The Future of Publishing?

For several years now we've heard how the internet has stirred up the music industry.  First Napster made downloading mainstream (albeit illegal), while iTunes has since taken up the reins of this cherished and now legal (though no longer free) pastime.  The big music companies are struggling with plummeting CD sales, but music itself is thriving.  Certain websites now serve both the listeners and the artists by providing free downloads of select songs and giving the artists widespread exposure.  Radiohead has bypassed the major music labels altogether for their last two albums by making them available online for as much or as little as the buyer chooses to give (and selling out their live shows in return).  


What about the book industry?  The internet has made ebooks mainstream, yet the parallel with the music industry isn't synonymous.  Major publishing companies dominate the ebook market just as much as the print market.  An author can't publish his or her book in print by Print Company A and then publish it as an ebook by Internet Company B.  The same company publishes the book in both formats--and in any other format (e.g. audiobook) as well.


But an article in this weekend's Wall Street Journal suggests things might be changing, at least in that genre most intrigued by technological change:  science fiction.  Author Cory Doctorow is releasing his latest work With a Little Help, a collection of short stories, entirely online.

The book is what Mr. Doctorow calls an "experiment in publishing." You can buy a trade paperback—choosing from one of four covers—through Mr. Doctorow's own website (craphound.com), through the print-on-demand service lulu.com or through Amazon. You can purchase a handbound, limited-edition hardcover for $275. Or you can download it, free, as an e-book, leaving a donation of whatever you wish. For a price, presumably fairly high, Mr. Doctorow will even write a story to order, on your premise. What then? You could have a personalized copy, or (we guess) you could order 50 copies for your friends.

This unusual business model makes more sense when you understand the author's artistic vision. For Mr. Doctorow shares the master-belief of science fiction, which is that technology, not ideology, is the agent of change. And he is determined that the direction of that change should be toward devolution of power—away from publishing companies and every other centralized authority. 

Mr. Doctorow's novel "Little Brother" (2008) contradicted Orwell's thesis—that centralized state power would become beyond challenge—by showing a bunch of kids with computers and cellphones and video-links defeat the great organs of state. In "Makers" (2009), the great manufacturing corporations go down before micro-businesses empowered by cheap, computerized machine tools.

Read the whole article here.  I don't know if this is good or bad for book lovers.  Cheaper books is good, but will the quality of the writing cheapen as well?  Still, I'm intrigued, and I for one might download With a Little Help.