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By Root 772 0

teach readers, yes, but once written they tend not to teach authors. They cannot link to related knowledge, debate, and sources as the internet can. David Weinberger taught me in Everything’s Miscellaneous that when knowledge is frozen on a page it can sit in only one place on a shelf under one address so there is only one way to get to it. In the internet age, with its many paths to knowledge, this, too, is a failing of books. Books are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They kill trees. They rely on the blockbuster economy, which is to say that only a few are winners and most are losers. They are subject to gatekeepers’ taste and whims.

Books aren’t read enough, I think we’d agree. Don Poynter at BookStatistics.com compiles sobering stats about the industry and reading. Citing BookPublishing.com, he reports that 80 percent of U.S. families do not buy or read a book in a year; 70 percent of U.S. adults had not been in a bookstore in five years; 58 percent of U.S. adults don’t read a book after high school (though this conflicts with National Endowment for the Arts stats saying that in 2004, 56.5 percent of U.S. adults said—said—they had read a book in a year). Books are thrown out when there’s no space for them and end up as trash or pulp. Forty percent of books that are printed are never sold. Books are where words go to die.

When books are digital, all kinds of benefits accrue. Books can become multimedia, like Harry Potter newspapers, with moving pictures, sound, and interaction. They can be searched, linked, and updated. They can live forever and find new audiences anywhere. Conversations can grow around ideas in books, exposing them to new readers. Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book envisioned a digital ecology in which “parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven together out of components in remote databases and servers.” Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.” When an idea is spread among people, it can grow and adapt and live on past the page. Before a convention of booksellers in 2006, author John Updike called Kelly’s vision of “relationships, links, connection and sharing” Marxist and “a pretty grisly scenario.”

There’s just one problem with these visions of digital publishing paradise (including mine): money. How will authors be paid for going to the trouble of reporting, imagining, and writing when so much of that is free on the internet? The internet is unsympathetic.

Robert Miller, former publisher of Disney’s Hyperion, came to HarperCollins—parent of my publisher—as I was writing this book. His mission was to update the business of book publishing and its two dogging problems: advances and returns. The difficulty, he explained to me, is in the middle. At the top, best sellers make money and at the bottom, we now have the means for no end of niches to create small books (six huge publishing conglomerates control the high-end of the market but Publishers Weekly reports that the total number of publishers grew from 357 in 1947 to 85,000 in 2004; that’s a lot of niches). In the middle, however, advances to authors (like me) have been rising, increasing risk and losses.

It’s a problem of the blockbuster economy: Publishers throw a lot at the wall, hoping something will stick but never knowing what will. Though ownership of publishing houses has consolidated, Miller said that hasn’t much affected competitive bidding among them. All it takes to pump up the price is for two houses to want the same book. That has been the case since 1952, when literary agent Scott Meredith started auctions among publishers rather than sending a book to one house at a time, as the gentlemen of the trade used to do. Today most books don’t earn enough to pay for the advance publishers give authors. Miller said a house is doing well if 20 percent of books earn back their advances. Imagine any other industry in which 80 percent