Publishing Buggywhips
From Wikipedia: Buggy Whips
A buggy whip is a horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage. A coachwhip, usually provided with a long lash, is used in driving a coach with horses in front of other horses. Though similar whips are still manufactured for limited purposes, the buggy whip industry as a major economic entity ceased to exist with the introduction of the automobile, and is cited in economics and marketing as an example of an industry ceasing to exist because its market niche, and the need for its product, disappears. In discussing market regulation, it is often held that the economy would be disadvantaged as a whole if the automobile had been banned to protect the buggy-whip industry.Buggy whips are not entirely gone. A resurgence of interest in the international sport of combined driving and historical carriage driving, sports enjoyed by people of all ages, has allowed some buggy whip manufacturers to stay in business, serving this specialty niche market. Foremost among these is a company in Westfield, Massachusetts.
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When the motor car (the automobile, the self-powered quadricycle, the horseless carriage, by whatever name) got an internal combustion engine, the game changed almost overnight.
Suddenly we could go further, faster, and without leaving dung in the roadways. It was a revolution in transportation technology. Several interdependent industries and networks developed to both support and take advantage of the car (not just car manufacturers: rubber & tire production, the transition of the oil companies from lamp oil to gasoline and the retail network that followed, car sales, and service stations) and our underlying social infrastructure was also forever changed: drive-ins, drive-thrus, motels, interstate highways, suburbs, exurbs, and sprawl — to say nothing of taking a date to a secluded spot, parking, and making out in the back seat.
The Car Changed Everything.
And no doubt, sometime between 1895 and 1910, some internet pundit was immediately on his telegraph key to broadcast to the web (such as it was, at the time) that the Day of the Horse was over, and the Age of Automobile had arrived.
Of course, this is a gross simplification of economic models, as the horse-as-transport is just one aspect of overall animal domestication [food being primary, then and now] and the horse was much more important in that day and age as the horsepower that drove agriculture — interstate commerce was largely done by rail (and rail continued to be important until the 50s, when Eisenhower lobbied for—and eventually signed—the legislation that would found and fund the US interstate system) and personal transport, back in the day, was trolley car, subway (what little mass transit there was at the time) — or shoe leather. Most commuters, as we now understand the term, wouldn’t be able to afford a horse — let alone a pair or team of horses & a carriage, to say nothing of the driver and footmen and grooms and stablehands, and feed and fodder and saddle and tack or harness — this was a major production, getting around by horse.
…which of course is why the car took off, after Mr. Ford manufactured ‘em in quantity and proved the business model and made the car affordable (after a fashion; a single horse was probably still cheaper but it didn’t seat four) — and hired assembly line workers and actually paid them enough to afford the machines they assembled. (Fair wages are Ford’s legacy, more than Model T’s and assembly-line-methods. Ford realized the first customers for his product should be the people working for Ford.)
The introduction of specialized tractors and combines for agriculture has done more than the car ever did to improve your daily lot in life — and did more to change our world — but this idea of car-replacing-horse has made itself a home in the public’s collective memory, and of course more people drive cars every day, as opposed to taking the train (to say nothing of riding a tractor to work)
In areas where dense urban centers had already formed, the impact of the car was lessened (while traffic became even more of a headache, the car was not an engine of geographic destruction) but for much of 50s America, booming with babies and with cheap money for new mortgages via VA Loans and cheap cars rolling off of the same assembly lines that had recently built jeeps and bombers, the modern suburb in all of its ugly glory was born.
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I know I’m the only manga (or comic, or even book) blogger who gives a crap about urban planning and the future of our cities, so I’ll just have to ask that you forgive that last digression. But I do have a point, dragging a dead horse into a editorial on publishing [to be flogged, yet again, only this time not metaphorically]:
The car replaced the horse. Given.
So, all of our horses were converted into baseballs, glue, hamburgers, and fry oil decades ago and the only horses left are in zoos and [mounted and stuffed] in private collections? right?
Actually, no.
Between 59 and 100 Million horses are still employed daily: in sport, recreation, and yes, farm work [the number varies depending on which actual, quoted figure on horses you’d care to believe from the same damn wikipedia article, about six paragraphs apart]
Some people still own horses because they are the best way to do a particular job, even given all other options. Some own horses out of a sense of tradition. Some own them for sport or hobbies. Some own them because horses are beautiful, and there is a bond between us and horses that nothing else can replace.
There may be “better” solution out there, for most needs (but not all) —
but for those who value historical models, or who just aren’t on this tech track just yet, or for whom a technologic-one-size-fits-all solution still doesn’t quite fit: There is still some value in a horse. And it would seem that the Amish may provide a new model for publishing — just because we hadn’t thought about books in quite this way yet.
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50 years from now, Steve Jobs has had his way, and was elected to 2 [non-consectutive] terms as US President and later appointed as Chief Justice to the US Supreme Court. Apple is the new default format; everything and I mean everything is available from the iWhatever store, we only get dissenting news via our inboxes or from RSS feeds, and the wild internets fills in whatever gaps might be left over from your corporate-government-Apple-spoonfed-feed.
The e-book will replace the book. Again, I’ll accept that as a given.
And again I have to say, yes… but no. There will still books.
A book requires no power, no backup, and no support past light enough to read by. There will always be situations where what you need is a book.
And in much the same way that the horse is still used in sport, Books will still be used as a way to convey Art. There may be a billion e-books, and only a scant hundred thousand books, published each year — but each and every one of those books will be worth something. Books will populate many private collections, as some books have intrinsic worth for what they are, and others are just a valuable for what they contain —
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The e-book will replace the book, in the same way that the car replaced the horse.
Sure, if you want to phrase it that way.
But I also hope that even the most fervent e-book advocate will admit that there is still a value in some physical books. If nothing else, the last books will be much like Gutenberg’s first: a bible. No getting around that, no matter how pro-technology you are.
I can see moving almost all of my collection to an e-book format, if and when those volumes become available. Some things (newspapers, magazines) have already been handily supplanted by open web standards and the wealth of information available on the internet. Unless it takes hours to read, we’ve already moved past the printed page. And in time, I could adjust, from reading a page to reading a screen, if the user interface and display technology catch up just a bit more.
I might not miss physical books, just like currently I don’t necessarily miss horseback riding.
But the two experiences are not identical: e-books aren’t books. Riding in a car is no where near the experience of riding on a horse.
This is where publishing will go: the experience that can not be had on a screen.
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And [in a thread I’ll pick up on in the next rethinking the box column] there is still a place for bookstores: there is still expertise, and enthusiasm, and atmosphere, and experiences to be had, even in a world without “books”
