books: the future reloaded

Because the only way we can get on with our business is if we finally bury publishing’s corpse and rechannel the energy we’ve spent propping it to build something new. Something that serves the needs not of editors, or marketers, or publishers, or shareholders, or the culture industry, but of writers and readers, who together are recto and verso of the literary community, which is to say, the only thing that matters.
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Literature isn’t a 6-year-old dyslexic girl who has to be drilled on the difference between b’s and d’s and p’s and q’s. Literature isn’t weak. It’s strong. It isn’t given. It takes. It isn’t protected. It protects. And, finally, literature cannot be saved, because literature saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer literature. Perhaps it was once and has lost its relevance; perhaps it never was; the distinction is one we can and should argue about, and if we don’t reach a conclusion that’s a good sign, because a book about which everyone in the culture says the same thing has lost its ability to say anything about the culture—just as a literary classic, to borrow a phrase from the beleaguered Mark Twain, “is a book that everybody talks about but which no one has read.”

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From where I stand, I can see a world not so far into the future in which books are sold only by authors or small collectives through one or two or three online portals that charge a nominal fee for their service rather than gobbling up the lion’s share of revenue.

Dale Peck