Into the Great Wide Open
Or the becoming of a part-time publisher
—Thomas Alm, publisher at Rámus förlag and lecturer at the Department of Media Technology and Product Development, Malmö University, Sweden
I am a part-time publisher. In 2002, I co-founded a small press — I was a publisher — but now, in the beginning of 2016, I am a part-time publisher. I however still co-own the publishing house I co-founded and we still publish translated fiction from around the globe. We in fact publish almost one book a month nowadays, but in 2002 and in the following years we only published one to three books per year. “From one book a year to one every month? That’s capitalism!” some of you might say, and sure, that might be it, but it sure doesn’t explain why or how the terminology has changed: part-time publisher.
Since 2002, the publishing landscape has changed immensely. Books with titles such as The Last Book, The Bookless Future, The Last Days of Publishing, and The Gutenberg Elegies have all claimed that books as we have known them — ink printed on paper of uniform size and bound in a codex format — will soon be historical relics. That has not yet happened, but since 2007 the transformation has geared up, and one reason can be traced to the introduction of the Kindle, an e-reader designed and marketed by Amazon. The Kindle introduced not only a new device and a new file format — it introduced a new business model. Suddenly there were hints of a way of making money on digital books, which was something that the big publishers had not foreseen but was something that they were eager to invest in — not knowing, of course, that this new business model would come to affect their own business models.
Amazon wasn’t just out to help the other players in the publishing industry by disseminating their literature; Amazon wanted to change the game.
The Kindle used the proprietary AZW file format instead of the EPUB (Electronic Publication) format, which meant that Amazon chose not to be part of the IDPF’s (International Digital Publishing Forum) aim to create an open standard (i.e. the EPUB format) for the publication of e-books. You may notice that I didn’t put brackets after AZW; this, dear reader, is consistent with Amazon’s stance on openness, or rather lack of. The acronym (or is it an abbreviation?) might stand for Amazon Word, but Amazon hasn’t officially confirmed that.
Proprietary e-book file formats have been around since the 1990s, but, thankfully, past attempts have been shelved and forgotten. In 1998 NuvoMedia bundled their e-reader, Rocket eBook, with their own file format and in 2000, Microsoft introduced the LIT format for their Microsoft Reader. Both formats have been discarded, the former much faster than the latter, but they strike the same chord. Open formats (in contrast to proprietary) have, by being available to users to modify and build on, been widespread and in use throughout media history, and thus established itself and helped generate new knowledge, e.g. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and EPUB.
As of 2011 Amazon declared that they were going to publish 122 books in an array of genres. When the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, that same fall introduced the new Kindle Fire, he referred several times to the Kindle as an ”end-to-end service.” According to the New York Times, he envisioned a world where Amazon not only distributes books published by others but also develops and promotes books themselves. Concurrently Amazon launched the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program, thus further stretching their ambitions of becoming this end-to-end service. The KDP has been a tremendous success with more than one million books published, which is assumed to equal around 25 percent of all books listed at Amazon.
Once Amazon started to publish books, the non-transparent business model grew. One indication is the refusal to employ the book industry’s identification standard, ISBN (International Standard Book Number). Amazon have instead introduced a new standard, the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) number. This means that books published by Amazon are not catalogued e.g. by the UNESCO book production statistics, where a total title count of books published in the world is being done, nor are they being indexed in libraries throughout the world. For the book industry, the titles published exclusively by Amazon are, with Mike Shatzkin’s words, a total ”black hole,” i.e. Amazon is creating a body of content (number of works, types of genres etc.) which is a desirable factor of building a literary public sphere, but is available to nobody but themselves.
Do you as an author or publisher need to choose between ASIN or ISBN? There are however outliers. One that could serve as an example is the UK small press Headpress who has decided to introduce a third option: the rejection of cataloging identifiers altogether. Headpress issues ”no ISBN special edition” and they have thereby stopped trying to get their books into the retail outlets (which more or less means death in the world of book publishing) and thus their books cannot be found anywhere but on the Headpress website. This is a form of resistance that is reminiscent of the Swedish magazine OEI with their series of works named ”Häftad serie,” which are publications only to be sold at the launch event of the publication.
The creation of the Amazon publishing landscape has not gone unnoticed, thankfully. One of the first and most infamous examples might be the realization of a license agreement that affects the rights of the ownership, sometimes more than anyone could foresee. In July, 2009, Amazon customers who had purchased the George Orwell novels 1984 and Animal Farm on their Kindle one day discovered that the titles simply had vanished from their devices without a trace.
It turned out that the publisher of Orwell had reconsidered the desirability of an electronic edition, after which Amazon quietly located and deleted the works from every single Kindle — taking back the book.
Actions like these have led to reactions, interventions and artistic attacks within the avant-garde media landscape. An example of this is the artist Johannes P. Osterhoff who commented on the violation of the integrity of readers through extensive tracking by creating the online performance ”Dear Jeff Bezos.” Osterhoff’s performance is based on the function of making a bookmark; every time Osterhoff makes a bookmark in his Kindle, an email is sent automatically to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, containing information about Osterhoff’s reading habits.
A somewhat more traditional take on the Amazon framework, and an example of a hands-on project reminiscent of the Xerox tradition of copying books, is the DIY Kindle Scanner. Executed by Peter Purgathofer, the DIY Kindle Scanner is a scanner that runs in a loop, repeatedly pressing the “next page” button on the Kindle and taking a picture of that page. The DIY Kindle Scanner then sends the pictures to an online optical character recognition service and you end up with a plain text file of the scanned book. Purgathofer underlines that this is an art project that is meant to critique Amazon’s end-user license agreements, i.e. the agreement that changes the relationship between buyer and seller of a book. Originally readers tend to think that they bought a book once they bought something to read in the Kindle, but as it turned out, they only bought a license to access this book, and not e.g. to disseminate it amongst friends as a recommended read.
With the Kindle, Amazon is not offering a product but rather a service where the reader, as a consequence of advanced tracking, is becoming a producer of content within the Amazon publishing landscape — and this has effects on the already existing publishing landscape. For example, Amazon works really hard to invite authors to their publishing platform, the KDP. One way of doing this is by emphasizing the openness of the publishing platform; that is, they let everyone be a part of this platform, but once a book has been published, they modify this openness by changing the terms of sales condition and by ignoring archiving standards (Amazon neglects the ISBN in favor for their own ASIN). In combination with allowing extensive tracking of the reading habits of the users, Amazon does the opposite of what is preached in an open society: the freedom of speech, the accessibility of texts that are distributed over time and space. Values we’ve come to associate with an open public sphere tends to, when you look at it this way, be centrifuged into the Amazon public sphere, i.e. the consolidation of a market might lead to consequences we do not yet know.
When I ask friends that are not engaged with the publishing industry if they know any big publishing houses, more than a few answer “Penguin,” and then I’m sorry to inform them that Penguin as a stand-alone publisher doesn’t exist anymore; they merged with Random House in 2013. The literary media landscape has been transformed by media giants such as Google, Amazon and Apple; actors which all practice ”controlled consumption” where copyright, trademarks, patents etc. have all been wrapped up in contractual and restrictive end-user license agreements. This transformation of the literary media landscape highlights the success and growing of actors and the ongoing horizontal integration of publishers as in the case of Penguin, i.e. the big ones are getting bigger. At the same time it also sheds some light in the opposite direction, like the transformation of myself, once a publisher, now only a part-time publisher.
It is not that the small presses are getting smaller, but rather, as a consequence of consciously naming ourselves “small,” we underline the contrasts within the literary publishing landscape.
This is a strategy, if true, that is awfully short-sighted. We, the small presses, need to discuss the ongoing consolidation of the book market where it looks like 25 percent of the books sold on Amazon, the world’s largest book store, are books that not a single person outside of the platform knows how to catalogue and disseminate. Openness can hence be guaranteed by the small presses, not only by putting this transformation on the agenda, but we also need to organize ourselves in order to maintain a literary public sphere. But sure, every cloud has a silver lining. For example, the Nobel Prize committee, a curator of openness, has for the last four years awarded authors who are published on small presses in Sweden. Or, to rephrase, it has been five years since a big publishing house in Sweden got awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part-time publishers into the great wide open.
Thanks to Nikita Mazurov for useful comments.
About the author
Thomas Alm is co-founder of Rámus förlag and an awarded graphic designer as well as lecturer in Media Technology. Experiments conducted by him within the field of literary publishing are often connected to how different materialities correlate with the creation of new narratives of fiction.
