Klinging to the coattails of a futurist
View from the hotel in Denver
by Christine Kling
For many years when I was a teacher and then a college professor, I loved to go to technology conferences. I admit that I am more than a little geeky, and I used to love to go to the presentations by the “futurists” most of all. I remember how astonished I was when I first learned about Moore’s Law back in about 1999. This law was postulated by Gordon E. Moore, the founder of Intel and it states that the number of microprocessor transmitters in computers doubles about every two years. It was nearly impossible to believe that we would have computers with one terabyte of memory or that operated at the sort of speeds we see today. And the idea that we would all be carrying powerful computers around in our pockets (smart phones that could also do global positioning) just sounded crazy – but exciting crazy. It made my head hurt in a wonderful way to think about the future back then, and it still does. So this was certainly part of the allure when I first met Wayne. He worked for the California software company Autodesk for more than 20 years, and his title was “strategic futurist.” His job was to travel all over the world and speak at conferences. Today, I got to see why.
So, yes, the whirlwind world travel tour continues and this time our travels have taken us to Denver, CO so Wayne could present the keynote address at the CAD-1 company’s 25th anniversary customer appreciation day. We flew in the day before, Wayne kicked off the event this morning, and we are on our flight back to Kelowna, BC tonight where our two dogs are enjoying life on a beautiful farm in the Okanagan Valley.
One of the many things I found so fascinating about watching Wayne both at the dinner last night and especially this morning, was the way I kept interpreting what he was talking about and applying the new ideas to my field of publishing. We writers often use the “building a house” metaphor to describe what we do when we write books so listening to his talk (to a room full of architects and contractors) about change increasing at an exponential rate really hit home for me.
Let’s think for a bit about the history of writing as we know it. For thousands of years, people painted on cave walls, carved hieroglyphics on stone, and wrote using sticks and clay tablets. Then, mankind advanced to papyrus and parchment made of animal skins and many more manuscripts could be created because they were easier to make. But duplicating writing really took off when wood pulp paper was created and all those religious guys were put to work in the Middle Ages copying manuscripts. Then along came Gutenberg in1450 with his moveable type printing press and by 1500 Europeans had printed more than 20 million volumes (according to Wikipedia). In the years since we’ve seen lithography, off-set printing, Xerography, laser printing, et al, and the numbers of books produced by all this technology has increased — yes, exponentially.
Today, we no longer need to print our books: we have digital books. We’ve gone from carving in stone to light dancing across a screen and this new technology is being adopted faster any previous method for distributing writing. The number of titles published worldwide (not individual volumes) is now in the millions according to this Worldometers website.
One of the stories that broke this week with headlines I saw on several sites insisted that the growth of ebooks had now flatlined. According to this story at Digital Book World, “The BookStats report, from the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, confirmed earlier reports from the AAP and anecdotal evidence. Ebook revenue in 2012 was about $3 billion as well, up from $2.1 billion in 2011.” So there had been huge growth from 2011 to 2012 and they are taking the stalled growth the following year to mean that this new technology has maxed out the audience. However, the article goes on to say, “Trade publishing revenues overall in the U.S. were also basically flat in 2013 at $14.6 billion, down slightly from nearly $15 billion in 2012.” In other words, the headline that I would have written was that ebooks held their own while sales of print books declined. There are sometimes lulls in the exponential growth (we are in such a lull right now in the growth of computer speeds) but it doesn’t mean that the curve is going to flatten out – only that it will average out soon.
The clear message I got from Wayne’s talk this morning was that businesses need to figure out what it is that they do. He calls this their “value proposition.” So ever since this morning, I’ve been turning that over in my head. What is it I do as a business? That should be an easy one. As an author, I’m in the business of selling books, right? Actually, I don’t think so.
After some thought, I’ve concluded that what writers really do is we communicate ideas. That’s what we’ve been doing whether we were painting on walls, poking sticks into clay or clicking away at the keyboard of a computer. It just so happens that as a novelist, I craft my ideas into story, but non-fiction writers are also in the business of selling ideas, and theirs might take on a different structure. Today, some writers are telling their stories through plays, films and video games, and I think we need to understand that the medium – papyrus, paper or electrons – is not the point. If we allow ourselves to get too bogged down in thinking we’re selling books, we’re likely to follow the trails of Kodak or Blockbuster Video. Perhaps, ten years from now, we will be adding Barnes & Noble and some of the less nimble big publishers to that list.
Fair winds!
Christine
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