{"id":1042,"date":"2009-12-02T11:11:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-02T19:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/12\/the-future-of-publishing.html"},"modified":"2009-12-02T11:11:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T19:11:00","slug":"the-future-of-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2009\/12\/the-future-of-publishing.html","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Publishing?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><a href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_yrL6yfubw8g\/SxbEmKaEHjI\/AAAAAAAAAjs\/9VkU1drfZtw\/s1600-h\/bookshop-ty.jpeg\" imageanchor=\"1\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_yrL6yfubw8g\/SxbEmKaEHjI\/AAAAAAAAAjs\/9VkU1drfZtw\/s320\/bookshop-ty.jpeg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>WITH dignitaries including saxophonist Wayne Shorter and Ray Bradbury, and displays ranging from publishers&#8217; new books to the history of the low-rider, the Guadalajara International Book Festival &#8212; dedicated this year to the literature and culture of Los Angeles &#8212; has been quite packed already. I&#8217;m going to try to offer a few snapshots of Tuesday&#8217;s festival &#8212; hoping to get time for a second post on last eve&#8217;s wild night.<\/p>\n<p>The afternoon included a typically elegiac, mandarin speech by former LATimes book editor Steve Wasserman on the future of publishing. We&#8217;ve entered what he calls &#8220;an ultimate stage in the democratization of knowledge.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also, he said, a time when digital technology, conglomeration, the collapse of bookstores, independent and otherwise, &#8220;renders serious reading increasingly irrelevant.&#8221; He fears a &#8220;hollowing out&#8221; of the culture of sustained argument that makes for an informed citizen.<\/p>\n<p>Literary people, Steve feared, will become &#8220;the party of the past.&#8221; He compared the situation in the U.S. to Europe and especially Germany, where state controls (forbidding price-slashing) kept an indie bookstore culture thriving even in bad economic times.<\/p>\n<p>He offered two contrasting phrases. First, Philip Roth&#8217;s prediction that the novel will go the way of Latin, known only to a small elite. And second, Auden&#8217;s line, &#8220;It is always a danger for the present to write history in the future tense.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WITH dignitaries including saxophonist Wayne Shorter and Ray Bradbury, and displays ranging from publishers&#8217; new books to the history of the low-rider, the Guadalajara International Book Festival &#8212; dedicated this year to the literature and culture of Los Angeles &#8212; has been quite packed already. I&#8217;m going to try to offer a few snapshots of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,365,40,30,109,86,373],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"category-guadalajara","8":"category-indie","9":"category-los-angeles","10":"category-publishing","11":"category-technology","12":"category-wasserman","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}