
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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Back to the Future of Publishing Back to the Future of Publishing
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Thought Experiments Thought Experiments
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Big Name Authors Self-publish, across Both Academic and Trade Big Name Authors Self-publish, across Both Academic and Trade
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Books are Written by AI, According to your Reading Tastes Books are Written by AI, According to your Reading Tastes
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Books Disappear Books Disappear
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At Your Service At Your Service
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Translation on Demand Translation on Demand
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Ebooks are Free, Print Books Cost Five Times More Ebooks are Free, Print Books Cost Five Times More
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The Death of Bricks and Mortar Retail: all Books are Sold via the Internet The Death of Bricks and Mortar Retail: all Books are Sold via the Internet
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The Resurgence of Analogue The Resurgence of Analogue
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Conclusion Conclusion
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References References
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25 The Future of Publishing: Eight Thought Experiments
Get accessMichael Bhaskar is a writer, digital publisher, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder of Canelo, a new kind of publishing company based in London, and Writer in Residence at DeepMind, the world's leading AI research lab. He has written and talked extensively about publishing, the future of media, the creative industries, and the economics of technology around the world. He has been featured in and written for The Guardian, The FT, and Wired and on BBC 2, the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4, and NPR amongst others. Michael has been a British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur and a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow. He has written a prizewinning monograph, The Content Machine (2013), and Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (2016). He is also the lead author of the Literature in the 21st Century report (2017) and can be found on Twitter as @michaelbhaskar.
Angus Phillips is Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. He formerly worked in the publishing industry as a trade editor at Oxford University Press. He has given talks and lectures about publishing all over the world including across Europe and in China and South America; and has carried out consultancy and training work with international publishers. He is on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press and was a judge for The Bookseller industry awards for four years in a row. He is the author and editor of a number of books including Turning the Page (2014) and Inside Book Publishing (sixth edition 2019, with Giles Clark). He is the editor of Logos and in 2015 published a book of selected articles from the journal's 25-year history: The Cottage by the Highway and Other Essays on Publishing.
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Published:09 May 2019
Cite
Abstract
The present era of publishing is marked by unusually intense transformations, driven by technological change and the digital revolution. Trying to understand the future of publishing is an important strategic question for all stakeholders, but it remains difficult: the track record of accurate prediction is poor. Another way to think about the future is via thought experiments. This chapter expounds eight possible experiments for thinking through change in publishing, including looking at what would happen if brand authors self-published; artificial intelligence superseded authorial functions; and books started to disappear from day-to-day life. It considers automated translation, online only bookselling, and all publishing and reading becoming pure service with no residual ‘product’. Lastly, it thinks through what would happen if ebooks were free but print was five times the price. None of these thought experiments are claimed as predictions; in thinking about them, we hope to gain a better appreciation of some possible fault lines in the future of publishing.
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