Downloading is about to create a revolution in publishing – but who will be winners and losers?

Published on Monday 26 April 2010 19:01

IN 15 OR even ten years' time, who will even remember the compact disc? When CD sales began to decline as people switched their music collections to mp3 format, there weren't many mourners in the funeral cortège.

CDs just didn't inspire devotion – they were impractical, flimsy things that scratched and jumped at the slightest pressure, so the transition to a fully digitised music library felt appealing and practical to everyone but the most dogged Luddites.

The ease of this comparatively silent revolution perhaps helps explain why the music industry was largely unprepared for the wider consequences of easily downloadable music: filesharing, unauthorised downloading and an end to sky-high profits from record sales. Hastily prepared legislation such as the recently approved Digital Economy Act, pitted against the breadth of possibilities and sheer size of the internet, just seems nave.

The next revolution is already in progress, and it's coming for your literature. However, readers have proved a lot more attached to their books than music fans were to CDs, so between the outraged shrieks of paper book purists and the noisy fanfares surrounding showy new electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle and even more recently the Apple iPad, at least publishing companies can't claim they weren't warned. Despite legislation, it's generally assumed that the easily downloaded, easily shared e-book file will fall victim to "piracy" in the same way that the mp3 song file did.

Publishing, however, has been in crisis for some time now, with serious drops in print sales figures even before the launches of the various e-reader platforms – due, apparently, to reader apathy rather than piracy.

This decline contributed to the closure of major book chain Borders in December 2009, and to a sales-cautious situation where, as the award-winning Scottish author AL Kennedy sees it, "the biggest difficulties (for writers and publishers) are the pressures from bookshop chains to produce increasingly commercial works, which has lead to a terror about taking risks on new writing or new ideas."

Small wonder, then, that a number of writers and companies are welcoming the shift from analogue to digital as a chance to reinvigorate the whole industry.

"This is going to be one of the best times ever to be a reader," says Dan Franklin, who just over a year ago moved into the newly created post of digital editor at Edinburgh-based publishing house Canongate. "The best comments I've heard about this whole era are comparing it to the birth of the paperback. E-books are an exciting, complementary format, just like the paperback was to the hardback 60 or 70 years ago. If you're working in publishing and you can't get excited by that, in my opinion, you ought to quit."

With Franklin in place, Canongate's digital portfolio now extends far beyond simply producing e-book versions of all of its new titles. Last year, one of the company's bestsellers was Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro, published as an iPhone App (co-created with digital publishing company Extended Editions) which allowed users to toggle between the written book and the audio version, read by Cave himself, at will.

Canongate is experimenting further with a multi-format version of David Eagleman's short story collection Sum, featuring readings by Jarvis Cocker, Stephen Fry and Emily Blunt, as well as video interviews with the author embedded within the digital text, and has just signed Dizzee Rascal up for a multi-format autobiography Franklin describes as "our most ambitious piece of digital publishing yet", although he's unwilling to go into more detail at the moment.

From late spring this year, Canongate will also begin to challenge the marketplace dominance of online book retailers like Amazon, by selling e-books as direct downloads from its own website. Increasingly, the signs are that digital publishing may actually work to free publishers from the controlling interests of retailers: at the other end of the established scale from Canongate, recent graduate Mark Buckland, director of new Glasgow-based publishing company Cargo, believes that we're going to see smaller, independent publishers breaking through.

"There's a real feeling that the whole industry is becoming a level playing field," he explains. "New technology and the cost of production has meant that the whole game has changed in favour of the little guy."

Like Canongate, Cargo is about to start selling directly to readers itself, with its online imprint Cargo Crate. Books in that imprint will only be available either in e-book form or to print-on-demand for customers, which Buckland sees as a fair way of reducing the cost of a print run to benefit the author's royalties, and cutting out the middleman of commercially run bookshops.

There's no doubting that Buckland's aims are exciting, even noble in an industry where, as Franklin notes, "most authors don't really earn a very good income from their writing". However, should we ever reach the stage where the e-book becomes the main way we consume literature, it might be the publishers, not the online stores, which prove disposable. If the income you're able to make from selling your own art is already curtailed by free downloading, why on earth would you then want to split what's left with a corporation?

Upcoming bands now regularly promote and sell their own music using Paypal-powered free websites like Bandcamp, rather than waiting for a record label to pick them up; bigger name acts, most notably Radiohead, make good money by engaging directly with their fans – selling merchandise through their websites and throwing everything into live performance.

When musicians began adopting these survival techniques, the music press hailed them as revolutionary (again). However, many of Scotland's best known writers have been using live performance for years.

Despite winning a very high-profile prize and being one of the country's most respected authors, AL Kennedy explains that she has to do as much work as possible to promote her books herself: "It's about getting my feet out onto the ground to give readings. I give one or two readings a week, and have done for many years. Most writers have to make sure that they have another source of income, and you have to keep doggedly creating and recreating a readership. It makes good commercial sense – if you can give people a good night out, you're going to sell more books as a result."

Kennedy, who has recently begun to diversify her writing into both stand-up comedy and last year's one-woman live literature show Words With AL Kennedy, also feels that performing her work for an audience is an essential part of the creative process, and should be for any writer. "Too often, writers get hung up on the voice that's down on the page, and forget that readers are going to hear it out loud in their own heads, and it has to sound clear there, to them. That's an essential connection. You learn these things from performing your work, from hearing it out loud."

Scotland's writers, and audiences, seem to agree with her, if the successes of live literature nights, from Monosyllabic and Discombobulate in Glasgow to Edinburgh's Golden Hour, the Canongate-run Irregular and newcomer One Night In The Gutter, run by Gutter magazine, are any sort of barometer. Like music audiences, Scottish readers are increasingly discovering new writers by seeing them live, rather than through a publisher's marketing campaign.

Kennedy's fellow novelist Ewan Morrison echoes these sentiments, observing that over the last few years "we've had to get out there and really build up our own fanbases. That's something authors haven't done before." Morrison is phenomenally excited about the possibilities of the e-book, both creatively (he's currently working on a short story collection, Tales From The Mall, which is designed to be completely digital, with embedded links and hidden content all created by the author, sitting within the main text), and in terms of what it could do for writers.

"We need to have a crash-course in retaining control of our work," he says, citing the example of Ian McEwan who this year brokered a landmark deal with e-book publisher Rosetta Books to ensure that he will earn 50 per cent of royalties from all downloads of his work. McEwan's argument was that as the e-book is just one PDF file created on a single computer (the author's) and then endlessly copied, rather than a physical run of books, the publisher is far less involved with the process. In the US, sites such as www.coolerbooks.com and Amazon.com have already started approaching authors directly.

For now, though, Scottish authors are simply enjoying the possibilities of change. "I'm welcoming the opportunity to jump between ideas, rather than thinking of literature as a pure and untaintable form," says Morrison. "Things are so volatile right now it would just be foolish to be tied down to one single way of working."

&#149 Some of Ewan Morrison's Tales From The Mall content is already available for viewing on his YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/mormor39. AL Kennedy will be reading and talking at Booked! in West Dunbartonshire on 9 May and at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh on 26 May. For more information on Canongate and Cargo's upcoming e-book sales, please see their respective websites, www.canongate.net and www.cargopublishing.com.