If the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog came up with the idea for it today, does anyone think his first call would be to a book publisher? Of course not. Stewart Brand would reach out to a Web designer. And as quickly as he could, he'd launch WholeEarth.com. This time around, though, in addition to short essays and bright ideas, there would be writeups of relevant products. By each of those writeups would be a “buy” link to that product's page on an online merchant—and Brand would get a commission for each reader who clicks through and shops. What about the book? The book comes last.
This Web first/book second sequence should delight publishers, who now routinely ask would-be authors to show up with a “platform” of their own. Well, if the site had half a million unique visitors a month and an Amazon.com conversion rate of 10%, I'd call that a fairly powerful “platform,” wouldn't you?
More benefits to this approach: the community interaction on the Web site will strengthen the content, serving as a kind of pre-edit. Later, when the book is published, it enters the marketplace with a ready-made audience of buyers and buzzers.
Is this not a win-win scenario? Doesn't it make both business and publishing sense? Indeed, if I were a publisher and I'd heard that today's incarnation of Stewart Brand were launching a Web site, I'd be on the phone in about two minutes, offering to fund the enterprise in exchange for 50% of the revenue from product sales and advertising. Because the upside is outlandish—not just a site that grows up to be a book, but a site that flowers into that most beautiful of all business success stories, a brand.
Why isn't this happening?
Considering the fundamental challenges now facing the book industry, why aren't publishers identifying the cream of Internet content creators and challenging them to dream up the kind of high-service sites that could, down the line, morph into books?
Why aren't publishers seeing the implications of the simplest economic fact: unless you're dealing with a fancy, big-name Web designer, you can build and launch a site for considerably less than a mid-range book advance.
And why don't publishers grasp that these specialized sites are like plays that preview in Boston before opening in New York? If they fail, there's no reason to go on and publish the book—the house can cut its losses early.
I ask these questions because you can't read publishing blogs and catalogues without being stunned by the industry's refusal to treat content with real-world applications as anything but a book. And this refusal seems universal; even editors who are said to be in the vanguard of cutting-edge, digital-friendly publishing flinch at the idea of partnering with writers in a digital enterprise.
What's the hurdle? The insistence that “We're in the book business, not in the Web site development business or the venture capital business”—this, from some of the same people who have published books that criticized companies for failing to grasp what business they were really in.
Once upon a time, publishers could believe they were in the book business. Now, if they don't want to join Xerox in the dunce hall of fame, they need to understand that they're in the intellectual property business. The content marketing business. The business of seeing how many ways words can dance in digital media. Books are the least of it.
If I'm unsentimental about books, it's not because I don't love them. I do. I've written a bunch, and, on HeadButler.com, review as many as four a week. But after working on the Web for 13 years, I have a different relationship to readers—and to print media.
Books published as books, on a standard production schedule, are beautiful artifacts, monuments to civilization. They're Alistair Cooke in a paneled study, a Carnegie library, a kid under the covers with a flashlight. They're everything we cherish. And if we love them, we'll do what's needed to protect them. Like, paradoxically, producing some of them at the end of a digital dance.
