Through The Elegant Variation, I saw this article by Lev Grossman in Time about the future of publishing. Grossman recaps the current woes of publishing, and–given the coming downfall of the major publishing houses that now act as “gatekeepers” for published books–he predicts that
The novel won’t stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It’s about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.
Ugh. The Elegant Variation’s take on this article argues against that point, saying that Grossman
sidesteps almost entirely questions of quality. There are passing nods to “gatekeepers” but he seems to suggest that cell phone novels, fan fiction and other self-published efforts should be taken as seriously as, say, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith, simply because there are people willing to read these things (and sometimes pay for the privilege).
I agree more with TEV than Grossman. We’ll need gatekeepers all the same once epublishing takes off. If anything, we’ll need stricter gatekeepers, that allow less material though.
In 2007, over 400,000 titles were published, and about 3.1 billion books were sold. That’s an average of around 7500 copies of each book, which is low when you consider the drek on the bestseller list, and all the books that must sell less than 7500. The shame is that the good books get lost in all that noise, a problem that won’t go away if novels get “wilder and trashier.”
In general, I don’t think the value that publishers give to literary culture–the “gatekeeper” thing–is what’s broken. It’s their distribution system that’s broken. We’ll still have room for plenty of epublishers that release quality titles. And someday we won’t dismiss out-of-hand books that only come out in digital editions.
[see the original at Time, and also TEV's take]
You might also prefer Eric Flint’s rebuttal (which I blogged on TeleRead).