From time to time I've written about a forthcoming book with an ironic title Print is Dead by Jeff Gomez (this links to his excellent blog), who is about join Penguin USA in a senior electronic publishing role.

I asked him to describe what it felt like to be on the receiving end of being published rather than the doing end of publishing and, being the professional he is, he has delivered on schedule and to commission. Thanks, Jeff. If only all authors...

In the 1991 film The Doctor, William Hurt plays an arrogant young physician who becomes ill with throat cancer. As he begins to go through the health care system --- as an ordinary patient and not a hot-shot doctor --- Hurt is shocked by how clinically he’s treated; he feels like an object instead of a human being. The experience forces him to reflect on how a profession whose stated goal is to help people can end up treating them as little more than a commodity. By the end of the movie, of course, he has acquired a new and added perspective on his profession.

As someone who works in publishing who has recently been through the process of writing and editing a book, I’ve been thinking of this film a lot over the past couple of months. That’s not to say that my treatment during the past year (it was last September that I signed the contract to write the book, and it’s now been printed and will be in stores in November) has been anywhere near as traumatic as what William Hurt faces in The Doctor. In fact, it hasn’t been a bad experience at all. But it has indeed been important and instructive, and it’s an experience I wish more people in our industry could have.

One of publishing’s dirty little secrets is that, increasingly, it’s not about the books. Or maybe, it’s too much about the books (meaning books as objects, or even books as a number on a balance sheet). In the publishing process we find ourselves sometimes getting removed from the ideas and stories found in our books; the words that provide the power to deliver amazing and transformative experiences to readers (and are therefore the kinds of books we read growing up that made us want to get into this business in the first place). 

One of the reasons this happens is because people who work in publishing, for the most part, have not had the experience of writing and publishing a book. They know the physical process, and they know the business inside and out, but they don’t know what it means to slave over an idea, or live with a single character or theme, for a number of years. They don’t know what it’s like to see their name on a dust jacket, not to mention --- after all that hard work --- getting a hideous review on Amazon. (Having been through both experiences, I can safely say that one is better than the other).

They also don’t know the feeling of having a signing and showing up to an empty bookstore, reading to just employees and in the end not signing anything but some stock. True, some editors and publicists have witnessed these kinds of things from the wings, while escorting their authors around town, but it’s a much different experience when you’re the one standing in front of all those unoccupied folding chairs.

In Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, Michael Douglas's infamous character Gordon Gekko at one point says, “Today, management has no stake in the company.” What Gekko meant was a financial stake; people who were Vice Presidents didn’t own company stock, and thus were sometimes not terribly motivated to make the company perform well since it wasn’t their own fortunes on the line. Well, in today’s literary world I would make the comparison that, in publishing, we are like those Vice Presidents Gekko described.

Not because we don’t care whether or not our companies do well (we of course have a vested interest in the well-being of our companies; without them, we wouldn’t have a job). But rather, it’s not our names on the dust jacket, spine or title page. Our hopes and dreams don’t (usually) ride on the success or failure of any particular book. In fact, the same way that hundreds of sentences create a novel, the dozens or hundreds of books we’re associated with throughout our tenure at any one company form our career. Our reputations don’t rest on one book or another. And yet, for many authors --- especially first-time ones --- this is it. This is what they’ve been dreaming of for much of their lives, and we shouldn’t take that for granted or treat it cavalierly in any way.

That’s not to say that we don’t root for our titles, or that editors don’t evangelize their writers internally and externally. They do, and I’ve seen many editors do everything that they could to get the word out about a book that they loved. But still, at the end of the day, it’s a business. It’s a business we love, and one we wouldn’t trade for anything else, but it’s still business. And the fact is, the books we sell aren’t our own words.

Because, while we can imagine what it’s like and try to empathize, it’s just not the same until it happens to you. It reminds me of when I was having dinner years ago with a friend who’s a famous writer, and we got to talking about Spy magazine. (This was during the interregnum when Spy was off the shelves for a few years before coming back to life.) My first novel was about to come out, and I was lamenting the fact that Spy wasn’t around to make fun of me. My friend looked up from his meal and warily said, “It’s not as fun as you think.” At the time, I just waved his comment aside with a grin. Well, when my second novel came out, in 1997, Spy had returned and, lo and behold, they made fun of me. And guess what? My friend was right.

Beyond this general feeling, I think we as publishers tend to use our experience and knowledge in a way that automatically puts the author at a disadvantage. We’re the ones who know the trends, the sales curves, and --- more importantly --- the fiction buyer at Barnes & Noble. We think we know best, and we make decisions based on this fact. But we’re not the ones who wrote the book. And sometimes, during various parts of the publishing process, authors are made to feel more or less powerless.

For instance, I’ve had five books published, and I’ve never had major input on a cover. In fact, for my first novel, I had a terrific fight with my publisher and --- even though I loathed the cover beyond belief --- they went ahead and printed it. (True, I was a first time author, but I have since commiserated with other authors, ones who have sold many more books than I ever did, and they have confirmed similar experiences.) And so, back then, I was that crabby author on the other end of the phone; the one who caused an editor’s eyes to roll towards the ceiling. Later in the day I was the subject of a snarky story told in the elevator on the way down to lunch (“Guess who still doesn’t like his cover?”).

I was a problem, a nuisance, a bore; a know-it-all and someone who didn’t know anything (both at the same time!). And yet I was also a writer, an author whose book they had paid for and put on the cover of their catalog. I remember at the time being immensely confused, thinking, “How could they want my novel, but not my advice?” And now the shoe is on the other foot. For instance, I’ve been on the phone with authors who were complaining about their websites, and this time it’s my eyes that roll. I tell stories about them the way that my previous publishers used to talk about me.

It reminds me of a scene in Annie Hall (yes, for someone in publishing, I know I watch too many movies), where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are both on screen in separate therapy sessions. The off-screen doctors ask them each a question (“Do you sleep together much?” “Do you have sex often?”), and even though the questions are essentially the same, their answers are different. Keaton replies, “Constantly, three times a week,” while Allen answers, “Hardly ever, three times a week.” While this exchange is a wry commentary on how, within a romantic relationship, two people can have the same experience but reflect on it differently, I can see a correlation to our industry. Because, during the typical publishing experience, we always think we’re doing everything we can to help our writers. Meanwhile, they think we’re not doing enough.

All of which goes to say that, while I doubt every person who works in publishing will find the time to write and publish a book, I think that if everyone tried more often to envision what it’s like to be an author, we would be better off.  After all, we spend so much time these days crunching data and trying to look at our products from the point of view of consumers, reviewers, and booksellers; we should try to also imagine what it feels like to be a writer. 

This is going to be the shortest posting for a while but it might just be the most important. Click on this link to Jeff Gomez's excellent Print is Dead blog. Perhaps Manolis Kelaidis is to the digital world what Allen Lane was to mass-market paperbacks, Paul Hamlyn to colour illustrated books, or Robert Maxwell to scientific publishing.

Invariably when there is discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of print versus digital delivery of books, someone says: 'Ah, but you wouldn't want to read an e-book in the bath.' I am therefore most grateful to New Yorker Chris Steib who has undertaken a controlled scientific experiment comparing his Sony Reader and a print copy of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The Reader won!

I must thank Jeff Gomez and his Print is Dead blog for stimulating the experiment in the first place and then bringing it to my attention. Jeff's book (in print and digital editions)with the same title comes out in November.

I had a meeting yesterday with the person responsible for the OUPBlog. They manage approximately two postings a day, which puts me to shame - and they are very interesting. My only defence is that most days the blog is written by one of their illustrious authors while I'm pretty much a sole trader with the occasional and much-appreciated support of some Macmillan colleagues.

I've just seen the latest account from Google ads, a majestic $122.78. Here's my question. Do the ads upset any of you in any way?

One of my favourite columnists is Matthew Parris. His latest piece is entitled 'So much for world progress. We have failed. We're stuck.' It promotes the contrarian view that there has actually been little progress in the last fifty years in the West (accepting that developing countries have seen significant change). He also referenced this link to the February 1950 issue of Modern Mechanics magazine predicting how the world will be in 2000. The predictions are, by and large, wrong. Here is one paragraph which is fairly typical.

'When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors — all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled “linen” into the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.'

This got me thinking about our ability to predict and how hopeless we probably are. We all remember predictions for the paperless office. Ha. Remember when libraries were going to get rid off all books and replace them with microfilm? Ha.

However, sneakily things do change (usually in an unpredicted fashion) and book publishing is changing. Last year we commissioned Jeff Gomez who is head of internet marketing at Holtzbrinck Publishers USA to write a book about these changes. It's called 'Print is dead' and will be published in print form this Autumn (or Fall). As part of writing the book Jeff has set up the brilliant Print is dead blog and I was particularly taken by this photo and quote from Woody Allen:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

My piece yesterday on BookStore prompted my good friend, colleague and author Jeff Gomez to remind me of the blog he's set up to support his forthcoming book, Print is Dead, which we are publishing in print and electronically later this year. Jeff is responsible for the electronic publishing and marketing of much of Holtzbrinck Publishers, our sister company in USA and he knows what he's talking about.

And another sister company has just launched a new service to showcase the fruits of Chinese science to the world. It is Nature China. This has been made possible by the generous sponsorship support of AstraZeneca and is another example of the development of multiple business models to support the dissemination of scholarly material.

Yesterday I was asked in the comments for more detail on our visitors. Here are two pretty pictures showing which websites feed this blog and which countries during January. I hope they are helpful.

I've been lucky enough in my career to have worked for and with amazing people. It's impossible for me to create league tables as they do at the Nibbies but the former Managing Director of Oxford University Press in India, Ravi Dayal was definitely premiership. He was the real editor, the real publisher, the real thing - and a gent to boot. I have just heard about his death and wanted to write about him but Amitav Ghosh says it so much better. And Ravi himself writing on Delhi as Khayasa'a View gives some sense of the man as well as the city:

SEMINAR’S letter seeking contributions to this issue on Delhi refers to ‘Your city – where it is at, how it has changed and grown, and whether it has changed its identity.’ Many solemn books on Delhi have been published over the years to confirm in stodgy detail what amateur eyewitnesses have long taken to be self-evident – that Delhi has, of course, changed enormously since the inauguration of New Delhi in 1931 and, more so, since 1947.

In 2001 the extravaganza of The Millennium Book on New Delhi, edited by B.P. Singh and Pavan K. Varma, OUP, was published. It deals with many of the issues now sought to be raised by Seminar and the bibliography of even that unscholarly volume lists some 80 titles. People have not only written on the monuments and history of medieval Delhi, but a great deal on the 20th century city, including its obsession with politics, and the fact that jackals could be heard on the outskirts of Barakhamba Road in the 1950s and nilgai roamed until later in the scrub now occupied by Pragati Maidan.

Many other details could be filled in to show how Delhi has changed: the expansion of the population from less than a million in 1946 to more than 12 million by 2000; the fact that you didn’t need to boil or filter drinking water until the 1970s; could eat kakri and chaat from pavement vendors without falling terminally ill; could walk on grassy sidewalks in leather-soled shoes without damaging your heels and shins, as you would now on concrete pavements; could enjoy a boat ride on the Jumna rather than be driven to attempting to do so in a fragment of the stinking moat below the Purana Qila, and so on.

Delhi is vast, and it is said to be a microcosm of India; it is inhabited liberally by people from all parts of the country and shared by all. Seminar’s letter refers to ‘Your city’ – but apart possibly from the politicians who infest the city and have appropriated the prettiest real estate in it for themselves, do people still think of themselves as Dilliwallahs, as the Mathur Kayasthas of Delhi once did?

Born of Mathur parents, and having had an association with Delhi for as long as I can remember (i.e. from circa 1940), I have periodically thought of myself as an authentic Dilliwallah. Although much of my childhood was spent outside Delhi, we were annual winter migrants to the city over sixteen years when I joined Delhi University and stewed for the next five (1954-9). Thereafter, I was based outside Delhi for the next eleven years as a student and then a publisher, and have been a publisher here since 1971. My genes, college days and profession have conspired to tie me to the city and coloured my view of it, so in this brief piece I will restrict myself to what flows from these three elements.

One of the traditional conceits of the Mathurs of Delhi is that they consider themselves the highest form of a high species – perhaps less flamboyant than the Mathurs once based in Lahore, but infinitely more refined as speakers of a tongue untainted by Punjabi; a cut above those in Rajasthan, who servilely served provincial rulers and said hukum; somewhat similar to members of the community in Agra and Lucknow, but free of the small-town smugness of urban U.P. The Mathurs of Delhi also considered themselves Dilliwallahs par excellence, forgetting that the city is now barely aware of them.

My father’s family was originally from Peepalmandi in Agra, but with innumerable relations in Delhi; my mother’s family was once based in Chelpuri and Chiraykhana in the Old City – always referred to as shahar by insiders, and never as Shahjahanabad. Early in the 20th century some Mathurs from these mohallas colonized spacious houses with large gardens in the Civil Lines area, mostly a swathe of land with ber orchards enclosed by Commissioner’s Lane and Usmanpur (now Jumna) Road. Many of them were lawyers, some became civil servants, others taught Urdu and Persian in colleges, and some concentrated on enjoying good food and music. Qudsia Bagh and the Jumna across Bela (now Ring) Road were abiding factors in their lives – the river kept the area fragrant and comparatively cool, its sandy banks yielding walks and melons.

Some Mathur families were persuaded by the early developers of New Delhi to move to the new city. They clustered around Connaught Place, on Barakhamba and Curzon (now Kasturba Gandhi) Roads, and areas like Babur Road and Hanuman Road. All retained strong connections with their kin in ‘Shahar’ and the Civil Lines, and all the major shopping – whether for clothes, jewellery, spices, paan, tin boxes, books and stationery – was still done in the Old City.

You couldn’t bypass Shahar. The entry into Delhi was always by train, at the Old Delhi railway station (the New Delhi station was largely ceremonial until the 1950s). There were usually prolonged unscheduled halts of the train at the Ghaziabad and Shahdara railway stations and, invariably, on the old iron bridge spanning the Jumna, from where passengers had the classical view of the dhobis of Delhi washing and drying clothes on the river bank. The last phase of the journey was exhilarating as the train chugged through the Salimgarh fort and skirted the walls of the Lal Qila: the sense of entering a great and historic city was palpable.

The journey to a home in very central New Delhi was done in a tonga or two, with tin trunks and holdalls and baskets piled high. The route was well-trodden, the streets the tonga clattered through celebrated: it went past the Public (now Har Dayal) Library, down Nai Sarak, then Chawri Bazar, past Qazi Hauz and on to Ajmeri Gate (through which the tonga went, the horse’s hooves echoing), past Delhi (now Zakir Husain) College and eventually down and up the Minto Bridge slope (where the tonga moved at the pace of a pedestrian and a gleaming Connaught Place came into view). Old Delhi was not only an essential and hallowed part of the route, but also the place where people indulged in sharp practices (with elegance), sharp talk and, generally, were city-slickers in a city they ardently believed to be the acme of creation.

As late as the 1950s the most trusted doctors in Delhi were located in Chandni Chowk or Daryaganj, and the great tailor was Mohammad Umar, who functioned in a lane not far from Atma Ram’s, the best bookshop in Delhi, and in the Kashmiri Gate area. You didn’t know good cuisine unless you had eaten in Shahar, and of the four stylish hotels in Delhi, only the Imperial was in New Delhi: the rest – the Cecil, the Swiss and Maidens – were in the Civil Lines area. When a West Indies cricket team first toured India, it was housed at Maidens, which rocked with calypso rhythms for the likes of Wallcot, Weekes, Gomez and George Headley.

And yes, people went to Shahar to see and ride in trams, perhaps the ricketiest, slowest and oldest trams in the world, but the only ones in north India. Not even Lahore could boast of trams. Shahar remained the heart and soul of Delhi throughout my days in Delhi University. Our movements circumscribed by poor public transport (perhaps the only element of continuity in Delhi), the lack of personal scooters, motorcycles and cars, an outing from the campus usually led to Kashmiri Gate or the Jama Masjid area: we often walked there, and the route to Chandni Chowk meant using the high pedestrian bridge across the railway track near Kash Gate and often emerging from that exercise covered with soot from the puffing steam engines below as they pulled wagons to or from the Old Delhi station.

Until the late 1950s even those living outside the city walls knew Shahar reasonably well. New and Old Delhi together still formed a comparatively compact unit, with New Delhiwallahs making regular forays into Shahar and the Civil Lines areas: Moti Mahal was a premier attraction, and the bar and nightclub at Maidens’ the fanciest in town. The Ring Road hadn’t yet come into being, so people couldn’t ignore the Old City.

The journey to the university meant rides through Daryaganj and past Lal Qila, frequently involving prolonged halts in these areas as buses were changed. During these halts one got to know the dhabas and stalls near the bus stands, and, if a suitable bus failed to turn up, the journey was often continued on foot or temporarily abandoned in the galis of the Old City. Commuters thus got to know the book-shops in Daryaganj and Nai Sarak, and the kabariwallas near the Jama Masjid. These meanderings also prevented some of us from forgetting the Urdu script entirely, for the hoardings and signboards in the Old City were still mostly in Urdu and it was reassuring to be able to decipher them.

The cohesive, urbane combine of New and Old Delhi no longer exists and while Delhi has grown into a vast city over the last few decades, its different parts don’t seem to make up a whole. The area covered by it appears to have reverted to what it was before Shahar came into being – a collection of disconnected villages, each with its own ways and mannerisms, and altogether more provincial than the stylish, integrated city of not so long ago.

The village I inhabit, roughly extending from the Lodi Gardens to the Purana Qila, with Khan Market, several schools and Sujan Singh Park as its focal points, and the IIC, IHC, Humayun’s Tomb, the Oberoi Hotel and Taj Mansingh at its periphery, is agreeable enough, but it’s not a distinctive civilization, as Delhi once was. It is, nevertheless, a central area in a city that has expanded thirty kilometres afield in all the cardinal directions, and is visited by and known to people living in the outbanks. But most of the outbanks are less fortunate and remain strangers to each other.

There is, thus, no such thing as a Dilliwallah any more, and this absence seems to be part of the present, amorphous identity of the city. There are Londoners and New Yorkers, Parisians and Mumbaikars, Mysoreans and Hyderabadis, but the inhabitants of Delhi are now anonymous. Even the Mathurs have stopped calling themselves Dilliwallahs. How can it be otherwise if you live in GK II, your spouse perhaps a Sikh, your son an investment banker in New York, your daughter-in-law an Italian and your grandson unable to digest a decent, spiced kabab made of goat meat?

While the Dilliwallah may have gone into oblivion, the other Kayastha conceit – of being traditionally literate and literary and, generally, good pen-pushers – has prospered in the changed environment. The Mathurs were quick to take to the new educational system introduced by the British and soon entered professions that needed the skills so acquired. Pedigree Mathur that I am, I became part of a comparatively new form of pen pushing in 1961 – publishing, and from my publishing peep-hole have not only witnessed and participated in the flowering of publishing in Delhi over the last few decades, but also been struck by the spectacular growth in Delhi’s educational system and intellectual infrastructure which catalyzed publishing.

India’s educational system is much derided, no doubt with good reason, but the good should not be interred with the bones: one of the good things is that in the hurly-burly of the last five decades, as Delhi shed its old scales and didn’t quite refashion itself as a cohesive whole, it also became India’s premier educational centre and a magnet for the country in this area. If Delhi has more automobiles than Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai put together, it also probably has more authors than in these cities put together, and produces books in a similarly excessive proportion.

This wasn’t always so. Until the mid-1960s Bombay was the major publishing centre in the country, with Calcutta and Madras not far behind. The best book printers and binders were in these cities, and even in 1971, when the OUP opened its office on Ansari Road, its bigger books were usually typeset there or in Pondicherry. With every major publishing house shifting base to Delhi around then or soon after, the skills needed to make a decent book rapidly developed in the region, and Delhi now leads the field both in printing and publishing.

Initially it was Ansari Road in Daryaganj that hosted the publishing renaissance, and manuscripts from Delhi University that nourished it, but matching the expansion of the city further south and the growth of author-yielding institutions in other parts of the city, publishing too is no longer concentrated along the rim of the Old City. Penguin are now in Panchsheel, OUP on Jaisingh Road, IndiaInk in New Rajendra Nagar, Permanent Black in Patparganj and Ravi Dayal in a back-room facing a garden and a pomegranate tree in Sujan Singh Park.

While the Delhi I knew and sometimes felt I belonged to has been obliterated, its new and, in many ways, much nastier incarnation has nevertheless nourished me enormously with the ideas its contemporary scholars, thinkers and writers have generated. A live but violent and corrupt Delhi is not a pleasurable creature to endure, but for a publisher in India, ‘If on earth there is a place of bliss/It is this, it is this, it is this’ crazy city.