Cultural Tenacity within Libraries and Publishers

Libraries and book publishers coevolved during the period of information scarcity, and developed cultural traits that are affecting their strategies in the new era of content abundance. Both industries are under threat. The author examines the interdependencies, the similarities, and the different agendas of the two cultures; explores likely speciation within the new ecosystems; and frames reasons for both optimism and concern for the near future. Libraries and publishers need each other to survive, as we evolve in the next five years. We’ve spent a century developing a codependent ecosystem, which has strengths that are important, but that are not necessarily robust. Both industries, in the era of vast book and content repositories, and the more general environment of content abundance, could be made functionally moot, if we each simply go our merry way. I’ve been working the tectonic shifts of the digital world since the late ’80s; I helped build Project Muse, back in the mid-90s, and I’ve participated in the many earthquakes in book publishing since then, at the National Academies Press (NAP), the first book publisher to make its material openly accessible online (in 1994). The biggest shifts we’re facing now are the standard litany: the technical revolutions (the shift from dial-up to broadband, the rise of plug-andplay Web software, the explosion of connected devices), and the social revolutions (“content is king” to “comments are king,” social networking, new forms of “web authority,” the move from information scarcity to information abundance). I won’t dwell on those, nor predict whether e-ink or web-on-a-placemat or virtual avatar software might be the next big thing to affect libraries and publishers. Cultural Tenacity within Libraries and Publishers