The democratisation of publishing (and a bit of Clay Shirky for good measure)

Print publishing also creates extrinsic value, as an indicator of quality. A book’s physical presence says “Someone thought this was worth risking money on.” – Clay Shirky, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

The competitive landscape doesn’t include silence on the part of the amateurs. And it will never include silence on the part of amateurs again. – Clay Shirky again

Something Jessica Au quoted in her Gutenberg post really struck me: ‘The personal computer was closer to a Gutenberg moment than the printing press ever was.’

Indisputably, the Gutenberg press revolutionised the ‘way we read and publish’. The printing press is deemed the most influential invention, up until the last few decades at least, heralding modernity, and conferring the ability to distribute ideas and the written word beyond immediate communities.

Here was this invention that initially allowed for the printing of bibles, but then exhausted bible demand. Since I’ve already donned my Clay Shirky-tinted glasses, I’ll allow him to explain:

The idea that the printing press democratised reading, writing and ideas is widely embraced. This is not to suggest it was – or remains in its internet incarnation – politically progressive or, indeed, revolutionary. Matthew Battles reminds us:

The printing press never only produced the kind of deep reading we admire and privilege today. It also produced propaganda and misinformation, penny dreadfuls and comic books offensive to public morality, pornography, self-help books, and much that was generally despised and rejected by polite culture. Any account of the history of “The Gutenberg Era” that lacks these is incomplete — just as any picture of the Internet that privileges LOLcats and 4chan is insufficient. We must consider both — for pornography, misinformation, and sheer foolishness have thrived from the age of incunables to the advent of the Internet.

Yet it did bring the written word to the people.

During this current age, one of increasing mass literacy – which is unparalleled when we pause to reflect that never before have more people across the globe had the capacity to read and write and actually are reading and writing – it has been suggested that whereas the printing press democratised ‘the written word,’ the internet has democratised publishing itself. In other words, we find ourselves in a time of (potential) universal publishing or content production for anyone who owns or has access to a computer. And the internet. Which, despite their ubiquity, still belong to the realm of the privileged.

‘Here’s what the Internet did,’ posits Shirky, ‘it introduced, for the first time, post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor. And so there’s no economic logic that says that you have to filter for quality before you publish’:

If you owned a printing press, you could make money, if people bought your books, but you could lose money if people (didn’t) buy your books. And since you had to print the books in advance, you were taking on all the risk of whether or not those books would sell… This is the problem of publishing … that economic logic has come to mean that the word “publisher” has come to mean two things: people who decide what to publish and people who do the publishing.

As Timothy B. Lee wrote in a review of Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations:

Every content consumer is a potential producer, with the entire wired world as a potential audience. No longer does publication require the purchase of expensive printing presses, broadcast stations, or 35mm cameras. With these economic barriers removed, publishing is limited only by time and ability. The media marketplace will contain everything anyone cares enough to create, not just the few things that the limitations of 20th-century media technologies made profitable to distribute.

(Honestly, this whole print vs digital debate reminds me of the Ancients vs the Moderns: everything now and into the future is purely imitation, aka progress vs authority.)

But moving on: is that what the internet democratised? How then would we describe the function and effect of ‘The mother of all invention’ – the Xerox 914? As the Atlantic Monthly said: ‘it gave rise to the information age’ – and democratised publishing, pre-internet.

The photocopier prompted creation, not just the recombination of others’ ideas. An alternative to the mess of the mimeograph and the expense of the offset master, the Xerox 914 opened a renaissance in self-publishing. The designer Aaron Marcus, a Yale art student in the late 1960s, remembers using an IBM typewriter with proportional spacing and sharp, single-use ribbons to design and produce books of his own. Indeed, the match between Xerox and IBM Selectrics (introduced in 1961, with interchangeable type elements) paved the way for 1980s desktop publishing.

The 914 also had an adverse effect: procrastination. Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, knew one prominent Ivy League scholar of the late ’60s who spent hours each day photocopying journal articles for a book—and never completed it. Our own overwhelming hoards of digital information are the next chapter in that endless story.

If you require further evidence of its impact on publishing, just look at the history of zine culture. Admittedly, the scene was perceived as a literary subculture – a form of underground resistance – and was defined by a rebellion against the publishing and literary mainstream. It may not have been ‘unlimited perfect copyability,’ but people were able to self-publish before web domination.

Therefore, aren’t the internet and the publishing opportunities it provides more representative of a democratisation of distribution? People produce, people read and, at times, people respond. It’s distribution with a reciprocal bonus.

So digital-age democracy results in a time when we can write our own books, publish our own books and distribute our own books. But how do we market our own books?

While blogs and social media are means of publicising content and our publishing feats, we still need people to follow the paths to our online works. We are competing – not necessarily for profit – with large publishing houses with formidable publicity budgets. How do we battle that?