The Literature of the World in a Warehouse in Richmond, California

I love this story about Brewster Kahle, who has taken it upon himself to create an archive for hard copies of books scanned, digitized--and then mostly discarded--by Google.  Ultimately he hopes his collection will include some ten million books.

Is there a point to Kahle's mission?  There will be if, by some quirk of history or technological evolution, we arrive at a moment when the Internet is no longer available or useable, and we suddenly realize that one of those old tomes we uploaded decades ago contains information we actually need or want.

Digital technology is great, but I for one wouldn't want to bet our entire cultural patrimony on the continued viability of any single electronic data storage and recovery system.

The News About Publishing: Catastrophic But Not Serious

I just finished perusing Publishers Weekly's year-end roundup summarizing the biggest news stories of 2009, and as usual the situation in our industry is viewed as teetering on the brink of disaster. The number one story for the year is headlined, "Layoffs, Pay Cuts, and the Reshaping of the Industry," and things go downhill from there, with the article describing the unsustainable business terms Amazon appears to be demanding for its Kindle, bookstore closings by the hundred, a storm of controversy over the Google book-digitization settlement, etc. etc.

So what else is new? I've been in book publishing for 28 years now (God help me) and I don't recall a year when people weren't predicting the imminent demise of the business. It's second only to the theatre (AKA "the fabulous invalid") in terms of institutional hypochondria.

One day I suppose the dire forecasts will turn out to be correct and all the big publishing houses will collapse in a heap of rubble on Sixth Avenue, in which case we will report the news right here on the Consulting Editors Alliance blog! But meanwhile I comfort myself--perhaps naively--with the idea that, as a freelance writer and editor, I am a "content provider" rather than a publishing executive . . . and that as long as people want information, inspiration, and entertainment, they will want "content."

So whatever happens to the business model of book publishing--and heaven knows it's due for some massive changes--I believe there will be a place for me and the writers I work with. Anyway that is my story and I am sticking to it.