Over at the New Yorker, George Packer has a long, earnest take on Amazon, ebook thing, and what it’s doing to the publishing industry. George is earnest and thorough, and includes some intelligent quotes from some authors who say the New York publishing scene pretty much treats them like shit, but you can tell that he’s had it up to here with those “disruptive,” “where’s your ten billion, dipshit” know it alls from Silicon Valley.
Well, I’m (fortunately) too low on the food chain to have encountered billionaire arrogance first-hand, but I can imagine that it’s massively obnoxious. I’m also one of the newest, and lowest, authors on the ebook food chain, so I can’t say I’m unbiased, either. But that’s never shut me up before.
Packer’s piece is subtitled “Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for the books?” But what he’s really asking is, “Is it good for New York?” and the answer to that is obviously “no.” Packer himself has the best quote, that in New York everyone talks about the past and in the Valley everyone talks about the future. So who’s going to win?
In the early days of computing there was a great deal of excitement about something called “desktop publishing.” You could actually design a book, a magazine, a newspaper, right on a computer! An early desktop publishing program was called “Aldus PageMaker,” which no longer exists. “Aldus” was a serious publishing in-joke. Aldo Manuzio (aka “Aldus Manutius”), was a Venetian humanist/printer who issued the first print editions of many of the classics of Greek literature. He worked extensively with Erasmus, who said of him, “others have compiled fine libraries, but the library of Aldus has no roof but the sky and encompasses the entire world.” The invention of printing was “disruptive,” to be sure, but remarkably liberating as well. The digital world will probably lead to a shortage of leisurely lunches at the Algonquin and an excess of smart-ass, jeans-wearing billionaires, but in the long run I don’t think either development will be too important.
