Today I had occasion to recall a passage in a book that I have always very much appreciated, Complex Organizations, by Chick Perrow, a sociologist from Yale University. Somewhere in the middle of the book, Chick pens a beautiful, stirring passage which raises the inquiry of what we, as a society, seek from our institutions – what should we value, and what should we consider just - from the organizations we build, sustain, and all too often have to endure.

For that passage particularly, and the book as a whole, I went looking for a copy of the book in Powell's. I was shocked to discover that the paperback version of the book would cost me at least $58.00. For a 30-year old, 320 page paperback with minimal illustrations (as I recall) and no photographs.

In my outrage, I queried a friend of mine who is well known in the publishing industry, and asked him how on earth it was possible that a publisher might think it acceptable to charge that amount of money for a work read largely by graduate students in sociology and students of organization in business schools. I took the high moral ground, considering the pricing nearly usurious. After a series of exchanges, my friend was able to convince me that it was unfair to judge the publishing industry on the basis of moral values distinct from other industry or commerce.

The remembrance that what I had sought from the book was primarily a single passage perhaps helped bring forth a slow fork in our correspondence to a broader and more speculative vein. With the permission of my colleague, I reproduce the later stage of our correspondence below, with a modest smoothing of the ruffled feathers of serendipitous correspondence, as we turned away from pricing and economics, and toward the future of publishing.

Peter:

Usury is an economic term, not just a moral. But economics generally, as a social science, is not devoid of morality, nor should it be. "Commerce" might be, but that is a different argument. And I think that if publishers want to claim any kind of special status in commerce as conveyors of ideas, then they are explicitly entering the domain of value, with implicit obligations to ensure, in my mind, that the pricing of those ideas is at a reasonable and responsible level.

Friend:

What "special status" in commerce did you think publishers have?

The fact is, most of them can't make their quarterly numbers. They either have a budget for charity and good works or they don't. But when they make pricing decisions, the only extent to which they take cognizance of "fairness" or avoid gouging is the degree to which they perceive a real market backlash. And they will NEVER perceive a market backlash on a 30-year-old low-demand book.

If I organized society myself, I might do this differently. But it wouldn't make the first 10 pages on my list. As it stands, I don't think publishers are much different in this regard than anybody else. Whatever nobility is in the work is inherent to the work, not the way it is practiced.

Peter:

OK, I will get off my value-of-ideas high horse then, and treat books as simple commodities, like so many bales of hay, from now on. I had always accorded them special status, I suppose, in commerce, but I guess that is rather foolish.

Friend:

In what "commercial" sense did you do that? I mean really, except for “Special 4th Class Book Rate,” what subsidy or support does book publishing get from ANYbody?

Peter:

Actually, in the light of market-realism, with my Google- Publisher- Academic tricorne hat on, this makes me somewhat less embracing of the Google-empowered vision of the "network of books" which is itself partially a romantic, academic notion that might actually be a distinctly net minus for publishers. Potentially great for academics and readers, but potentially deadly for publishers. As opposed to the simple first order advantage of having the books discoverable in the first place – but the extent to which books are mined, fragmented, and then inter-connected - that is an interesting and very difficult challenge for publishers.

Am I missing something...?

Friend:

If you mean, are book publishers as we know them doomed? Then the answer is "probably yes." But it isn't Google's connecting everything together that's doing it. If people still want books, all this promotion of discovery will obviously help. But if they want nuggets of information, it won't. Obviously, a big part of the market that book publishers have owned for 200 years want the nuggets, not a narrative. They're going, going, gone. The skills of a "publisher" -- developing content and connecting it to markets -- will have to be applied in different ways.

Peter:

I agree that it is not the mechanical act of interconnection that is to blame but the demand side preference for nuggests of texts. And the demand is probably extremely high, I agree.

The challenge you describe for publishers - analogous in its own way to that for libraries - is so fundamentally huge as to mystify the mind. In my own library domain, I find it hard to imagine profoundly differently enough to capture a glimpse of this future. We tinker with fabrics and dyes and stitches but have not yet imagined a whole new manner of clothing.

Friend:

Well, the aggregation and then parceling out of printed information has evolved since Gutenberg and is now quite sophisticated. Every aspect of how it is organized is pretty much entirely an anachronism. There's a lot of inertia to preserve current forms: most people aren't of a frame of mind to start assembling their own reading material and the tools aren't really there for it anyway.

Peter:

They will be there. Arguably, when you look at things like RSS and Yahoo Pipes and things like that - it's getting closer to what people need.

And really, it is not always about assembling pieces from many different places. I might just want the pieces, not the assemblage. That’s the big difference, it seems to me. That's what breaks the current picture.

Friend:

Yes, but those who DO want an assemblage will be able to create their own. And the other thing I think we're pointed at, but haven’t arrived at yet, is the ability of any people to simply collect by themselves whatever they like best in all available media. You like the Civil War? Well, by 2020, you'll have battle reenactments in virtual reality along with an unlimited number of bios of every character tied to the movies etc. etc. etc. I see a big intellectual change; a balkanization of society along lines of interest. A continuation of the breakdown of the 3-television network (CBS, NBC, ABC) social consensus.

Peter:

I do not know that I would describe it as a balkanization of society because people will fracture along different paths across many different vectors. I might work on advanced mathematical ontology derivatives but also be an avid student of the Normandy invasion or Guadalcanal (to continue to the military theme); my daughter might be interested in tempura and my wife in flamenco. All communities of interest, and all available to me in multi-media collage. I think that is great.

There are personal and cognitive challenges to how I spend my free time, and professional time, but they are enriching choices. The diversity of information resources may in fact solidify social understanding because information and opinion flows more readily and openly, unimpeded by monopolistic mediation. I suspect mediation and curation will be available, albeit with more options than is presently the case. I do not expect an empty tintinnabulation, devoid of value.

There are market and economic challenges in how we reshape the industries which produce, market, and evaluate content, and the topology of the firms that will evolve into this space is something that I cannot imagine yet.

Friend:

Absolutely mediation and curation will be available and absolutely with more options than now. And less power. And I think we're a less unified and homogenized society than we were 1950-1970 when we had three networks and a high commonality of entertainment exposure. I am not saying better or worse. I think 25 years from now there will be fewer common denominators amongst us, and more people will be in the position I'm in now, with almost total ignorance of topics of widespread interest (like American Idol, which I have never seen but probably a third or more of the people in the country have.)

Peter:

Less homogenized and unified in one-way, more in another. Think about the millions that TV was never able to reach in the 50s or 60s as a result of extreme poverty; think about the horrendous divides in our society. What does homogenization mean? In the city that I grew up in, San Antonio, it meant one world for people on the north side, another world for people in the south and west, and another for the folks on the east side; all these people of different color, culture, and nationality; with too much to say and too little shared understanding to speak beyond what they saw on Lawrence Welk.

Friend:

Actually, I think TV reached most of those millions, even in poverty ...

And obviously, the divides have always existed and, in a huge and multi-faceted society like ours, always will.