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    Gutenberg to Google
    Gutenberg to Google
    Gutenberg to Google
    Ebook159 pages3 hours

    Gutenberg to Google

    By Michael Levin

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    Gutenberg to Google explains the coming collapse of the traditional book publishing model and what it means for book lovers and society at large. It also explains the truth about publishers, bookstores, how books are chosen, why literary agents fail authors, what books will sell in the future and how they'll be sold, and the future of fiction writing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Levin
    Release dateMay 11, 2011
    ISBN9780983640615
    Gutenberg to Google
    Author

    Michael Levin

    Michael Levin has over 30 years of experience in the field of pharmaceutical scale-up, instrumentation and process optimization. He has edited a “Pharmaceutical Process Scale-Up” book, and has contributed chapters on “Tablet Press Instrumentation” and “Wet Granulation: End-Point Determination and Scale-Up” in the Encyclopedia of Pharmaceutical Technology. Michael holds a M.Sc. degree in History and Philosophy of Science from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ph.D. in BioMathematics (1980) from University of Washington in Seattle. His Post Doctorate studies were at University of Houston, Department of Mechanical Engineering. He participated in numerous wet and dry granulation and tableting projects in major pharmaceutical companies as a provider of process analytical instrumentation, conducted many seminars, performed numerous consulting services and wrote expert reports to clients in the pharmaceutical industry.

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    • 5/5
      Good to know the dark side of pblishing exposed, however the future isn't as bleak, with audiobooks like on scribing and extensions that help read other the words to you at faster speed and idea sharing platforms like ted-ed, idea sharing will continue, just in a different, more concise and engaging form.

    Book preview

    Gutenberg to Google - Michael Levin

    This fascinating exposé of the book publishing industry is must reading for authors, publishers and everyone else in the book business.

    — Dan Poynter, The Book Futurist and author of The Self-Publishing Manual.

    When it comes to publishing, authoring, and the world of books, I know no one as exquisitely full of The Wisdom than Michael Levin. For all would be authors, or those who are even thinking about it, read this book. It will save you a lifetime of pain, anguish and authorship depression. Or, as it was said, Don’t leave home without it!"

    --Michael E. Gerber, Author of the E-Myth (5 million copies sold)

    Gutenberg to Google

    By:

    Michael Levin

    Copyright 2011 BusinessGhost, Inc. All rights reserved.

    Smashwords Edition

    Publicity Contact: Michael Azzano, Cosmo PR

    415/596-1978

    michael@cosmo-pr.com

    WARNING LABEL

    This is a book about the future of the publishing industry, and it will be highly depressing to anyone who loves books, ideas, or independent thought, all of which are disappearing from society today. You’ll discover why books, unfortunately, are going the way of the vinyl LP and the videocassettes and DVDs you used to rent from Blockbuster.

    The book that is most likely to succeed, as the publishing industry fails, is a book that is actually a marketing tool for a business or professional practice. There’s some good news about novels, but let’s not go overboard with excitement and anticipation about the future of publishing. Indeed, this book explains why we are entering a post-literate era, in which books are no longer profitable for publishers or popular with readers. The reasons why will surprise you. But if you love books as much as I do, proceed at your own risk.

    Table of Contents

    Chapter 1 The Last Chapter?

    Chapter 2 The Colossal Failure of the Traditional Publishing Industry

    Chapter 3 Whatever Happened to Bookstores?

    Chapter 4 Literary Agents: Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You. (Actually, No, We Won’t.)

    Chapter 5 But I Still Want to Write a Book!

    Chapter 6 What Readers Really Want Today

    Chapter 7 The Business Book of the Future

    Chapter 8 Creating a Marketing Tool Cleverly Disguised As a Book

    Chapter 9 Marketing Your Book: Finding Your Tribe

    Chapter 10 What About Fiction?

    Chapter 11 The Last Word: A World Without Books

    About the Author

    Endnotes

    Chapter 1

    The Last Chapter?

    Here’s my greatest fear: that we are slipping into a cultural Dark Age, not unlike the one that Johannes Gutenberg effectively ended when he invented movable type. In the first Dark Age, books were practically nonexistent, the province of monks and monasteries, the educated elite. In the new darkness, books are irrelevant as knowledge and power are concentrated once again in the hands of society’s elite, and the rest of us have no clue about what’s going on.

    I love books and always have. To me there is absolute magic in the idea that one person can sit down at a desk anywhere on the planet or at any point in time and develop ideas that change the way the rest of us think. I once heard the novelist Erica Jong say that An author’s job is to rearrange the molecules in the reader’s brain. That’s the ultimate power of the book—to shape, or reshape, opinion, to add to society’s knowledge base, to entertain and educate.

    And if you’re anything like me, you understand when I say that I love the look and feel of books. My Russian lit professor at Amherst College, Stanley Rabinowitz, said that "You can judge a book by its cover." Meaning that a well-designed, artful cover indicated a useful, potentially brilliant book inside it. I love a well-bound book, right down to the stitching that holds the signatures or groups of pages together. The feel of the paper. The choice of font, sometimes described in a paragraph at the back of the book, on the assumption that the readers are just as interested in the design as was the book’s creator. I love the excitement of opening a book to the first page and seeing just what kind of journey on which I’m about to embark. Mystery? History? A little bit of both?

    To my mind, the first paragraph of a book is a contract between the author and the reader. The contract runs this way: The author’s responsibility, or part of the bargain, is to come up with a story we haven’t heard, a set of facts and interpretations we’ve never known, told in an interesting and entertaining manner. That’s the promise the author makes in the first paragraph. The reader’s end of the bargain is simply to read. If the contract in the first paragraph is strong enough, the reader will stick around, read, enjoy, and learn.

    Am I the only one who finds that a book, once read, has a heavier weight to it? An unfinished book is alive, and is easy to carry about. A book, once read, feels differently in the hands. It’s a dead weight, something unnecessary, something to put on one’s shelves, give to a friend, or donate to a library. A book is one of the few things that, once finished, one would never dream of throwing out. This suggests that there is something sacred about books.

    There always was. Most of the earliest books in Western culture are illuminated manuscripts, created a dozen or more centuries ago in windswept monasteries like the one at Lindisfarne, a small island off the coast of northern England. Those monks drew some of their designs with human hair dipped in liquid gold, designs too fine for the naked eye to see but visible for their ultimate audience—the eye of God.

    So the earliest book in Christian culture was the Book, the Bible, created in glorious color on carefully constructed paper intended to last thousands of years, to honor the King of Kings. And then mortal kings wanted in on the act; some of the most beautiful books in the Middle Ages record the doings of leaders, such as Jean de Berry’s Book of Hours, created in the early 15th century. In those times, priests or potentates controlled literature—who was allowed to read, and what they read. Books were never the province of the common man, for reasons of both fiat and finance. If you weren’t of gentle birth or a member of a religious order, you weren’t allowed to buy books. You couldn’t afford them, anyway.

    Yes, there were books in every culture written for the lay reader, but mostly these were epics that some wise hand had reduced to print. In the English tradition, Beowulf. And then Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And then Chaucer, which ultimately was a religious text, albeit a profane one--the story, or stories, of a group of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury Cathedral. God and kings never loomed far from the subject matter for the first few thousand years of books.

    And then Gutenberg changed everything in his time, just as Google has changed everything in ours. Prior to Gutenberg, every book had to be copied by hand, an expensive and laborious process that guaranteed that literacy would belong to the noble few. Stop and think what Gutenberg’s invention must have meant to the world. Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, thanks to his invention of movable type, books could be printed instead of hand-copied, thus driving down the cost of reproducing information and driving up the numbers of people with access to knowledge. In Gutenberg’s time, it took more decades for the printed word to spread its influence and enlightenment than it took our Internet revolution; you might say it took a century or two before Europe was fully wired and a broader class of people were reading books. But numbers grew, and more people were reading, and more people were writing. For a span of centuries, right down to our day, books reigned supreme as the most powerful, economical, and elegant manner of disseminating knowledge, of rearranging the molecules in readers’ brains. Knowledge was power, and the dissemination of knowledge meant the diffusion of power in society. Monarchies no longer reigned forever in Europe. Revolutions fomented. Commoners took control.¹

    It turns out that the intelligentsia had been right all along—if you keep literacy in the hands of a chosen few, and keep the rest of the population ignorant, you can control them more easily. It’s hard to constrain the masses when they can think for themselves and share ideas—witness the Facebook Revolution that swept North Africa and the Middle East from the beginning of 2011. And that’s why I fear for the death of books. Not just because I love them, and not just because I derive my living from their creation. In a broader sense, to paraphrase the great journalist Jimmy Breslin, dies the printing press, dies the city. We are moving, with reckless, headlong, breathtaking speed, into a post-literate age, where once again the world is ignorant, but this time it’s different. It’s out of choice.

    Let’s face it—95 percent of the population never bought books anyway. Or they might buy one a year, like the old Jimmy Durante song—I Read a Book! That book might have been a thriller, it might have been a horror novel, it might have been something about witches or goblins. But it was an honest-to-God book in their hands, an example of someone entertaining himself or herself in the theater of the mind. I used to know the owner of a chain of four independent bookstores in New England who said he had two types of customers. The first group was the commuters, who would stop by frequently whenever they finished their last book and buy whatever the owner recommended. They’d finish that book and then they’d come back and buy another book. The other group were the book-a-year people, about whom my friend said, When they finished reading it, at the hotel or on the beach somewhere, they’d look up and say, ‘I read a book!’

    Today, the book is giving way to the device, the smartphone, the iPad, the laptop, the Kindle. Yes, some people are still buying books. But for how much longer? And what does it mean when—not if but when—books recede as a cultural force?

    The debate has shifted. The focus used to be technological haves and have nots, expressed in the fear that those raised in low income backgrounds would lack access to technology and information that would belong solely to the middle class and the wealth. This is no longer a concern to the same degree--even the homeless have smartphones, which means they can do their Facebooking, or read Proust, for that matter, just as easily as a sophomore at Hotchkiss. In fact, the average, and I mean truly average, seventh grader owns or has access to a Mac that has design capabilities undreamt of by Da Vinci, a built in music studio that dwarfs the Abbey Road facilities where the Beatles recorded, and a film editor (okay, video) that would have been axed from a Flash Gordon serial for being too futuristic. Of course, we have all these tools and I don’t see too many new groups rivaling the Beatles, or directors throwing a scare into Francis Ford Coppola (or even Sofia Coppola, for that matter), or even popular writers who have Stephen King and John Grisham looking over their shoulders.

    There’s more computing power in a greeting card that plays James Brown singing I Feel Good than in the cockpit of the Apollo spacecraft that landed men on the moon². The concern isn’t that the poor don’t have the same tools as the rest of us; the concern should be that we have all these astonishing tools and yet all we do is update our Facebook pages. Are books receding as a cultural force? Regrettably, yes, and faster than David Letterman’s hairline.

    But what do we do with this unparalleled access to information that practically everyone in our society enjoys?

    Unfortunately, not much.

    It’s such a waste when you think about it. Each of us could access practically any piece of writing, any document, any piece of art, any musical composition created since man first taught himself to write, to draw, or to compose. But do we? The most popular things people do with their smartphones is updating their Facebook page, Twittering, playing games, and other forms of activity of dubious social utility.

    In other words, we aren’t nearly as smart as our phones.

    There’s a deeper meaning in the fact that we are Twittering and frittering away all our time, that we are telling ourselves we are acting socially when in reality we are staring solo into a screen.

    We are moving from an age of action to distraction.

    In some ways, it’s understandable. So much of what’s going on in the world today is so awful that anything affording us a distraction is desirable. The economic news of the last few years. Tragic events in

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