Rapscallion

I’ve been wondering what Marshall McLuhan would have said about the iPad, if he’d still been around for the launch yesterday.

McLuhan – one of the high-priests of 1960s pop culture – with his catchphrases that are now part of the language – ‘The medium is the message’ (well actually ‘massage’ – McLuhan loved his puns), and ‘the global village’. It’s almost 50 years now since his groundbreaking study of mass media, The Gutenberg Galaxy.

The importance of the printing press, McLuhan argued, wasn’t just a matter of speed – that a Bible a monk had lovingly hand-written and illustrated for a year could now be produced in a day or two. It certainly wasn’t a matter of aesthetics – on that count the monk won hands down. But printing transformed the way we lived. Not just read. Lived.

For a start, books and learning were no longer in the hands of a privileged few – the Church. Almost immediately there was a demand for the unthinkable – for the Bible to be published not in Latin, but in modern European languages. This was dissent – it was dangerous. Rome tried to ban books (just as states try to deny access to the internet today); printers were burned at the stake for their heretical ideas. The democratization of learning was a bad thing – how could you control the quality of the message if anyone could publish (sound familiar?), and if the whole population could read?

But media are unstoppable. They won’t be denied. Whether directly or indirectly, Gutenberg’s invention gave rise to the reformation of the Church and the growth of secularism, the spread of universal education, the belief in individualism and self-expression … the novel. Not everyone agreed these were good changes – certainly not those whose authority was threatened. But that’s another thing about the media, says McLuhan. They don’t have feelings. They don’t regret, or necessarily respect the past.

His thinking went deeper. Before printing, most people didn’t read. Passing information involved an oral / aural transfer. When stories were told, the teller and the listener needed to be together – in a room, in a village, round a fire. And all the senses came into the act.

But after printing, how quickly everything changed. The eye became the primary sense. Information transfer could happen over a distance of time or space – we no longer depended on the village. And we learned to be linear, organized. With the printed word, thought was best expressed in structured sentences and paragraphs. So, McLuhan explained, the printing press spawned business organizations, mass production … schizophrenia (well, his thinking was always quirky – you try to explain that one!)

All this was history. But what really excited this media prophet was the future. For 500 years from 1440, nothing much had changed. Print continued to exert its influence over every aspect of our lives. And then suddenly there was a technological revolution – with the invention of radio, TV, the cinema, the phone. Years before the first personal computer was even thought of, McLuhan knew that we were on the threshold of a new age – an electric age.

The new media realigned the senses, moved back away from linearity. Sure, TV and the cinema are visual media, but not in the same way as printing and the book. Once more we’re watching story-tellers, but this time they’re not around the campfire. They’re in Karachi, Johannesburg, Washington. And they work for the BBC or CNN. It’s a different kind of village – a global village.

So what would McLuhan have thought on April 3rd as our friends from Cupertino rolled out their all-singing, all-dancing, finger-clicking new machine? With a full-color e-reader, ibooks with pages that flip to try to pretend this is a real book you’re reading, a free sample of Winnie the Pooh just to get you started? Like me, he might have shaken his head and muttered something about this year’s wannabe becoming next year’s has-been. Because we should know by now, machines are temporary .. but technology is permanent.

And if he’d been sitting next to me, he’d have smiled as we tried to post my ebook to the Apple ibooks store the other morning and discovered that even before breakfast, mine was the 107th electronic book that had been posted by one smallish publisher THAT DAY. He’d have pointed at the Twitter messages fluttering across the top of my Tweetdeck screen from friends in writing and publishing. ‘Don’t try to read them all’, he’d have said. ‘That’s not what they’re there for. They’re just environment, background, to give you a sense of the mood of the day, what the tribe are talking about. Don’t try to read the messages like a book.’

What was my tribe talking about? E-publishing. Every single one of them. Ebooks, just a small – though rapidly growing – fraction of the market a few months ago are suddenly big business. That’s what we’ll remember April 3rd 2010 for. It was the day when e-publishing came of age … the iPad just happens to be – perhaps for only a few days, or weeks, or months – the standard-bearer.

And suddenly, in a few hours, the publishing world has turned upside down. Publishers fear for their books and their profits – they’re trying to drive prices up when inevitably they must come down. Distributors are flexing new muscles and forcing publishers into a corner. New e-providers have suddenly emerged, looking for an opportunity, offering dubious services and terms for e-publishing that writers would be fools to accept. Writers can foggily see new opportunities but don’t know which way to turn. Readers are jumping on bandwagons, loving this and hating that.

And McLuhan says – or it might have been a tweet: ‘Once a new technology starts to roll, if you’re not in the steamroller, you’re on the road.’ He looks me up and down, appraising me. ‘Just make sure it’s the right steamroller.’

This is the first post in a series on the changing publishing landscape, explaining the guiding principles behind Rapscallion – our own new imprint.

And if, like me you’re living in a country where the iPad is off-limits, then here’s a look at what you’re missing.