What is the business of literature? It is about making culture

What is the Business of Literature? by Richard Nash. An excellent article crammed with interesting and provocative ideas and which strips away a lot of the miasma of unicorn gibberish so often associated with "Literature" and deals in the hard ideas that might make a difference.

Nash lays out a history of writing and publishing, highlighting the serial inflection points where the technology of book creation has led the way and transformed the cultural landscape, each time amidst howls of transitional anguish.

He offers the insight, explored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in both Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, that in systems of large numbers characterized by hidden feedback mechanisms, non-linear processes, volatility and excessive sensitivity to exogenous shocks, that the outcome cannot be predicted in advance. One chooses to play the game but one cannot reliably forecast winning.

What is published is published, and from that pool we choose to celebrate what we celebrate, and we say the system produced these celebrated works because, well, they’re available.

He points out what is obvious:

Editors are also needed to produce books, of course. But beyond their editorial skills, what has kept editors in demand is relationship skills. The skill that is commonly associated with the pinnacle of editorial talent—picking the right book—is, frankly, nonsense. Success, in terms of picking things, is a hybrid of luck with the non-self-evident and money with the self-evident, and even the self-evident often requires luck. This is not to say that people don’t work hard on those books that have gotten lucky, but all the retrospective justifications for why, say, The Da Vinci Code, or the Harry Potter series succeeded are trumped by what really was a matter of luck and network effects. Books, like most entertainment media, live in what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls Extremistan, a place with vast amounts of commercial failure and spectacularly high and extremely infrequent success.

To his titular question, his answer is that

It is not about making art; it is about making culture, which is a conversation about what is art, what is true, what is good.

He asks

So why is the margin attributable to the ideas in a book so low, at times in fact negative, whereby the total revenue earned by the book is less than the cost of producing and distributing it? Not because our society doesn’t value literature, as so many of us complain, but because it takes so long to discover whether or not you’ll actually like the book.

I believe this to be one of the central challenges for book culture - in an environment of universal access to an essentially infinite number of books and the practical reality that only the most enthusiastic readers are likely to read even 1,500 books as adults, how can we reduce the cost (make it easier) for an individual to be able to identify those books they are likely to be interested in at a given moment in time?

Abundance, it turns out, is a much bigger problem to solve than scarcity

He concludes

Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian.