PART ONE
Publishing Breakdown:
When Hard Covers Go Soft

Like the music industry or the neighborhood video store, the publishing industry is witnessing a transition of its own; a farewell, perhaps, to hardcopies as a way of life, and an emphasis on the transitory nature of the screen-read. In November of 2009, Amazon, the powerful online purveyor of books and music, flew out several of New York’s most prominent literary agents to Seattle to break down their business plan. This business plan featured drastic cost-cutting on the prices of new hard covers from $25 to $8.99, and an aggressive marketing focus on so-called ‘e-books,’ virtual copies of literature that can be read on mobile devices such as the Kindle.

According to the friendly clerks at independent bookseller Skylight Books in Hollywood, shoppers routinely come into the store, take a picture of the books they’re interested in with their iPhone, and then use an application to instantly price-shop online to find the best deal. The $25 dollar hardcover is already losing the competition to online retailers. Amazon, it seems, is reacting to this consumer demand by finding cheaper methods of distribution, while the publishing industry is too busy weeping into its metaphorical beer to come up with a better solution.

But really, who needs a conglomerate of power-lunching Michiko Kakutani fearing execs anyway? Publishing is just a platform, whether it’s the Gutenberg press, the guys at Kinko’s, or the limp glow of a plastic screen. Ecologically, it is in our best interests to start considering a more sustainable platform. If we can manufacture reading devices that don’t strain our eyes or use up our dwindling reserves of virgin wood pulp, we’ll be doing ourselves a bigger environmental favor.

But aren’t hard covers a part of what makes literature, well, literature? In a screen-read world, what does ‘first edition’ mean?
From flash fiction to Twitter to the gradual erosion of advertising dollars for magazines, our entire concept of what makes for a great read may itself have changed. Perhaps we have simply reached a point in our collective urban culture where literature, to accurately reflect our state of being, must by necessity be brief and unconcerned with the languor of existence, a sweet slowness that hardly anyone living in the crushed urban frenzy of now can remember. Take, for example, the Twitter phenomenon known as Justin Halpern, whose pithy little posts—apparent transcriptions of criticisms his father shouts at him—have inspired HarperCollins to sign Halpern to a book deal. Which begs the question: How does one ‘read’ a book-long compendium of Twitter feed?