The Future of Publishing: E-publish or die?

The iPad and its kind are both good and bad for book publishers.

Like many other parts of the media industry, publishing is being     1     reshaped by the growth of the Internet. For years, e-books have     2     to cut sales of the old-fashioned kind. In response, publishers are trying to support their traditional business while preparing for a future in which e-books will represent a much bigger chunk of sales.

For some time, publishers have operated a “wholesale” pricing model with Amazon. This has enabled Amazon to set the price of many new e-books at $9.99. Amazon has     3     prices low in order to boost demand for its Kindle.

However, publishers are     4     that this may make consumers expect lower prices for all kinds of books. And they worry the downward trend will further cut their thin margins and make     5     bricks-and-mortar booksellers(实体书商)suffer more. Some in the industry even     6     that publishers will suffer a similar fate to that of music companies, whose fortunes disappeared when songs can be cheaply sold online. This is particularly     7     for publishers because digital margins are almost as thin as print ones.

Some publishers try delaying the     8     of electronic versions of new books for months after the print launch to increase print sales. Some are starting to build their own online target reader groups. Sourcebooks, a medium-sized publisher that has developed an online group     9     on poetry, found that book sales rose by 50% after poems had featured on the site.

The publishing firms that survive the tough transition will be those who use flexible     10     and learn quickly to think. Not all of them can turn that particular page successfully.

4 . As we traveled around the U.S. reporting on the development of towns and cities, we always made the local library an early stop. The traditional impression of libraries as places for quiet reading, research, and borrowing books is outdated. There are three areas where libraries work as energetic centers of America’s towns: technology, education, and community.

Many people rely on libraries for their computer and Internet use. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, more than a quarter of Americans who had visited a public library in the past year had used a computer, the Internet, or a WiFi connection there.

More ambitiously, libraries have also begun offering “makerspaces” shared workspaces that provide technological tools and are designed to facilitate teamwork. I recently toured the makerspace at Washington, D.C.’s flagship Martin Luther King Jr. Library. A group of hobbyists, businesspeople, and a mom with her homeschooled preteens were learning about tools like 3-D printers, laser cutters, and wire benders. Miguel Figueroa, who directs the Center for the Future of Libraries at the American Library Association, says makerspaces are part of libraries’ expanded mission to be places where people can not only consume knowledge, but create new knowledge.

In my conversations with librarians around the country, the most urgent topic was the education of America’s youngest children. Patrick Losinski, the CEO of the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan library system, told me that when a 5-year-old walks into kindergarten, takes a book, and holds it upside down, “you know there is no reading readiness there.” I heard of many projects like Books for Babies, which is run by Friends of the Library in tiny Winters, California: Volunteers offer new babies a box with a T-shirt, a cap, two books, and an application to join the library.

In Charleston, West Virginia, despite recent funding losses that severely cut library staff, librarians still provide materials to teachers all across the 900-square-mile county. In Columbus, Mississippi, the library gives high-school students access to Civic War-era documents slave sale records, court cases, and secrets of the community making real the history of their state.

The library in West Hartford, Connecticut, offers conversational-English classes for immigrants. The library in Seattle provides citizenship classes. The library in Duluth, Minnesota, has a seed-lending program for local gardeners. In libraries, I have practiced yoga, drunk in coffee shops, and watched youngsters with laptops arrangetheir virtual start-up offices at long reading-room tables.

I wouldn’t put too much stock in what your “literary” friends say; they sound like bores. When it comes down to it, people who think about reading in terms of what “counts” don’t seem to actually enjoy books all that much. Their moralistic (说教的) gloom is evident in the extent     1     reading has come to resemble exercise, with readers tracking their word-count metrics, trying to improve their speed.

    2     some disciples of this culture are quick to dismiss audiobooks as a shortcut, they cannot seem to agree on why, exactly, listening is an inferior form of engagement. Some cite studies that have shown people who listen to books retain less than those who read them, which     3     (bind) up with how tempting it is to do other things while listening.     4     insist that audiobooks eliminate the reader’s responsibility to interpret things like irony, tone, and inflection, given that the person on the recording is doing the work of conveying the emotions in the book for them.

The larger problem, however, is in viewing books as     5     means to some other end. Many people who aspire to read more are motivated by the promise that doing so will prevent cognitive decline, improve brain connectivity. Some assume that the purpose of reading is     6     (absorb) knowledge or nuggets of trivia that one can use in order to demonstrate being “well read”. I’d be willing to bet, Easy Listening, that your earliest experiences with the joy of literature were aural. Most of us were read to by adults before we learned to read ourselves, and listening to audiobooks recalls the distinctive delight of     7     (tell) a story.

If you’re like most people I know, you probably find it difficult to recall the last time a book regardless of     8     you consumed it — succeeded in altering your consciousness, suggesting that many books you’ve encountered have failed to live up to their potential.

My advice, Easy, is to be     9     (discriminating) about the medium and more choosy about the books you pick up. If you find that your mind is wandering or that you’re not able to fully enter into the reality of the narrative,     10     (consider) that this might be a problem with the content, not the mechanism through which you are experiencing it.

Faithfully,

Cloud