What Is the Business of Literature?
Richard Nash
Editor's note: The following piece by Richard Nash will appear in our Spring 2013 issue, as the lead in a portfolio focused on the business of literature.
As technology disrupts the business model of traditional publishers, the industry must imagine new ways of capturing the value of a book.
As technology disrupts the business model of traditional publishers, the industry must imagine new ways of capturing the value of a book.
"The story of the book as technology—the book as revolutionary, disruptive technology—must be told honestly, without triumphalism or defeatism, without hope, without despair, just as Isak Dinesen admonished us to write. A great challenge in producing such an account, however, is the “availability heuristic.” This is a model of cognitive psychology first proposed in 1973 by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky, which describes how humans make decisions based on information that is relatively easy to recall. The things that we easily recall are things that happen frequently, and so making decisions based on the samples we have at hand would seem to make sense. The sun rises every day; we infer from this that the sun rises every day. A turkey is fed every day; it infers that it will be fed every day—until, suddenly, it isn’t. Heuristics are great until they aren’t. A person sees several news stories of cats leaping out of tall trees and surviving, so he believes that cats must be robust to long falls. These kinds of news reports are far more prevalent than ones where a cat falls to its death, which is the more common event. But since it is less reported on, it is not readily available to a person for him to make judgments.
Publishing is tremendously susceptible to the availability heuristic for two significant reasons. First, prior to recent innovations, manuscripts not published were unavailable for analysis. So the universe of knowledge we have about books, literature, and publishing excludes that universe of books that were never published. It also mostly excludes those books that were commercial or critical failures. One doesn’t see books that don’t sell, not on store bookshelves or in friends’ houses, not on Top Ten lists, not on Twitter, not in the Times (London, New York, Irish), and so on."
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