Publishing as a Vocation

Studies of an Old Occupation in a New Technological Era

Irving Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351495455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The linkage of politics and technology is now the driving momentum in communication. Publishers are now part of the astonishing transformation of the slow to the instant. From twitters to bloggers, the communication of ideas can now be accomplished in a matter of minutes, not weeks, months, or even years.Horowitz believes that at its best, information technology can be harnessed to facilitate the expression of democratic thought. In providing better access to production and technology, there is great hope to liberate humankind from ignorance and ideology—and imagination is what the purpose of publishing is and always will be about. If politics is the art of the possible, then technology can be harnessed to the higher art of transforming scientific principles into everyday practices.Publishing as a Vocation places publishing in America in its political and commercial setting. It addresses the political implications of scholarly communication in the era of new computerized technology. Horowitz examines problems of political theory in the context of property rights versus the presumed right to know, and the special strains involved in publishing as commerce versus information as a public trust. Offering a knowledgeable and insightful view of publishing in America and abroad, this book makes an important contribution to the study of mass culture in advanced societies.

Part 1

Technology and Morality in Publishing

1

Publishing Challenges in the New Century

It is best to start with a pronouncement and a belief: publishing flourishes best in a democratic society. This is because there are no external limits, such as state power, on what can be published, by whom, to what ends, and in what numbers. Technological changes alter the relationship of forces so that opportunities for publishing expand even further. A broader range of information channels, especially on the Internet, exponentially increases choice and makes authoritarian rule more difficult. Publishing also enhances democracy when decisions are made on the basis of literary merit rather than top-down political legislation. Those who elect to forget such simple homiletics are soon in other areas of commercial activity.

Research on publishing should reflect awareness of the delicate interaction between publishing and politics. This interaction is reflected in such areas as the relationship between public and private sectors, the impact of internationalization, non-U.S. ownership of information, mergers and acquisitions, and conflict between the First Amendment and copyright law. These are but a few examples of areas in which democratic outcomes are critical and not subject to external controls or limitations—as they are in small places like Cuba and big places like China. The strength of the dictatorships more than the geographies involved determines the ability to impose constraints. Decision-making in publishing would greatly benefit from heightened awareness of the political consequences of publishers’ activities. At this point in time, early in 2010, the heads of houses operate in private awareness but public silence on the constraints and opportunities provided by the political system and powers that be.

As the twenty-first century completes its first decade, the relationship of publishing to a democratic society and to human freedom has taken on greater significance than ever. Developments in communications technology, copyright ownership, information access issues, and dramatic international social and systemic changes are converging to have a profound impact on this relationship. Such changes have impacted the very nature of publishing. Its splendid isolation of the past has given way to publishing becoming a small part of the “media” empire, and if it is defined by the political process, it in turn defines that process.

Developments in communication technologies have already had a monumental impact on the educational and workplace environments, and these in turn have affected the public’s expectations of publishers. Some of these developments have been written about, but few have thought through their cumulative impact on traditional publishing. For example, it is now possible to work effectively, alone or as part of a group, without being in the same physical location at any time. The Internet offers the ability to share common images and communicate almost as if one were in the same room. Networking makes remote sites simple and effective means of communication. Skype and on-site photographic images, voice mail systems, along with a new generation of “smart” cellular telephones, permit people to establish their own schedules, and to be in contact with others at convenient times and locations. Computers and electronic mail permit instantaneous communication across continents. Portable computers have given way to laptop computers, and these have morphed into handheld devices that combine telephone, Internet communication, and Internet access worldwide. People are able to extract information from large public and private databases. Mini-printers and portable fax machines permit people to print out information received or accessed wherever they are. And mini-scanners enable them to send the images anywhere they want via the Internet. A plethora of print material can be transmitted simultaneously to one central location or to multiple satellite locations. These developments affect not only how publishers work, but what they publish and how they produce it. Indeed, a wide variety of handheld machines that simulate books permit electronic books and journals to be made available through such devices. Habits of the heart are hard to break, so just how pronounced an impact on the general culture these devices will have in the future is still to be determined. I suspect that they will broaden access without much impacting the contents of books, journals, and other organs of public opinion.

It is best to begin by acknowledging that the rapid multiplication of choice in how and when one communicates in the twenty-first century itself represents essential attributes to as well as risks of democracy. As has been well understood in relation to authoritarian regimes in the present epoch, it is harder to control a population through arbitrary and capricious rule when that population has access to a variety of information channels. So rather than bemoan these high-powered but relatively inexpensive “gadgets” as somehow bemoaning difficulties upon publishers, it is far more meaningful to recognize the wider range of opportunities available in democratic political cultures. Such opportunities do not necessarily translate into the higher culture. Many of these channels of ideas and information are displeasing to the same people who shout loudest about the worth of democracy; everything from pornography and demagoguery can be found that raise serious questions about the limits of democracy as simply freedom of choice.

My view is that the impact of these technical devices is less macro than micro in their consequences. That is to say, we see profound changes in how printed images are produced and transmitted to end users, but little transformation of the overall impact or number of such images on the general culture as such. If one may borrow an analogy from an older medium with all its attendant risks, radio, we see publishing as a medium capable of growth in a post-television and coming satellite era, although we also expect only modest changes in the actual content of our publications, just as there has been in radio programming. One no longer looks to radio for docudrama, for example, since television presents such programs in a far more compelling way. But music programming, such as FX and Sirius, with classical and well-known popular items, has exploded on radio. Since music is a language of its own, and its abstract and non-visual components are particularly suited to the highly mobile lives we lead today, we can readily incorporate new technologies into traditional cultures. The same kinds of changes may take place in publishing. For example, while information storage and retrieval might be best suited for formats such as CD-ROM and flash drives, which provides enormous storage capability and flexibility of access, everything from scholarly monographs to mystery novels remains very much the province of the book. Indeed, there is now more variety in book publication than at any other time, and undoubtedly more variety than in any alternative mode of popular entertainment.

This multiplicity of communication media as a characteristic of democratic societies can be seen readily in the enormous expansion of new forms of written communication. We already see a clear preference for electronic mail delivery over regular paper mail service in business-to-business communication, even when the correspondence is not especially urgent, and when the time saved as compared to alternatives is minimal. Even so, electronic mail and facsimile mail machines have not put overnight mail services, private or public, out of business. Documents considered legally important still must travel in an original “hard copy” rather than reproduced format. As changes in communication technology proliferate in the workplace, in private homes, and in educational institutions, they affect the public’s expectations as to how rapidly they expect publishers to respond to their needs. This in turn has forced traditional publishers to compete in new ways and with a keen sense of the temporal imperative to communications. Publishers who ignore the implications for what the public expects of them do so at their peril.

Book and journal customers will seek more rapid or random access to what publishers have to offer than present-day production and distribution methods permit. Journals that lack a strong editorial framework, that exist as a periodic compilation of the latest work on a subject, as is characteristic of many important scientific journals, may cease to exist conceptually as a unitary product. Scientists may instead rely on databases to inform them about articles they are interested in, and seek single copies through document delivery services in hard copy formats, or, if available, from their library. The library may continue to receive the print journals through the mail as a subscription for archival purposes. Individual scientists will probably not subscribe, but receive the articles they request through a variety of technologies (Internet/electronic mail, fax, or mail services). The source may be the publisher, a document delivery service, or a library. All of this points to the multi-tracking of information, even more than the heralded multi-tasking of information flows.

We already have audio books and video books, although, like print books, they are still often delivered through existing distribution channels. There has been much discussion of electronic books, which may be delivered through conventional channels (stores, direct mail) or, in the most visionary thinking, from a central electronic library such as Google or Amazon. Such electronic books may offer vastly different possibilities than print, including interactive capability, the ability to extract and manipulate information, and so on. The difficulty here is that many publishers may not believe the audience potential for such books is large enough to warrant the investment of resources required to achieve these capabilities that also risk conventional methods of reaching the public. They may rightly feel, with some justification that many kinds of books would not significantly benefit in quality from such enhancements. The one certainty is that new communication technology will render publisher concepts of what constitutes a book and a journal much more open-ended than at present. The concern will be delivering information, whatever the format, for a decent compensation to publishers and authors alike.

Too many of those who speculate about the impact of communication technology on publishing continue to present the future as a series of alternatives rather than a coexistence of options. In consequence, the economic no less than political implications have been badly misunderstood. Many publishers are deeply concerned about change, in part because publishers understand what they do in a very limited way. They think that they take manuscripts, edit them, put them into type, have them printed, market them, and distribute them to interested purchasers. This parochial vision makes publishers vulnerable to those in the hardware end of the new technology who are alert to developments and who can identify a potential replacement for every one of these specialist activities. Publishers need to confront the sources of their own sense of insecurity before they can understand or explain to others the things they do that are not self-evident and that they may themselves take for granted.

In this area, scholarly publishers play a pivotal, if intermediary, role between the producers and the consumers of our intellectual and cultural life. They encourage scholarly work they believe to be important, either directly (by direct communication with an author) or indirectly (by publicizing their interest in an area of publication). They organize an evaluation process whereby decisions are made about what merits broader attention, involving internal and external participants. Publishers also ensure quality control by verifying that the work is complete and meets objective standards for publication, recommending improvements, and ensuring acceptable quality of production and presentation to a public. They work energetically to bring the author’s work to the attention of the broadest possible audience, and ensure that the work is available to those who wish to acquire it. After publication, they protect the integrity of the author’s work by ensuring that those who use it or reproduce it acknowledge its origins. They generate and maintain information about who has acquired the work, so they can communicate with them in the future about other work of a similar nature. In this process, inventory maintenance shrinks in comparison to propriety considerations.

Hidden in these new and innovative technologies is an implicit democratizing role. For without universally recognized procedures, the very substance of democratic life is tarnished by idiosyncrasy and arbitrariness. It might well turn out that the need for procedures—what might be called the methodology of democracy—will do more to preserve certain forms of publishing than simple technical requirements. An individual working alone may be able to produce a product that looks like a book, and do so at a remarkably high level of competence. What the individual cannot reproduce are the varieties of “value added” activities performed by a decent publisher.

This description of some of the important activities that publishers perform does not imply that publishing as we know it will remain static. Clearly, it already has, and more changes will follow, perhaps of an even more dramatic sort. We now see, through Lightning Source and other like services, not only printing on demand, but binding on demand, thus eliminating the need for large inventories. In themselves, such changes do not threaten the survival of publishing. Quite the contrary, technical flexibility permits far greater emphasis on editorial discretion and marketing outreach than in the past. Furthermore, it is already clear that marketing is taking on a more significant role as a direct exchange between producers of information and recipients of ideas and values. Marketing may even take a greater proportion of publishing budgets than at any time in the past. How publishers will redefine their roles in response to increasing technological change remains an open question. But the old way of reaching a well-defined public only through newsprint is already a mode of the past.

Another area of publishing that merits the attention of those interested in the democratic society is in part related to the above, but is sufficiently distinct as to require independent assessment. Some developments in communication technologies may have a dramatic impact on the relationship between the private and the public sectors in publishing and publishing-related activities. The federal government generates large masses of information as a byproduct of its activities. It also funds significant areas of research and development. Until recently, public dissemination of this work has generally been limited to print formats, and up to now it has by and large been ineffectual. The private sector has stepped into this vacuum, playing a principal role in retooling, packaging, and selling government-generated information. Thus publishing, scholarly and reference publishing in particular, has become a forum in which issues of publicity and privacy are both debated. Such debates reflect upon the sensitive area of the limits of control by government at the top, and what can legitimately be withheld by individuals at the bottom. The census data are a perfect illustration of where these two ideals meet, and not always in comfort.

Many participants in publication of government-generated information or government-financed research are members of groups such as the Association of American Publishers and the Information Industry Association. Many are major publishers of traditional books, magazines, and newspapers, influential sectors of the American public, and librarians in particular, have voiced a belief that these companies have no business reselling to the public what it has already funded through taxes paid. In addition, some of these publishers are not American-owned companies, although they may have been at one time. Their repackaging and reselling of government-generated information, and their publication of research funded by the government, has aroused concerns akin to protectionist demands being voiced in other economic sectors. Some critics have even raised national security concerns, arguing that it is shortsighted to permit control of critical segments of American information resources to be in the hands of non-U.S. companies.

The latest and most militant development is the demand for “open access” of all materials produced in semi-publishing settings, such as universities, agencies, and foundations. The argument by such advocates is that publishers do not participate in the costs of such information, and therefore should not benefit from an exclusivity of copyright and publication. Again, this is a demand for more, not less, democratization. Whether cutting out the publisher is feasible, given the costs of securing editorial advisors, and paying the freight for a variety of marketing and warehousing features, is even possible, is beyond the scope of this opening chapter. But it is evident that pressure by academics no less than librarians has moved the discourse to a sharper vision of identifying democracy with open access of information.

This is not the place to argue the premises underlying such policies. However, it is reasonable to say that avoiding monopolies on information sources and delivery is itself a function of the democratic society. The worry that a few may profit on occasion from repackaging publicly generated datasets is more than offset by larger concerns: the consequence of government functioning as a monopoly on access to and use of information. Government-generated information is exempt from copyright constraints—in part because the Founding Fathers appreciated the need for public access to discourse on central considerations of policy. How the private enterprise sector in commercial and professional publishing alike respond to such urgings will probably be worked out in court rulings and decision, which in turn must secure a broader outreach of materials and at lower costs, and yet insure the viability of publishing as a mechanism for decision making on the quality of performance no less than the costs of publication as such. In this sense, the public-private partnership which currently exists is itself part and parcel of the democratic approach to running government.

Added to the equation is government support of a precursor to a high-speed electronic communication highway, the Internet. As the Internet has become a worldwide phenomenon, and attracts more and more users, some have challenged traditional norms of behavior, from publisher control of copyrights to payment for products. Those who are committed to a free-market, private-sector approach to scholarly publishing are being challenged by those who believe in public-sector approaches; this debate is emerging as a version of the old “right to know” versus “right to ownership” arguments that characterized the mid-eighties. It is hard to imagine Bitnet challenging newspapers in the delivery of information and entertainment to large numbers of people. Yet it is also hard to deny that Bitnet does greatly amplify and enhance news reports. For example, a recent article in the International Herald Tribune concerned charges that an ex-student, had been charged with spying. The Herald Tribune story was a one-paragraph capsule, but Bitnet carried two full pages on the same story, gathered from a variety of press services such as Associated Press and Reuters. It even included direct interviews of subjects who know the accused individual. Again, the relation of democracy to publishing is not a simple linear equation, but a complex set of public choices, the depth and detail of which are determined by the exact need to know specific things at specific times. As a result, both delivery and acquisition of information and ideas are an interaction, not just a dissemination. This empirical truism is the common meeting ground of democracy and publishing. It is also the flashpoint where gossip and slander interact...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Technology and Morality in Publishing
• Part 2: The Political Economy of Publishing
• Index