“Is publishing doomed?” It seems like everyone and their grandmother can’t stop asking this question.
In 1993, when Peter James published what many believe to be the first ebook, he received enormous backlash. People accused him of killing publishing, and journalists across the US furiously wrote about his betrayal of the literary world. All he had done was load his thriller novel, Host, onto two floppy disks.
In 1998, the first ereaders appeared on the market, and in 2000, Stephen King released the first book solely offered in digital form. Fear grew among those who loved the tactile nature of books—those who pressed books up to their faces to smell, toted them proudly under their arms, and could not imagine a day in which turning the page could be accomplished by the push of a button.
However, the ebook was not the first piece of technology to jumpstart this worry; in fact, the preoccupation with the death of publishing is nothing new.
Business Adventures—a collection of 1960s New Yorker essays written by John Brooks and recently endorsed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the single best business book—touches upon the history of this publishing terror. One of its chapters, entitled “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox,” outlines the history of the Xerox Corporation and explains how their core piece of technology made them “a publishing firm as well as a copying-machine firm.”
By the 1950s, copiers had become an office staple. Yet, the copying machines available on the market were difficult to operate and only about 20 million copies were made annually. With the introduction of xerography in the early 1960s, the number of copies shot up to over 9 billion per year and up to 14 billion by 1966. This Xerox revolution stirred copy mania—or, as Brooks puts it, “a feeling that nothing [could] be of importance unless it [was] copied, or [was] a copy of itself.”
With this copy mania came fear from publishers and writers: as Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1966 for the American Scholar, “every reader can become both author and publisher.” Issues of copyright law quickly came into play. Educators began producing copies of journal essays and sections from books for their students, either without realizing the illegality of their actions or without concern (how would they get caught?). As Brooks noted, “All that the amateur publisher need[ed] was to access a Xerox machine and a small offset printer.”
Authors and publishers protested this revolution, claiming that the ease of copying was depriving them of their livelihoods. And although the House Judiciary Committee approved certain bills that established more stringent copyright laws, Xerox machines were already out on the market and people knew how to use them.
Brooks shows us that while technology may have been different in the 1960s, people’s anxieties haven’t changed very much. Worry over renegade photocopiers has been replaced with complex piracy problems and the growing debate about digital rights management.
Yet, almost 50 years since the invention of xerography, and more than 15 since ebooks became mainstream, people are still buying books. Even the dot-com boom and the subsequent digitization of books and media haven’t managed to kill traditional publishing. Amidst this climate in which anyone can be an author or publisher and the access to information has become greater than ever, the book market is alive and continuing to adapt to innovations in the industry.
This all goes to say that publishing has found dynamic ways to not only combat but also take advantage of the changing technological environment. Brooks’s essay shows that even though technology is always evolving, the people who use that technology are much the same. In the words of Bill Gates, “John Brooks’s work is really about human nature, which is why it has stood the test of time.”
{buybutton id=15213/}Read more classic tales from American business history in John Brooks’s Business Adventures.
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