Guest blogger Brian Ward talks about the problems with current publishing models and the unprofitability of the industry.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what forms of media people are willing to spend money on. Studies in consumer psychology in relation to general goods and services suggest that we are most willing to pay for two things: convenience and status.

We willingly buy a 500ml bottle of lemonade for $3 from a convenience store when we could get 1l for $1.50 from the supermarket around the corner. We pay exorbitant prices for things that define and display our economic status, particularly everyday luxuries that symbolise wealth and taste like takeaway coffee and juice.

We crave things that define our social status and affirm our sense of identity and belonging. Women buy fashion and gossip magazines, which are fundamentally tools that mediate the social status of both the subjects of the media (lip synching celebrities) and the consumers of the media (which magazine you buy and are seen reading on the tram tells everyone around you how you choose to define yourself).

We like guidance, because we are mostly passive conformist sheep, which is why we pay attention to movie and book review shows on TV and the radio, and many people consume what they are told to.

The media we buy

This is how money is currently being spent on media. We spend less on newspapers and magazines than we used to (except perhaps for gossip). We continue to buy lots of media physically, though increasingly we obtain it online from Amazon.

To confound the strategists that predicted the death of cinema, we still go to the movies (particularly, and counter intuitively, if we are young male file sharing addicts).

Games are a massive and growing form of paid content. For many young men, playing RPGs and MMOGs is as social a phenomenon as piling into a car and going to a multiplex to see an action film with your friends.

Steam is a site and store that is also a social network. Users create a free account, then buy licenses for games (instead of buying the game on disk) through the social store to play online with other community members. As most popular games are multiplayer, the social aspect of game play extends into a social network of gamers, who socialise both within and outside the games, such as by sharing strategies about game play and recommending new games to each other.

We subscribe to LastFM and buy music as discrete files on iLike and iTunes.

The problem with digital media

The problem with a lot of digital media is that it is invisible, and thus annoyingly unhelpful to narcissists intent on displaying their social status and identity. A suit reading the AFR is visible to the whole tram; an iPhone full of music and apps can only be seen by a few people because it is so small.

When invited home to a new friend’s place, you used to browse their books and CDs to judge their personality and taste. Now the CD shelf is mostly gone, and their music is on their iPod or laptop (a private space you cannot peek into without the risk of also discovering their porn preferences).

Because we crave social status, social media has become a popular work-around to display our status. We build virtual lists of our taste in books, films and music on Facebook, in Librarything and on LastFM and iLike. iTunes was recently rumoured to be incorporating a social network and / or Facebook integration.

The problem with literature

The bookcase may soon disappear, and we will have no way of displaying our social status via our taste in literature. How will we get our social literary recommendations?

We are constantly exposed to recommendations about books and audio and video content we may enjoy based on our previous preferences (the Amazon recommendation engine).

We consume audio and video media socially, such as by attending live concerts or going to the cinema with friends. In contrast, reading is primarily a solitary activity, although we have built some social activities, like participating in book groups, around discussing books after we have read them.

Compared to music, no standard file format like MP3 exists for text: we use .txt, .rtf, .doc, .pdf and .htm for text files. There is no standard device to display digital texts, although there are many devices that can display text. There’s no iTunes equivalent for organising a collection of texts or providing a comprehensive online store for texts. There’s no Steam equivalent for building a social network out of digital texts (Librarything is based on physical books).

Literature has not embraced digital media or encouraged new ways to find, share and identify via textual content. Is this because literature (fiction and poetry) is now a niche or elite cultural phenomenon, like opera or ballet?

The imperfection of the market

The market is imperfect. Capitalism is about greed, not elegant practical solutions to problems. If the solution to a problem cannot be made profitable, an emerging solution is often withheld (rich drug companies based in western countries try to prevent third world countries from accessing cheap generic drugs).

Sometimes solutions are never found. In the analogue broadcasting era, devices to automate the recording of radio never arrived in homes, but we later got VCRs for recording video (a much more complex task). Only in the digital era did timeshifting audio via automated recordings become widespread (radio podcasts). It made no sense, but it happened.

Most news content is inane fluff that is not worth paying for. A lot of media consumption is done merely to pass the time, with little care or attention to the specifics (such as cooking dinner with the TV on in the background) or reading the local paper over breakfast and throwing it in the recycling bin on your way out the door. None of this is worth paying for.

We rewatch some video and reread some text, but not to the same extent as relistening to music. Music is unique in that we consume it multiple times. There is a clear value in paying for something you will reuse for many years. Can the same be said for digital text?

The old analogue world consisted of corporations controlling (near) monopolies of scarse content delivered on paper and plastic and broadcast on radio and television. The new digital world consists of everyone creating and distributing an abundance of content in digital forms via the internet.

The commercial value of content has been separated from its intrinsic or social value. Hyperlocal news content, for example, has great utility but marginal potential for profit.

Not every problem has a solution, and not every solution is profitable. Getting paid for their work is a problem writers want solved, but don’t expect market capitalism to be motivated to do anything about it.

To succeed online and build economic systems that can provide financial returns to writers, literature needs a default format like MP3. It needs cool devices like iPods (perhaps the long rumoured Apple tablet). It needs recommendation engines like Amazon and LastFM, stores like iTunes and social networks like Librarything.

Literature needs mass audiences, like those that exist for games, movies and music, and it needs those audiences to measure their social status through their taste in texts.

Literature has none of these things.

Although it does seem like the book publishing industry is lagging in a lot of ways technology-wise, it’s not all bad news. If you’re interested in the future of the book, a great place to start reading about the issues is at the Institute for the Future of the Book. Also, just a few days ago it was announced that some of the world’s biggest magazine publishers are going to join together and create new digital solutions, like an iTunes-style program for mags.

*Photo by _ES.