sImage via artist Guy Laramee

Collective brains here at Sense Worldwide have been puzzling over the future of the printed page. What is next for our books, magazines and newspapers if anything.

Who needs a publisher?

It's an uneasy market for publishers at present with profits falling at many major houses. Bullied by Amazon and battered by Kindle margins are falling and now Apple has joined the party to cut them out all together. 

A Gartner Survey found last year that screen reading is almost equal to print. Another from eMarketer more recently stated Mobile has surpassed print in the amount of time invested daily by US adults. None of which bodes well for those fine purveyors of pulped paper and ink.

The written word is surely booming, but will ASCII bits ever kill ink? We want to know what you think the role of the written word and especially the book will be in future.

The press have found their feet with forward thinking and early moving brands like the Economist increasing their reach and profits through digital. The New York Times has produced a slew of interfaces and apps to better serve its content to its audience with varying results just google New York Times launches.

So we're more interested in the highest and most enduring form of writing, the book. Digital technology has increased the speed to publish of ephemeral news items but what can it do for longform, the fit isn't so obvious and certainly hasn't been conclusively cracked. You just aren't going to read War and Peace on a 4.5 inch screen.

Digital Ready

Will books go the way of records? Collectors items for an informed faithful whilst the rest of us simply consume, archive and forget them in our digital devices or eschew ownership altogether for on demand access from the cloud. In a conversation with a PR manager at one of UK's biggest publishers I asked him if he could imagine that near-future, he was horrified; our attachment to books greatly surpasses that of the pressed disk was his defence.

He's right. Music is abstracted from its medium and only truly exists as a live experience. Books are a laboured and involved thumbing of paper sheets in order to extract and interpret the ideas contained within. A process of methodical discovery played out in the imagination. Books are also a more engaging product than a disk which by its nature as a delivery system must be fashioned identically to be deciphered by the devices that play them. Books can be beautiful works of design just take a look at these dreamy editions of Malcolm Gladwell's ouevre.

The decline of music publishers greatly differs from those of books. Music has been crippled by piracy, books have not had quite the same fate although ebook piracy is commonplace. Music fans are spending more on live music than on CDs. The artists and live music moguls make more money that way and reach more people. However for books the issue is more one of relevance to the way we now consume writing in the always on world.

Our connection to books is our own and deeply cherished, stemming from the experiences they fashion in our imagination. They make us think and they make us do it alone. But wait it's the authors who do that not the medium should we really be tied to a century's old method of delivering ideas?

We are already amongst a generation who may never develop that attachement to paper because they consume through screens from such an early age. Just look at this photo project user generated by the audience of design agency Frog cataloguing screens in learning. 

Image via Jeff Wilson @ Frog Mob 

Many voices are singing the praises of iPads as teaching devices, Apple not least of which. Intuitive, engaging and accessible they create new ways of teaching young children and break-through techniques for teaching those who cannot read or write.

Do these techniques expand a child's imagination or modes of thinking in the same way books do? Well, forgive me for doing the unthinkable and answering with a question but; does it matter as long as they are developing the knowledge and reasoning they will need in life?

Before we fall into that trap though it is already apparent that these applications are not equivalent to books -they are often more akin to games- so perhaps they do not need replace them.

The worries raised around the demise of publishers are based around the lack of development resource available to these distributors to foster great authors. Without their ability to nurture and support talent afforded by their reams of cash from the distribution monopolization music labels, publishers and other distributors commanded pre-digital we are seing them take less risks and opt for market ready and seemingly generic safe bets. Secondly with the decline of publishers could impact the unsung hero of literature, the editor. Would we have had Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Wolfe without Maxwell Perkins to guide and edit? Probably, but you can't deny the influence. 

Losing publishers or worse seeing their output decline in quality would only damage the calibre of literature we can enjoy. Even self publishers will need an editor when going straight to Apple. Amazon have a team of editors in house, so maybe this too will go to them. However Self Publishing is not restricted to Kindles and Ipads, The Guardian recently reported that China has seen a massive industry develop around self published ebook serials. Authors offer their writing in periodic chunks for free, when the number of readers reaches a critical mass then the readers have to pay a small amount for the next segment of the story and these tiny payments have been racking into the millions. This model isn't likely to bite in the west leading those at the forefront of the digital transformation of books to seek more innovative approaches to the written word.

The Future

The publishers know all of this and they have been responding. This video from interaction Designers UsTwo presents some great new applications from the minds within publishers tasked with navigating this shift:

The above falls into the first camp defining the future of literature and the avenue many publishers are taking producing bespoke apps that enhance the reading experience. New agencies are popping up to specialise in this like Storythings, and all major publishers have dedicated teams producing these innovative forms of interacting with writing.

However these audio and image pairings do not seem enough to engage us with literature in a new way, which begs the question perhaps we do not need a new way to engage with books.

Secondly new storytelling initiatives are popping up all over the web many focusing on longform copy and extended reading, something highlighted in this article praising a shift to meatier reads online.

Sites like The Morning News offer long from journalism and collected themes. Figment is a fantastic community of predominantly young writers exercising their creativity and sharing their stories amongst eachother. There is such a need to write that the sites' daily theme often sees hundreds of bespoke submissions. Cowbird offers a more contemporarily social approach with personal stories written and shared by curated storytellers documenting their lives and experiences through major events.

And finally...

There are no shortage of authors and plenty of channels to access them, while the avenues to create and access stories flourish the role for the publisher -if any- seemingly remains as trusted curators and editors. Their capacity to charge appropriately for that service is vastly diminished as book prices have been forced down by market competition and a new generation of readers who expect this reduced cost for an (e)book. As with so many things digital success stories are likely to go to a single dominating force (amazon law-suits permitting) benefitting from vast economies of scale and driving margins down across the board leaving only niche, focused and flexible providers who can better serve their audience with a global platform to do so.

The importance of ink and paper diminishes with each more digitally active generation and we can't predict what value if any will be placed on these texts in future.

So tell us, how do you see this playing out. ASCII or Ink and how can publishers retain their role in the process?