Renaissance or Reckoning?

Leaders in a number of countries and industries are treating the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic as an answerable challenge to innovate, both socially and economically, toward greener models. The re-evaluation of consumption patterns is pragmatic for industry: environmental sustainability in the long term equates with business sustainability, as any that cannot operate within planetary boundaries will before long find themselves in problematic territory, whether financially, legally and/or publicly. Industries that rely on material economies of scale already or soon will be faced with the necessity of transformation, as this model can’t expand indefinitely in a closed system. The books industry is of course no exception.

Post-consumerist behaviours and post-growth consumer trends are emerging in markets around the world; alongside and in reaction to economies of scale and endless market clearing, (post-)consumers are emerging who are looking for less, smaller, deeper, slower, more interesting products and services, and are willing to pay for them. At the same time, whole societies are now actively questioning whether value should be primarily defined in economic terms, whether economies should run on material definitions of wealth, or if valuing wellbeing is more important for long-term sustainability.

As with seemingly every part of our media diet, there are more than enough books to consume, with close to two million new books published in the past year alone. What we have too little of is the time or attention to make consumption rewarding.

Amazon, the archetypal example of commercial success in contemporary media distribution, capitalises on that lack of time while exploiting it: its algorithms and delivery processes are extremely efficient, giving us greater choice and a greater volume of books, relatively inexpensively. But broadly they exacerbate the problem, compelling consumers to use the time and money saved to scroll, click and attempt to consume even more. But success based on accelerating consumption is limited, with a few firms splitting the majority of market share. And in publishing as elsewhere, there is a clear logical misstep if what we treat as value in practice is chiefly about making, selling, buying and amassing material or digital wealth, when to do so indefinitely ensures a terminal decline.

Even as many struggle to survive, publishers are compelled to question acceptance of whether a permanent state of growth, and a definition of value as chiefly economic, are a humane proposition. Literary publishing has a tense relationship with consumption-driven models even before environmental sustainability enters the equation. Reading for pleasure is not an economically productive activity, especially not in the current economy. Reading books requires time and attention, and time and attention are scarce resources increasingly colonised for cash, making books that take any time to read less than ideally suited to fast-paced retail models. Indeed the broader expectation of acceleration in most industries is counter to what is enjoyable about books in the first place.

The logic of the attention economy is to reduce and cut our attention into small bits which are then monetised, precluding deep attention, and so eroding the complexity of experience that is the value of books for so many readers. And literature itself, as a thing, struggles to be private or scarce – printed knowledge is so easily reproducible – making it relatively difficult to control and monetise. All of this suggests that there is not just necessity, but also opportunity for literary publishing to innovate thoughtfully in a post-consumerist space, from the design of brands, literary ‘experiences’ and the objects of books themselves, to curatorial and distribution processes, and how books are marketed to consumers.

Voluntary simplicity, the reduction of the volume and pace of consumption, has become increasingly compelling in a number of areas, evidenced by particular kinds of products and brands (microhomes, Smart cars, Marie Kondo) and lifestyle choices (eco-villages, ‘downshifting’). The ‘slow movement’ likewise has instantiations in media, fashion, food culture, and parenting, all responding to concerns about planetary and societal sustainability.

Against this, the innovation focus for publishing in recent decades has been on generating more and often faster informational experiences for consumers to manage. This includes developing ever more compelling digital modes of publication and distribution, in lockstep with technological design norms and the need to generate income from reduced physical materiality. Proportionally more digital content, in other words. Meanwhile the ubiquity of the smart screen has had a demonstrably huge effect on the design and functionality of all content, including books. What this means in practice is that users are, if they are reading on an iPad or a smartphone, likely to be interacting with a noisy informational load, disrupted by notifications, with touch-dynamics mimicking the endless scrolling of social media platforms.

Then there are some significant refutations of the principle of more and faster, where the reader is invited to value the small and to enjoy its smallness. Mouse Books have designed smartphone-sized books that can be carried around in your pocket. Literary experiences are being increasingly generated in serial format, for example as podcast or SMS feed, able to be enjoyed slowly and/or in small segments. BBC Long Reads is focused on long-form journalism and storytelling, and an accompanying podcast audio version extends its reach; both are other instantiations of small and slow, taking time to explore a discrete topic (a distinct alternative to the scrolling news cycle).

Numerous platforms have been designed, within the literary space, and without, to attempt to delimit a relentless deluge of information through curation and personalisation; likewise heirloom publications and beautiful design have never gone away, with many small presses focusing on limited runs of beautiful books that are slow to make and are meant to be enjoyed slowly. And we can imagine the ways in which the objects of books are likely to become increasingly intelligent, containing intelligent feedback mechanisms that provide rich, but not necessarily noisier, literary experiences. That is to say, post-growth books aren’t definitely traditional in form and format, nor does that mean they become not-books; perhaps they’ll become differently bookish.

Contemporary consumers are increasingly desiring more emotionally rich and often more intellectually complex experiences from cultural products, and the ‘small and slow’ might seem to be at odds with this. Indeed, there’s a tension: reduction implies, and sometimes necessitates, reductiveness. This can’t be neglected as a concern, where news and social media feeds continually normalise reductive headlines and a logic of lowest common denominators, despite what seems to be increasing complexity in our daily lives.

Future, sustainability-driven design of literary products, brands and experiences will be challenged to offer, as a needed alternative, greater emotional depth and intensity without sacrificing complexity of ideas. Part of the complexity issue is that we’re attempting as a society to learn to operate more effectively within expanded temporal and spatial structures, to think holistically about the planet and more long-term about our role as ‘good ancestors’.

This influences the kinds of literary experiences we want to have: what readers want to read and how they want to engage in the literary marketplace. This might mean developing new ways of engaging readers that respond directly to evolving spatial and temporal dispositions in culture. Theorists like Matt Tierney have raised possibilities for engaging specifically with the aesthetics of ‘the void’ as a form of solution, where deletions and open/empty experiences generate fertile spaces to explore uncertainty.

In any case the design of literary experiences, including books themselves, will necessarily engage info-aesthetics, as Lev Manovich describes it, “the new priorities of information society: making sense of information, working with information, producing knowledge from information.” Interestingly Manovich doesn’t specifically refer to that which is normal, but rather that which is a priority – and where accepted ideas of value are beginning to shift, publishers have an opportunity to help shape the new normal.

Book culture might increasingly concern itself with literary works that are transient events and experiences, rather than objects. These future literary experiences cannot be expansive in terms of resource use either, but must be sustainable, even regenerative.

A driving factor over the long term for the book industry will be to reduce consumption of resources. Thus far this has been answered largely – and somewhat incompletely – by an expectation that digital resources and technological innovations will solve the sustainability problem. But it turns out that ebooks and audiobooks, while popular, aren’t necessarily less resource-intensive, and certainly don’t provide a silver bullet for the industry.

The issue is more fundamental, demanding examination of not just book design and production, but also ethical issues relating to supply chain, distribution, sales, and marketing. A post-growth ethos would aim to reduce consumption at every stage of that process, right down to material and immaterial consumption by readers. We don’t need more things – regardless of whether those things are material or digital – we need better things. Books that are crafted with more care and generate more meaningful experiences.

In one sense this is likely to be about focus on production of books, both in terms of sustainability and emotionally intelligent design. It is likely to mean publishers monitoring supply chains and distribution networks carefully, reporting on the ways in which books arrive in the consumer’s hands – absolute transparency about the carbon footprint of a single book, for example. It also might mean creating books that will be kept, objects with which the consumer has a relationship: items that are traditionally crafted, artisanal; they might be regionally produced, heirloom objects that speak to particular times and places in ways that mass-produced and mass-distributed books cannot. (This is the diametric opposite of market-clearing processes by which obsolete items are continually replaced by the new, so requires a different kind of business model altogether.)

The object-ness of books will become important as, and partly because, the status of the book-object is precarious. Informed by ongoing changes in how we think of and relate to objects, both traditional and ‘smart’, has influenced and will continue to influence how we think about what a book is and should be.

Book design is likely to adapt with haptic design technologies, generating intimate, touch-rich experiences. Shape-changing and colour-changing polymers, smart fabrics and e-textiles, soft circuit technologies – all of these could come into play as publishers reimagine the object of the book and the relationship between book and reader. Books will be designed to be close to the body – like Mouse Books, like a smartphone – and wearable technology may provide interesting avenues as well. A deepening engagement with books-as-objects would organically connect with how brands are developed and experienced by consumers as well. Relationships, like objects, would be developed to last longer than a screen-tap.

A general slowdown of innovation would result in more stable, longer-term brand identities and consumer identities. This would require, and stimulate, more frequent and genuine engagement between stakeholders in production and distribution (retailers and publishers, for example) and among consumers, retailers and brands. So much of branding has become emptied of the real – real history, real places, people and stories not generated for clicks and likes – but a slower pace of growth would provide open space for real life to become re-embedded in the items we use and love.

The integration of post-growth practice into working publishing models will undoubtedly be a patchy, challenging process. We’re operating in a risk-averse economic moment, with innovation limited by a number of obvious (and less obvious) constraints. Again, many publishers are simply trying to survive.

And beyond the feasibility of smaller publishers innovating in a difficult market, there are broader ethical questions about the implications of selectivity: what happens to diversity when we opt to produce, and sell, less stuff? Does less content delivered at a slower pace mean smaller worldviews, limited scope? Or simply that publishers become more specialised? How many will disappear?

A positive outcome would be less low-quality content overall, and proportionally more high-quality content; the worst outcome would be that readers have access to less high-quality content because it’s not affordable. There is innovating to do around processes not just for making post-growth practices feasible and sustainable within publishing, but simultaneously mitigating against outcomes that would deepen sociocultural divides.

Despite those challenges, significant change is inevitable. In the immediate sense, this is also a moment of social and cultural transition, with an intense focus on environmental sustainability as a key strand of the COVID-19 recovery. That is, radical change might be more than a possibility; it might be a necessity.

Visionaries and pragmatists in a number of sectors are already reimagining products, services and business models with respect to different metrics of value for human thriving, and refocusing on engaging healthier and more sustainable modes of consumption. And how publishing develops over the medium term will necessarily be aligned with broader patterns of planetary shrinkage and slowdown (of population and of resource use), as is the case for most industries.

Transformation of the industry to operate within planetary boundaries will entail a truly complex and wide-ranging matrix of solutions, with implications at every point in the process, likely across the whole sector. But for literature in particular, a post-growth shift has massive significance, even potential to spark a literary renaissance, as the modes of production and consumption so profoundly affect our sense of what literature is, the benefits we derive from it, how it shapes our lives and futures. And the rewards of moving beyond growth models – the return of quality, time and attention back to individuals – are fundamental to revitalising the cultural value of literature. Without this, books are just more stuff.