Sun, Apr 26, 2009 page9

• The power of the Internet

  Publishers beware — Amazon has spoken

  • By Robert McCrum / THE GUARDIAN
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  Recessions, like wars, accelerate history. Just as the credit crunch, which has annihilated the US automobile industry, will probably hasten the mass transition to the electric car, so the same downturn has whipped up a perfect storm for the information sector: declining advertising revenue and plummeting sales for the newspaper industry.

  As many, including myself, have complacently observed, books are crisis-proof. World War II, we like to say, proved to be the making of Penguin. In none of the subsequent postwar downturns did publishing suffer. And now ... the latest bookselling figures from the US and UK suggest that once again books are riding out the storm. Phew.

  But does this not perhaps smack too much of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss? The crisis in newspapers, especially in the US, must surely begin to sponsor anxious second thoughts. After all, books and newspapers are in the same business of delivering information. The May issue of Vanity Fair contains a fascinating profile of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the youthful publisher of the New York Times, and heir to the Sulzberger family’s historic ownership of a fine US institution.

  

  It’s a sobering piece. Ten years ago, Sulzberger and his newspaper appeared to be masters of the media universe, riding high. So confident was he of the future that he commissioned a state-of-the-art Renzo Piano office building for the Times that was to be the visible expression of its supremacy.

  And where is the New York Times now? Today, the paper is in debt to a Mexican tycoon, the company’s shares are classed as junk bonds and for the first time ever, sensible people are questioning the newspaper’s survival.

  A lot of this has to do with the slump in US newspaper advertising. But that’s not the whole story. Where the parable of the New York Times should give book publishing’s senior executives pause for thought is in the speed with which decline, in the shape of news-stand sales being obliterated by online browsing, has overtaken a once-confident institution and plunged it into crisis.

  The Internet revolution, which has brought low so many US newspapers, from Seattle to Chicago, must surely threaten conventional book publishing. Agreed: New books in copyright are very different animals from daily newspapers. Elsewhere, however, there are alarming parallels between newspapers and publishing. Both, essentially, have given away their all-important content for nothing: newspapers through online services, books through the mass digitization of the contents of the world’s greatest copyright libraries in the “Google initiative.” Both have found it difficult to think laterally, or even creatively, about the immense power mobilized by organizations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

  Even new titles are vulnerable to the Kindle and the e-book. You may say, as people often do, that you have never seen anyone reading an e-book on the tube or the bus. Fair enough. But in any big US city today, you will find hundreds of younger readers in bars and coffee shops happily immersed in their Kindle or its equivalent. No question: Books are facing their “iPod moment.”

  More alarming still, the Free Culture Movement and its silky advocates have begun to open up to scrutiny the holy grail of literary copyright, asserting a new legitimacy for the idea of “the public domain.” It is now feasible that within no time at all the copyright conventions by which publishers live and die will soon have the contemporary relevance of a papyrus.

  If you think I’m exaggerating the power of the Internet giants, consider the April 13 report of a sobering tale from Amazon and its attempt to make its lists more “family friendly.” Overnight, a bunch of attentive West Coast readers noticed that Amazon had de-listed a number of gay writers, making their work a new category of un-book.

  At the click of a mouse in Amazon HQ, it was no longer possible to buy works by EM Forster or Annie Proulx, among many others, including Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. An Amazon spokesperson said this was just a “glitch,” a weasel word with frightening implications. As well as hinting at a more sinister agenda, this episode also demonstrated the awesome power and irresponsibility of online bookselling. Book publishers sometimes claim, in Arthur Sulzberger’s fateful words, to be “platform agnostic.” But when the “platform” has the power to make or break, they should check their digital watches. It’s five minutes to midnight.
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