After writing yesterday (in The Economics of Shelfies) about the complementarity between e-books and physical books, and arguing that in general different vehicles for ideas are complements rather than substitutes, I happened to read this last night in Tom Standage’s [amazon_link id=”1408842068″ target=”_blank” ]Writing on the Wall: Social Media – the first 2000 years[/amazon_link]. It’s about the circulation of handwritten poetry among groups of friends and family members in Tudor times:

“The printing press was now a century old, but rather than making obsolete the copying and sharing of documents in manuscript form, print actually increased the importance and prevalence of handwritten text. Printing pushed up demand for paper throughout Europe, encouraging production and making it cheaper (its price fell by 40% during the 15th century) and more widely available.”

The passage goes on to explain the fashion for creating ‘miscellanies’ or commonplace books, large handwritten notebooks, sometimes shared.

[amazon_image id=”1408842068″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years[/amazon_image]

I’m about half way through the book and will review it later this week.

Digital technologies have obviously disrupted the publishing business as they have music and film and will do higher education. The record business was first to experience the shock and in its response offered plentiful examples of what not to do. To my mind, publishing has done much better, both in terms of the incumbents safeguarding their position and in terms of innovation with new formats and new creative options.

This is not to say that everything is ideal. There are new, damaging concentrations of market power in e-book distribution. There are too many celeb biographies and cookbooks due to the winner-takes-all dynamics – dynamics that Anita Elberse’s recent book [amazon_link id=”0571309224″ target=”_blank” ]Blockbusters[/amazon_link] explains.

[amazon_image id=”0571309224″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Blockbusters: Why Big Hits – and Big Risks – are the Future of the Entertainment Business[/amazon_image]

Still, as I’ve said a few times, the balance is positive in terms of innovation, and also number of titles available and book sales. This weekend I read this post about the ‘book porn’ phenomenon, the growth in websites like Bookshelf Porn and Explain Yourshelf, the ‘#shelfie‘ vogue on Twitter. The author of the post explains it in terms of the physical pleasure, turning pages, feeling the heft of the book, seeing the spines on the shelf.

There’s an economic account, too, namely that reading online and reading offline are complements, not substitutes. Many people made the assumption that e-books would substitute for physical books. But the sales numbers don’t bear that out, as physical book sales have not declined much (during an economic downturn) while e-book sales have soared (from a low base).

It’s the same mistake that was made when people predicted the paperless office; in fact, access to more information led to more printing of documents, not less. Or when it was predicted that telephones, or social media, would reduce face-to-face contact, when all the evidence is that they increase it (see Ed Glaeser on this).

Generally, forms of communication and vehicles for ideas are complements, not substitutes.

This morning’s Financial Times reports a study saying the number of insolvencies among publishers in the UK has been trending upwards, to 98 in the 12 months to August 2013, from 69 and 36 in the preceding two years. The suggestion is that although entry barriers in publishing have declined and it’s easier to reach customers thanks to digital technologies, margins have been squeezed. After all, in 2012 there were 2,450 books per million people published, which is apparently more per capita than any other country.

I’m a moderate optimist about publishing, which has been more innovative and responsive to customers than some of the other industries, swimming with the digital tides rather than paddling furiously against them. Indeed, I’m sufficiently optimistic to dabble a bit myself with Perspectives.

The FT story does note that many of the insolvencies concern magazine publishers, facing full-on competition from online and often free content. It quotes Richard Mollet of The Publishers Association (they omitted the apostrophe, not me) saying the biggest threat comes to very small publishers from self-publishing. I’m not sure that distinction makes much sense any more – it’s all competitive fringe to the bigger publishers. It isn’t entirely clear from the PA figures, but it looks to me like margins have been increasing for the book sector as a whole – sales values rose 4% in 2012 and volumes declined by 1%. And e-book margins are surely much higher than those for physical books, given the pricing points that have been so successfully established for e-books. Sales of digital books in the UK rose by 66% in 2012.

The really good news about the effects of the technological changes is that people have much greater access to things to read, and greater voice if they want to engage in the debate. So we have the paradox of an increasingly vibrant, engaged public conversation online at the same time that conventional political debate in many countries is becoming increasingly impoverished and ritualised. The public space is reverberating with informed debate – you just wouldn’t know it if you stuck to the conventional channels.

Courtesy of a link tweeted by @TheLitPlatform comes the splendid History of Publishing infographic below.

It merits reading in conjunction with this optimistic article in The New Republic about the future of books. When I linked to this recently, there were some comments suggesting I was being delusionally optimistic about the outlook for the industry. Maybe, although I still think it is encouraging to see how innovative the industry has been compared to the early days of the digital tidal wave washing over the music industry, for example. There are other optimists – this in the Virginia Quarterly Review is another fascinating take on getting people to pay for value in books.

Anyway, the point is that the infographic above is a technology history, and it needs a business history alongside it. Publishing has always been a technology business, and lies at the intersection of monetary and non-monetary values.

Infographic by Finvy