By Edward Nawotka, Editor-in-Chief
A year ago, I wondered if Barnes & Noble could boost its stock price by dropping the word “booksellers” from it’s official name. Wall Street certainly might like it. After all, the it does make sense—today at B&N you can buy speakers, handbags, crock pots, yoga mats and all other manner of items. “Bookseller” is a convenient, if somewhat antiquated branding.
Of course, you might also say that it is a “brand differentiator,” in so far as it maintains and identity for the company from other retail competitors that sell an equally wide myriad of titles. And, naturally, books still are B&N’s core product.
Sounds absurd? Let’s not forget that Amazon has long dropped the tag line “the world’s biggest bookstore.”
But what if we extended this thought experiment to the entire book business. What if the publishing industry simply stopped using the word “book” to describe its end product. Would this simple change in thinking inspire a revolution in the way publishers look at their jobs.
The change is already happening. At this year’s ongoing Digital Book World conference you rarely hear the use of the word “book” as such. You hear “ebook,” certainly, as well as “print” and “digital” and “format.”
The word “content” echoes through the halls. Rarely still, “IP” — which is how James Frey describes the stories that his company, Full Fathom Five, develops.
Does the word “book” encumber the industry with too much history and tradition for it to move forward with the speed demanded by our new digital world? The words one chooses to describe oneself imply an awful lot about the person at hand. Would this simple alteration change our thinking for good? Or would it simply cause us to lose our identity?
As I said, it’s a thought experiment.
Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think in the comments.
9 Comments
Agree. I do this already for some years now. And the alternative I use is ‘title’. A title can be a book (print), e-book, app, or whatever form it has. It’s about the story, not about the package.
I prefer Stories. It sounds a bit innocuous at first, but it’s less antiseptic than ‘content’ or ‘IP’. It at least implies the act of fashioning a tale, regardless of medium or format. A close second for me is Fiction. I suspect that, as I give it more consideration, I’ll hit upon the perfect term I’m looking for to describe the end product of my work.
To me the name of what they ‘publish’ is less important than their role.
Now the process of publishing is relatively simple and quick, their role as a mechanic in the publishing process is becoming minimalised. As more and more tools are developing, publishing per se will become child play – almost literally.
To me they need to morph into marketeers and value-added-partners for authors.
Great blog by the way …
I disagree. For now, “book” is the best word we have for the entity in all its forms. Books are organized bundles of information, words, or even images, longer than pamphlets, and comprise many genre and purposes.
I think “title” is too abstract. “Stories” works for fiction, but not for poetry, photos, or nonfiction, etc. and neither “title” nor “story” would distinguish books from movies or theater.
Language change is not engineered or top-down, anyway. Publishers and sellers should keep be aware of how words are used, and how readers refer to their products, which terms catch on, etc.
I think the answer lies in simply expanding the definition of “book,” or rather, taking away some of its traditional meaning (“paper volume bound in a certain way”). And in fact, that is what has been happening in the language already.
I agree with Bill Davis, although the advent of digital publishing has loosened the dividing lines between, for example, the long article and the short book. Is a 75-page essay a long article or a short book? Does it make a difference? Probably so, because the work will be marketed and sold differently depending on its description as one or the other.
Isn´t it just a question of the length of a text, and the longterm value of a text?
And not a question of how and in which “packaging” it is published in the analog world?
Services like http://www.dotdotdot.me which enable reading of webtext content as well as ebooks in one place, will more and more blur the line.
A book is an object or a format and I 100% agree that the word is broken.
Here is 6 min on why:
http://vimeo.com/8459799
Great discussion, and naturally leads to the next level of what do we do with chapters. I would say that unless we change what we create and publish from a content point of view, the terms book and chapter are well defined and understood. If we drop “book”, what do we call a textbook – texttitle, textstory? Certainly the term “title” is used extensively inside the publishing houses and is equivalent to book in terms of meaning – maybe it is a viable alternative. Does that mean we need a new term for “title” as “What is the title of the title”? Again great discussion.
I really don’t think the use of the word “book” is causing, or exacerbating, the industry’s problems. They would be no different if they used the words “novels,” “stories,” “titles,” “media” or “fiddly bits.”
The industry is locked into an industrial-slash-commercial-slash-financial process that they don’t want to change… not because it’s so wonderful, but because they hate to be bothered changing it. That would take effort, and cost them profits, and those Lexus SUVs don’t buy themselves. Those issues go a lot deeper than the name of their widget; it’s the widget itself, and the business surrounding it, that need to be addressed.
So, call books “scrolls” if you want to. But fix the process.