The Art of Publishing

I'm a trendy person but...not. Allow me to explain. There are some things I'll do because they are so popular that I want to try it too, if only for the experience. However, there are some trends that I feel no desire to follow. Call it schizophrenia, rebellion, or just plain normality. I mean, people just like different things. Let me provide an example. I read "Harry Potter," but I have no plans of reading "The DaVinci Code" or "The Alchemist." Believe it or not: I'm not the only one. My best friend won't read "Harry Potter" because she believes that it's against her religion. I have another friend who's with me on "The Alchemist." Her reason is that she hates the people who read it and suddenly think they're all philosophical.

I think if I wasn't given an iPod as a gift, it would be one of those trends I despise. I heard a classmate talk about it once. She was saying that she doesn't understand the iPod explosion and won't be buying one for herself. However, I've grown to love my iPod. (My fourth grade teacher would be so disappointed in me. She said that it's gramatically incorrect to say you love something. You can only love someone. For things, places, and the like, one should say that he/she likes it. Example: I really liked fourth grade English.)

Anyway, the reason I brought this up is whatever despise exists for the iPods can't last for long. I read not one, but two, articles on even newer trends as related to the beloved Apple gadget. First, more and more museums are offering audio tours that you can download at your convenience-legally and everything! This may be old news to some, but it's certainly news to me. You can download them before you go to the museum, or you could download them at the museum, or you can borrow an iPod already equipped with the audio tour at the museum.

Some of the museums that offer or will offer this service are as follows: Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), Akron Art Museum in Ohio, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washinton D.C., Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco de Young Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (CA), and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Second, according to the New York Times, "public domain books [are] ready for your iPod." Books, whose copyright has expired (i.e. published before 1923), are being made into audiobooks by everyone from amateurs to professional voice actors. Even you can submit one! This is all made possible by Project Gutenberg which supports the following services: LibriVox, Telltale Weekly, Spoken Alexandria Project, and LiteralSystems. Listeners can have their pick of the litter--anything from theBible to the Declaration of Independence to Jane Austen. Each audiobook title has different versions. Librivox, for one, has three versions of the Gettysburg Address.

There has been a lucrative market for audiobooks and downloading the actual book on one's computer, but now, there's the downloading of audiobooks onto one's iPod. I think this is the new direction that publishing companies are going to take. Perhaps they'll sell them on iTunes for 0.99 cents.

In line with this is an article in this semester's Reed magazine, "A Conversation with James D. Houston." He was asked how things have changed in the publishing business over the last 50 years. The noted author replied, "When I first started publishing books, there were probably 30 or 40 separate publishing houses in New York, and now they've one by one been bought up by larger conglomerates or merged with other publishers...The business is more and more controlled by, not a literary mentality as it used to be, but by corporate mentality."

Unfortunate but true. I have to agree with Houston. It saddens me that publishing companies are all about the business behind the books and not the books behind the business.