To make a very long story short, I was a book lug­ging Lud­dite until about three years ago when I dis­cov­ered that the inter­net was more than cats fiend­ing after cheese­burg­ers. And, since then, I have become increas­ingly fas­ci­nated with dig­i­tal culture’s scrolls and more than a lit­tle con­cerned about my friend, the codex. Over the next few days, I plan on giv­ing you a rough lay of land in the new/old pub­lish­ing world accord­ing to my eye.

Caveat: I am not an expert in the field. I have never worked in it, but I have loved books in the past, known more than my fair share of authors and edi­tors, and spent many of my wak­ing hours think­ing about the shift in read­ing habits and whether it does, indeed, demand com­par­isons with Gutenburg’s rev­o­lu­tion.

We’ll start with a long, but inter­est­ing* essay by a for­mer Editor-in-Chief of Ran­dom House, Daniel Menaker, on the con­tem­po­rary pub­lish­ing industry:

And here is the list of mostly non-arithmetical obser­va­tions about main­stream pub­lish­ing that these occa­sions have led me to com­pile. It is writ­ten pri­mar­ily from the point of view of a medium– or senior-level acqui­si­tions edi­tor at a major trade house in New York City, the cen­ter of the pub­lish­ing world. It applies prin­ci­pally to the pub­li­ca­tion of orig­i­nal hard­cover books. Some of these obser­va­tions have been observed before, but I hope to refresh them here. Some will be less famil­iar, I hope. These ideas are drawn from pub­lish­ing as it stands — maybe I should say “stum­bles” –right now; many of them may well not obtain when electronic-book-text dig­i­ti­za­tion begins in earnest. That will hap­pen in a finan­cially and orga­ni­za­tion­ally seis­mic way very quickly, I think — over the next decade –but I believe that this impend­ing Gutenberg-level shift in read­ing cul­ture, along with the eco­nomic dis­as­ters of the last two years, ren­der the chal­lenges of present-day hard-copy pub­lish­ing all the more ago­niz­ing, imme­di­ate, and dra­matic. At least in the abstract, and espe­cially in this eco­nomic cli­mate, most other pro­fes­sions pose some of the same prob­lems for those who pur­sue them, no doubt. But the tec­ton­i­cally oppos­ing demands on pub­lish­ing — that it simul­ta­ne­ously make money and serve the tra­di­tion of lit­er­a­ture — and its highly unpre­dictable out­comes and its promi­nence in the atten­tion of the media have made it a kind of poster adult for cap­i­tal­ism and the arts in crisis.

For the most part, I have to say I’m glad to have left this all behind, except in the tran­quil­ity of rec­ol­lec­tion. But since pub­lish­ing is essen­tially a casino, I do miss the thrill of gam­bling and the rare win­ning throw of the dice.

*I write ‘inter­est­ing’, of course, because I plan on post­ing bor­ing articles later.