Shakespeare's Birthday: Publishing in the New Frontier

First, happy birthday to the Bard of Avon (1564-1616), an extremely talented man ripped off by his own publisher. I've mentioned elsewhere that, in his lifetime, Shakespeare didn't own the rights to his own sonnets and the printer who published him put out a collection of his work (that also included poems only attributed to him; talk about diluting the brand!) without paying him a farthing. (Copyright wouldn't be developed for nearly another 100 years.) Printing presses in Europe were only around 100 years old (Gutenberg, the European inventor, died in 1468) and just coming into wide use at this time, so books were still something of a luxury item. The text was laboriously hand set, the signatures hand-cut and hand-sewn and hand-bound, so there was still a lot of labor involved in producing multiples, which made them somewhat pricey. The beauty of poetry is that it's short and needn't be more than a single signature. It can also be pamphlet-bound which makes it far less work than a leather-bound book and a quick money-maker.

I won't go into the whole history of printing and publishing here, but suffice to say, it's going in some interesting directions now. Print On Demand (POD) publishing has become quite popular and distribution over the net has made advertising far cheaper and wider than ever before possible. In true conglomerate fashion, Amazon, which is now the world's largest bookseller, is trying to horn in on the action of PODs and corner the market. It recently bought BookSurge, a POD company, and is now telling other POD publishers that it must use BookSurge's facilities or forgo distribution by Amazon. This is very bad news for places like Lulu and Lightning Source. From the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon's Web site.

Amazon "doesn't consider this an ultimatum," according to one of its spokespersons, but when you've cornered 15% of the book distribution market, and most of the online market, what else can you call it? Okay, blackmail, maybe. Extortion? Oh, I know. Monopoly!

In the spirit of independent publishing and World Book Day, Oached Pish has gathered a list of links to independent publishers in honor of the Bard's birthday. You'll see my own Maelstrom House listed there, though I haven't got much stock yet, and everything else from manga to poetry.

And if you're a poet thinking about DIYing, it's worth checking out the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative for links and news.