The Future, and Everything [25.09.2009]

Like almost everyone else in publishing, I've been thinking a lot lately about the future. In fact, I don't think I've ever put so much thought into the future in my life. If I put this much effort into thinking about, say, t-shirt slogans or my brilliant idea for how to telephone all the items I own so that when I lose them I can hear them ringing from the mysterious location in which they lurk, then I'd be a millionaire. And no doubt, I'd have nothing to do with publishing. Perhaps in another dimension somewhere, that's me; wealthy and rolling in it.

But back to the future, as they say. Ordinarily, when one contemplates one's future from a personal perspective you'll have an objective, like: I wanna be the first person to climb Mount Everest, or I want everyone in this town to be wearing one of my fabulous hats by the year 2011 - and then you'd go about heading towards that goal with all the strategies and resources and tactics that you thought were going to get you there. But this future in digital publishing? We're all working the wrong way round. Take the Mount Everest example: we're not entirely sure what the objective is, but we're pretty sure we're going to need an ice pick. We've got a feeling it might be cold, so perhaps we need to start designing some kind of thermal headwear. We're pretty sure we don't have all the necessary skills to achieve this thing that we haven't clearly articulated, but something's telling me we need a sherpa. And fast.

This is the approach that the publishing industry, by and large, appears to be taking. But no one (excluding those who have - I guess they're out there somewhere) has clearly stated what the objective is. Maybe developing eBooks is completely the wrong way to go about it! How will we know if we don't know why we're doing it?

I've got my own hypothetical objective, but it's a confronting one, which is why it's hypothetical. And it expressly concerns the future. Not just of publishing, but of everything. It's this little issue around our environmental impact on this planet. Sometimes I think of it in terms of Anne Frank. For her, and millions of others at the time, she had a war to fight, and it defined her generation, and it dictated the outcome of her existence. For me, the war for the 21st century has been as clearly defined as it was for Anne Frank, and I will spend my life, one way or another, fighting it, and dealing with it, and finding ways to inspire my fellow human beings to do the same. I'm not an environmental activist, you'd barely notice that I spend that much time thinking about it. But I've committed myself, and I've made a personal decision about it. If this forms the basis for my objective then one of the strategies that just might help me get there, is finding a way for publishing and writing to have zero impact on the world's environment in terms of carbon emissions and other environmentally destructive activities. Is an eBook going to do that? Maybe. Maybe not.

To pursue digital publishing in the vain hope that it will be a source of money (and why should publishing suddenly be so lucrative - it never has before) is obviously no objective. To do it because you think you'll be left behind is certainly no reason to climb the tallest mountain in the world. But if you have an objective - and it can be either a personal one or a professional one, they're often the same in any case - then that is cause for celebration. Cause all of a sudden everyone will say 'right! I've got it - I see exactly what you're talking about', and you'll have have captured everyone's imagination and their attention, and everyone will know, without a doubt, what their job is and how they're going to go about it.

Just a thought, anyway.

~ZD

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