘publish’, and when you press it, it’s done.
Clay Shirky
Introduction
USEFUL MIDDLEMEN
What’s the difference between these words before and after they are published? Is publishing a tangible moment? Can you point to the instance when words pass from being unpublished to published? What is publishing anyway?
We’re not short of descriptions and opinions. For John Thompson, publishers are ‘merchants of culture’ (or as Ned Ward said of the eighteenth-century publishing magnate Jacob Tonson: ‘Chief Merchant to the Muses’); for Gary Stark, they are ‘entrepreneurs of ideology’. Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Row and one of a generation of great American publishers including Bennet Cerf and Jason Epstein, was more lyrical still: ‘I am a publisher – a hybrid creature: one part star gazer, one part gambler, one part businessman, one part midwife and three parts optimist.’
A common theme is the Janus-faced publisher, who has one eye on culture, the other on commerce. The writer and critic Raymond Mortimer argued publishing is ‘at once an art, a craft and a business’, echoing Émile Zola’s formulation of the visual artist as both poet and worker. Richard Nash sees publishing as ‘the business of making culture’, while the editor Diana Athill views publishing as
a complicated business which has to buy, sell and manufacture or cause to be manufactured. What it buys and sells is products of people’s imaginations, the materials for making books, and a variety of legal rights. What it manufactures is never the same from one item to the next. (Athill 2000, 6)
Hunter S. Thompson thought publishers a combination of business nous and ineptitude, people ‘notoriously slothful about numbers, unless they’re attached to dollar signs’. Many have been unkinder. The children’s writer Maurice Sendak was even more strident: ‘publishing is such an outrageously stupid profession. Or has become so […] nobody knows what they’re doing. I wonder if that’s always been true?’ The philosopher A. J. Ayer was caustic: ‘If I had been someone not very clever, I would have done an easier job like publishing. That’s the easiest job I can think of.’ So was Goethe, who saw publishers as ‘cohorts of the devil’. Suffice to say, publishing has long been open to interpretation.
Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the clearest commentator is Oscar Wilde, who said with unmistakable brevity, ‘A publisher is simply a useful middleman.’ 1

Hustlers and Humanists, or Why We Need a Theory of Publishing
Publishing isn’t like most industries. It busies itself with questions of intangible value and moral worth. Nor is it exactly like the arts or sciences, as it obsesses over balance sheets and profit margins. Publishing is weird. Books are amenable to an industrially scaled analysis: given sufficient resource allocation any number of copies can be made available to produce steadily increasing returns. Yet they are also exclusive cultural or experiential phenomena, like fine art or ballet, whose limitations of distribution are part of their symbolic and financial value propositions.
Publishing is the primal creative industry qua industry. 2 It was the reproductive potential of the printing press, the first technology to mass produce and widely distribute cultural and intellectual items, which threw up new modes of organisation around the workshop, the humanist printer and ‘typographical fixity’.