long-stewed books and the implicit future of journalism

in a recent essay in the WaPo, jonathan karp — the publisher and EIC of venerable publishing house twelve — offers a very concise analysis of today's publishing market, and its potential future. shocker: he thinks intelligence is coming back.
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i'm not the first to blog about the essay: the also-venerable leon neyfakh already covered it for the observer, calling it a "precise, sober critique of the publishing industry."

the gist of the essay is contained in this pithy assertion: "We are living in the age of the disposable book."

any subway rider or bookstore browser can back up paragraphs like this one:

Visit your neighborhood superstore, and you will be overwhelmed with ephemera: self-aggrandizing memoirs by recovering addicts; poignant portraits of heroic pets; hyperbolic ideological tracts by insufferable cable TV pundits; guides to staying wrinkle- and toxin-free; odes to Warren Buffett and Jesus Christ; manifestos for fixing America in 12 easy steps; manly accounts of the best athlete/season/team ever; and glittery novels about British royalty, love-starved shoppers, mournful cops and ingenious serial killers. (There are more novels about serial killers than there are actual serial killers.)

of course, that phenomenon is nothing new (he recalls working on tracts by manuel noriega in his early days), but has reached a fever pitch.

but all is not lost, he exclaims! like marx, predicting the inevitable, dialectic-induced collapse of capitalism, karp foresees the industry exhausting itself of such garbage. what will be the linchpin of that self-implosion? what will save the print industry?

why, digital competition, of course.

Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it's hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.

bizarre, right? no one in the world of prognostication about journalism sees the blogosphere as a way of improving — much less saving — print from itself. but here karp is, saying slow-cooked works like those of franzen or messud will make a return:

Consequently, publishers will be forced to invest in works of quality to maintain their niche. These books will be the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else. Those same corporate executives who dictate annual returns may begin to proclaim the virtues of research and development, the great engine of growth for business. For publishers, R&D means giving authors the resources to write the best books -- works that will last, because the lasting books will, ultimately, be where the money is.

now, what can i add to what karp has already said? an implicit corollary that might be bad for major newspapers, but good for hard-working journalists.

see, one of the long-standing fears among newspaper editors has been that more and more reporters will go the way of bob woodward, largely abandoning periodical reporting and instead taking on lucrative nonfiction book contracts.

i mean, why not? just like gus says, a lotta times, if you really want to get a story right, you need to get all the angles. and how can you get all the angles if you're in the pressure-cooker of a daily, or even a weekly?

that's where karp's predictions might be good for publishing, good for journalists, but bad for periodicals. if the publishing industry really does start going for more long and thought-out books (although he's referencing fiction, non-fiction would clearly fit into his rubric, as well), that could mean more of a market for big-name writers at the NYT, the WSJ, the WaPo, the LAT, the trib, the times-picayune, the new yorker, and so on, to get contracts with publishers. and then boom—you've got better books about nonfiction topics, with real journalism that gets all the angles, but a gradual abandoning of the periodical ship.

of course, i'm prognosticating based on a prognostication, and that's about as useful as a blog blogging about a blog that blogged itself. but it's a thought, and i don't think it's too far-fetched.