Stephen Bourne is President and former Chief Executive of CUP. After a wide-ranging career in education, accountancy, petrochemicals, newswires, printing and wine, Stephen led Cambridge University Press for 16 years. He now specialises in building bridges between the past and the future and between China and the west.
‘Imagineering’ – imagine how things might be and then engineer the reality
Stephen began his most interesting talk by asking those of the audience young enough to remember what life was like 38 years ago. In 1974, few homes boasted a colour TV and most calls were made from telephone boxes. Ten years later, the first (brick-sized) cell phone came on the market, together with a battery pack to recharge it after every 20-minute call. In his first job as a trainee chartered accountant, Stephen was banned from using a calculator – on the basis that they were slow and ‘bad for the brain’.
Having encouraged us to think about life almost 40 years ago and appreciate how far technology has come since then, Stephen then invited us to project 40 years hence.
The first scenario Stephen proposed was that of devices becoming even smaller than the current tablets. The iPad is already considered too big by under-25s and the newly launched iPad Mini was out of stock countrywide within weeks of coming on to the UK market. Stephen predicted that by 2050 functions such as music, car controls, home controls, TV, etc would be contained within a wrist-worn device.
The second, rather unnerving, scenario was that of direct messaging via an in-ear device rather like a cochlear implant. The thought that this could be intercepted by subliminal advertising and even superseded by direct imaging onto the eyelid was a notion too far for most of the audience!
The third, rather more palatable, scenario was the idea that time-poor teenagers with short attention spans might forego more immersive texts for a series of mini-chapters of books to be read in 20-minute snatches of time. He cited the example of Bunny, a Japanese blogger who published her keitai (cell-phone novel) in 1000-character instalments over several months, writing each night in her bedroom between homework assignments. Stephen’s one caveat about such publishing, which has its origins in the early Victorian serialisation of novels, is that it must be entertaining and, of course, requires each issue to be bookended by ‘the story so far’ and ‘coming up next’.
In fact, Stephen felt academic publishing could learn something from such micro-publishing. Many academic texts are impenetrable by the average reader and need to be more accessible. Furthermore, he revealed that fragment selling generated more revenue from the sum of its parts than the full-price complete book.
Despite these predictions, Stephen felt confident that the physical book would remain. People like books. But where will they buy them? Stephen predicted that only a few small niche booksellers would survive. More controversially, he asserted that Amazon would not. Most large firms expire after 50–60 years, largely because they are unable to adapt, often as consequence of increased competition or government interference, but sometimes as a result of a single significant PR disaster. Was Stephen thinking of the current furore over tax avoidance by Amazon, among others, in the UK?
Another significant threat was that of piracy. Stephen was clear about the need for publishers to protect copyright, not least as a means of protecting the author’s income. He felt piracy had two main causes – sheer greed in the developed world, and poverty in less developed countries. He didn’t have a solution to piracy for greed, but felt that tackling poverty was a better solution than attacking petty criminals in the developing world.
How to bring an august institution like CUP into the 21st century? Stephen’s view was that changing the mindset of the people employed by the Press was more important than training courses. He felt publishers should meet more students of publishing – perhaps lecturing on courses such as the MA in Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University – and that student interns should be placed in the IT department rather than editorial, so that staff could learn from the early adopters of new technology. At its heart, publishing is still a people business, and therefore to be an effective leader you must bring people with you.
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