May Day! It’s May Day! We have three options to celebrate this day: a joyful, youthful celebration and dance; a protest of the masses against the elite; or a desperate cry for help. This pandemic year, it looks like all three types of May Day celebration were in order for the publishing industry.
Remember the early, revolutionary days of desktop publishing in the ‘80s? The liberation of hyperlinking in the ‘90s, and the confusing blend of paper and online business models of the 2000s? Suddenly, Covid-19 catapulted a globeful of readers and learners into e-content and virtual classrooms. No longer an optional “thing on the side,” e-content suddenly became central. All publishers now need to invent heuristic business models to accommodate the otherness of “e,” to differentiate this fluid, collaborative thought form from print books, to get beyond the mindset of assigning value primarily by counting copies of books sold. We are in a new world now where reader, content, and machine inform and change each other instantaneously, transactionally. Our industry morphs from its 500-year-old, product-centric basis, towards business models that reward thinking and learning in a live and recorded environment. Curating, validating and producing content, encouraging collaborative thinking centered on that content, in a world recorded, monitored, yet anonymized and free, publishers can now oversee a content stream that refreshes digital swimmers worldwide.
“Recorded, monitored, yet anonymized and free”!? Can we trust publishing companies to build that thinking machine? Through which publisher’s front URL door does the traffic pass before it is anonymized; who owns the key to the encrypted data holding people’s identities, linked to their thoughtpaths? Beyond the ribbons and roses of the May Pole, the masses also celebrate a second kind of May Day, a day to stand up to the corporate elite and question that trust between the workers, the readers, and the business owners. In 1889, May Day was declared International Workers Day by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, calling for global demonstrations in favor of the working class demand for an eight-hour work day. In e-publishing, it didn’t take COVID-19 to effect the disintermediation between publisher and reader. The means of e-content production are indeed in the hands of the masses. Today every client (cellphone!) is a server; every writer a publisher. Tweets, blogs, podcasts, whacky animal videos, science, propaganda, the firehose of content eblasts us continuously. Amid such pandemonium, publishers are challenged to reassert their role as curators, validators of truth and value, to build trust with readers.
Now comes the third meaning, the gut wrenching “May Day! May Day!” which became an international cry for help in 1921. (The British military were presumably adapting “May Day!” from the French “M’aidez!”) Subsequently, “May Day” has been adopted by military, police, and firefighters – and now in the age of Covid-19, publishers — the world over. A cry for help is in order. Today, our industry seems to be imploding. London Book Fair was cancelled in March; Book launches are delayed; the Javitz Center where BEA usually takes place in May is in clean-up mode after its days as a COVID-19 hospital. Publishers’ pocketbooks plummet and layoffs loom. Who buys books during a plague? Bookstores shutter, close, or struggle forward under an amazonian shadow, striving to identify new business models to leverage their value beyond copies of books sold: the curatorial knowledge of staff, virtual author events, private shopping events, leveraging of the Electronic Book Machine (EBM). This latter offers a particular beacon of hope.
The EBM machine ingests PDF files and within 5 minutes prints and binds a trade paperback book. Because up until now, publishers have guarded their current copyright PDF files for books they publish, front and backlist (most of the 20th and all of the 21st Century published books) with an iron fist, the EBMs of the world are largely consigned to printing public domain books, government and association “grey” literature, and self-published books. But think how this EBM capability might extend a lifeline to the publishing industry during Covid-19. Simply by leveraging infrastructure already in place – EBMs are situated in bookstores and libraries around the world – the “May Day” cry for help could revert to its ancient, celebratory meaning. Readers are holed up at home; supply chains stagger. If readers could call on a local, independent bookstore or library – such as Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square, or American Book Center in Amsterdam, or the Library of Alexandria in Egypt – to print and bind and fulfill orders for current copyright titles of major publishers – even the bound galleys of yet-to-be-published books that publishers would have given away at BEA later this month — the industry could enjoy a welcome business infusion, and readers worldwide could gain access to late-breaking pedagogical, medical, local, and world class book content through their local indie bookstores and libraries. Nothing needs to be invented, no new investments made. After a relatively minor matter of contracting between trusted parties, dealing in secure, encrypted files, we could enjoy maintenance of marketplace diversity, while leveraging existing lines of business between small, independent, trusted parties like bookstores, libraries, and publishers, challenging them to enter into Covid-19-specific contracts which make a pandemic exception to the otherwise highly restrictive rules for publishing current copyright content on the EBM. One way to put the joy back in May Day.