Musings After Reading Clay Shirky On Thinking The Unthinkable
In the conversations and statements about the digital revolution in the book publishing industry you invariably hear people say to the effect “printed books aren’t going away.” Hmm. I will say it. Books are already gone. By that I mean they ceased being essential long ago. In his must-read post on the news business Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, Clay Shirky distinguishes between journalism and newspapers; their interests are intertwined but the two are about to be separated forever. Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.
Now consider authorship and books. Authors began a lengthy divorce with books when cheaper, faster means of publishing came along. Was that with pamphleteering? Xeroxing? Blogging? Hard to say. But thank goodness it wasn’t an accidental marriage. As Shirky points out, advertisers were the reason newspapers and journalists stayed together all this time. Authors and print have no such imposed bond. Call it the slow divorce.
Yesterday, a commenter pointed out that the act of ‘authoring’ itself needed to change in the digital age. Changes to the book or the book business can be swept aside. Our understanding of what it means to be an author will be the most profound change of all.
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