(£1.2billion) of the revenue, at least in the UK. This situation hasn’t significantly changed over the last forty years of publishing innovation and digital ‘revolutions’ and if you look across the EU where, at £20 billion (2009), publishing is the largest creative industry, then it’s clear the long tail hasn’t been benefiting the small publishers as claimed, but instead serves to consolidate network monopolies.
Smaller players and Joe Public are told it’s good to share, while these same network monopolies reap all the associated advertising revenue into their offshore accounts, and social networks just wait for IPO day, their bloated info-bellies replete with our profiles, connections, and traces.
Supporting independent writing and publishing has been Mute’s raison d’être since day one. Then as now it’s infrastructures that appear a prime zone of contestation. Then as now, collaboration appears to offer a way out of the marginalization imposed upon us via our size. A recent project, Progressive Publishing System, looks to help small publishers distribute into ePublishing platforms, hybrid and expanded books, new book channels, and even walled gardens. Infiltrating every channel available, it attempts to allow content to ‘follow the reader’, rather than pretending the network can come good on its promise to deliver the reader to us.
Simon Worthington is the co-founder and director of digital at Mute Publishing.
