Somehow I strongly believe that along with digital books, the emerging paradigm of publishing will lay more stress on graphic novels and audio books.
The changing paradigm may help in restricting the role of social networking as the hyperbole enabler for all things literary, as observed now.
The emerging trend in publishing could broadly be on these lines –
1) Content alone will be the king (or the prime entity, if you don’t like the feudal usage) with media channels across print, visual and audio platforms seamlessly integrated to provide the best user experience
2) Apart from IPR concerns, placing any such created property in the public domain may be influenced by the ‘shelf life’ of such property. A work on politics, economics, technology or medical science for instance may require revisiting and revision to keep it always updated or may be after the shelf life is completed, it may belong to the realms of archival reference material.
3) I am consciously excluding contemporary literature from the ambit of this to avoid unintentionally shifting these discussions to an altogether different plane.
4) Making everything free for download without even knowing who is using it may not be the ultimate solution. It makes the reader laid back to a certain extent as one tends to be satisfied with the mere acquisition of such reading material which could be read at one’s disposal – that never happens, quite often.
5) A better option is to make the content available as reference material with reasonably good search facilities for zeroing-in on what is required. I have downloaded at least 50 books from Project Gutenberg and Project Madurai but these are rarely read. Whereas if I require any particular information, say like, the interpretation of ‘Kalam thodA mAndhar’ in PuRanAnURu by the scholar Avvai.Thiru Duraisamy Pillai, I find it quite easy to visit Tamil virtual university site (tamilvu) and obtain it.
6) Chandamama site is another example of efficient multi-language data dissemination and distribution along with sketches, line drawings and photographs – digitized print of the magazine copies over the past 50 years, month-wise! They have a fascinating print advertisement based search also.
7) The publishing supply chain could start at the author or the reader node. I prefer the author node mostly but am not averse to the process commencing at the reader end.
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