PUBLISHING

libraries could be the next on the list of public services and infrastructure
that will be subject to sweeping neo-liberal budget cuts. On the other hand,
the new electronic libraries will help level the global playing field of higher
education: first-class research libraries will then no longer be the exclusive
domain of traditional, highly-funded, Western universities.
How will people read in the future? Do people read ebooks from the beginning
to the end, or do they casually browse them – or merely keep them as
searchable items in a personal electronic library? Do they read PDF versions
of books and articles on display screens, or do they first print them on paper?
How much content is read only by internet bots and search engines? Will
attention spans decrease (the age-old criticism of any new medium)? Or will
long, complex texts and printed books become fashionable again in a more
mature technological environment? It is very possible that in the course of
time, users will adjust to the new reading technologies, and have no trouble
digesting long and complex texts from the displays of their mobile devices.
THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING CULTURE?
Already today, increasing numbers of writers and artists self-publish their
works. For them, print-on-demand (POD) publication often fills a gap between
traditional and electronic publishing. 3 The role of publishers as book
producers is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. However, at a certain point
of overproduction and oversaturation, publishers may redefine their role to
become aggregators and curators. A new publishing house like Zero Books
(featuring authors who mostly belong to a small, carefully selected group of
critical theory bloggers) demonstrates that this model already works today. In
the meantime, sales platforms like Amazon have become too large to provide
a competitive level of selection and curatorship; even their statistics-driven
customer personalization has not yet proven successful in this respect.
3 Take for example the 528 page (and 10.8 x 17.48 cm) thick anthology What will be / Ce qui sera / Lo que
será Almanac on the international Surrealist movement, with more than 170 contributors from 25 countries:
essays, poems, images, manifestos, a debate on Surrealist editions, a chronology of 50 years of
Surrealism from 1964 to 2014. Downloading such a book is problematic due to the need of a complete
structured index and advanced search options. Printing it locally is almost impossible because of its
small fixed-page size. Buying it at lulu.com gives readers a print-on-demand book on standard glossy
paper which is certainly not in line with the Surrealist tradition.
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