Publishers as facilitators at Custard In The Ether

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Publishers as facilitators

By admin | April 7, 2009

One of the things I have been mulling over recently (in admittedly quite a random way) is what various jobs might look like in the future as a result of the growth of digital technology. I am well aware that I am not alone in this, although many of the realistic opinions and discussions I have read seem to focus only on how the evolution process might work, starting from our current state.

My methodology has been a bit more detached and possibly more fundamental.

What got me started on this was the seemingly endless debates about what publishers should be doing to deal with the digital “problem”. There have been many commentators looking at every angle of the issue: should they be plugging e-books or moving straight into mobile web? how should they ensure copyright of digital works? are publishers even still relevant in an era of diy content producers?

I decided to strip it back and ask one question: what does a publisher actually DO?

The simple answer seemed to be “they facilitate”.

They facilitate all the practical (normally physical) bits of getting the author’s content to the reader. This covers everything from typesetting and producing the physical books, to the promotion and distribution. On the most basic level, they are producing the technology that gets the author’s ideas out there.

So what might that involve in the future? Particularly with digital-native content?

Could this involve hosting and maintaining sites, rather than printing on paper? Or providing coders, animators and the like to help develop the mechanisms for delivering the author’s ideas rather than more traditional editors and illustrators? Or providing PR support to authors engaging in large scale interactive projects?

Some of these things publishers are already doing - although often more as part of a 360 degree approach to marketing a print based work, rather than something that is purely a digital enterprise. But a truly digital publishing firm would have to consider having these things available in order to effectively facilitate an author reaching their reader. (Note: I am very deliberately avoiding the monetization issue, as I actually think that is very much a separate matter).

The other question that arises is: would digital authors want this kind of facilitation from an agency of this nature? Or are digital authors the type of people who want to do it all themselves?

Well, I certainly think that digital writers are generally more interested in the whole of the production process of their craft than print-based authors, but would not want to risk going beyond that by making any sweeping generalisations. There will always be creators in any art form who want to be with their baby from start to finish, and those for whom the idea (or content) is their contribution to the process of producing an artifact (and in fact the main value of that finished artifact). Neither is more noble than the other, of course - they are simply different creative approaches to the same problem: get idea to audience.

Stepping back and taking this view may not solve any problems for publishers or writers. However, it might help us to get a better perspective on what we perhaps really want to create as a digital publishing industry. And in these times of recession, it is always reassuring to try and imagine what the job vacancies of the future might be….

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One Response to “Publishers as facilitators”

Cromarty Says:
April 9th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Interesting way of looking at it Custard. A good distillation of what publishers are supposed to do. But you avoided the ‘monetisation issue’ then finished off by asking us to imagine jobs in the future. Not fair. Maybe you could tackle that issue?

Publishers as facilitators

One Response to “Publishers as facilitators”

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