Just Push a Button

At the end of the day, our digital technologies have offered unprecedented access to information, but at costs and levels of difficulty that in some cases are approaching the law of diminishing returns.

Posted on April 1, 2015 in Publisher Editorial

“You just push a button.” That was one of my supervisors speaking, long ago, as he described to his assembled team how easy it was going to be to produce digital versions of materials we had formerly published only in print. “The marginal cost is zero,” he went on, repeating another mantra of those heady days when digital publishing was metaphorically likened to flipping the switch that delivered power to your food processor.

Over the years “just push a button” became something of an insiders’ joke among those of us who had attended that meeting, referring to any reduction of a difficult problem to its simplest—and most misleading—form, but it never lost its original reference to the conceptually elegant notion that “content,” once created, could be effortlessly branched along parallel production streams and issue forth, at the end of the assembly line, onto multiple platforms, with little or no human intervention required.

“Everyone gets everything he wants,” Captain Willard says, early in Apocalypse Now. We certainly wanted the benefits that digital publishing promised, search and multimedia prominent among them, and we worked hard to realize them. And for our sins, to paraphrase Captain Willard, we got them. But what we thought we wanted and what we actually got turned out to be different things. We had not reckoned with the power of human creativity and the relentless pace of technological change it would soon enforce. New tagging standards, programming languages, and metadata descriptions. Multiple operating systems, use-case scenarios, and workflows. Multiple browsers to publish to, multiple versions of each browser to support. Desktops, laptops, tablets, smart phones, and, oh yes, interoperability among them all, with upgrades coming every eighteen months. It’s a time-consuming and expensive proposition, this publishing world we have created. Where is the simplicity we had imagined?

On the other side of the publishing ecosystem, at the library, a similar complexity attends the acquisition of the content we create. Just as digital devices achieve their true promise when aggregated into networks, distribution of digital content is most efficient when content is aggregated into large collections, favoring acceptance plans, patron-driven acquisition, and “big deals.” Scale dominates the process, and with size comes the power to control pricing, license terms, even access. Along the way, the very notion of what constitutes a collection has changed, and with it, the centrality of the library as the metaphorical center of the university. Instead, libraries are learning to adapt as maker spaces, multimedia studios, and social centers. And all of us, publishers and librarians alike, are learning to collect data on every last thing and every last body. All of the time.

At the end of the day, our digital technologies have offered unprecedented access to information, but at costs and levels of difficulty that in some cases are approaching the law of diminishing returns. No wonder open-access is the buzzword of our time. No wonder the appeal of “libraries as publishers.” It makes it all sound so simple, all complexity removed in one clean sweep. Reminds me of “just push a button.”

About the author:

Mark Cummings is the editor and publisher at Choice

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