Are books the new vinyl?

I’m old enough to fondly remember people telling me that CDs would never catch on; atmospheric, scratchy vinyl would always trump the soulless digital recording they said. We still have vinyl of course but nowadays, it is very much the preserve of DJs and collectors. Like its replacement the CD, it has ceased to be the utilitarian way of accessing recorded material.

Fond as I am of books, I rather fear that they are going the same way as the LP and perhaps that might not be such a bad thing. Accessing the written word nowadays is increasingly done through the medium of a screen and the proliferation of devices like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle in recent years suggest that the business of the written word has reached a crossroads. The news yesterday that Google had extended its 'eBookstore' service to users in the UK, following its launch in the US late in 2010, only underlines the growth potential of this market.

As an unpublished novelist, I have been watching these developments with a vested interest. After eighteen months of dispiritedly hawking manuscripts around Bloomsbury and Soho in return for misspelt rejection letters, I started wondering why I needed an agent or even a publisher.

Even if I was able to find the Tarquin or Hermione who’d represent my work, what was I actually getting for their fat parasitic percentage? They might have a boozy shmoozy lunch with a publishing chum and maybe at the end of it, I’d get a publishing deal (along with the bill for lunch) and precious little else. The help I would really need; with marketing and publicity would just not be forthcoming.

The publishing industry is still locked into a production cycle that requires raw materials, manufacturing processes and logistical networks. As a consequence, it’s a business that is risk averse. Outlay on a print run is too great for betting on literary longshots or curate’s eggs. It tends to stick with what it knows:  celebrities, rigid genres and already published writers.

When I spoke to other struggling authors, I realised just how a big a problem this had become. Over and over I was exhorted to look at the e-publishing route and when I did, it started to make a lot of sense. If I choose to, I can publish my novel electronically for Kindle and sell it on Amazon.  The do-it-yourself punk ethic of this approach is very attractive.

When the first independently produced e-novel does break through and sell a million copies, the writing may well be on the wall for the traditional publishing model. Well, we can only hope...