THE PROBLEM OF PUBLISHING

Imagine a publishing house. Here are the editors reading manuscripts before debating their virtues at an acquisitions meeting. We have the production department, sales, marketing and publicity; editorial managers with their proofreaders, copyeditors, text designers and typesetters; the art department with their large screens and colour printers. We have the C-suite executives and interns, secretaries and strategists, office managers, HR, contracts, the IT team and the legal counsel; we have an army of freelancers, from off-site readers to the man who delivers coffee. The large off-site machinery of distributors, sales agents and support services lies out of view, but remains essential. Departmental boundaries at a publisher's have, in recent times, become rather blurred; marketing and publicity, for example, share responsibility for managing the company's social media accounts. More or less, though, there is a clear workflow, a critical path winding its way through the organisational structure.

A manuscript navigates the path, beginning as a rough Word document. It ends as a complete text, gleaming from the attentions of many skilled editors and designers, produced as a handsome hardback with an eye-catching jacket, with excellent sales placements, favourable notices in major broadsheet newspapers, excited chatter on the web and a strong early showing in the bestseller lists. Somewhere on the journey it was published. Which department, which person did the publishing? One might be tempted to say the publisher, ex officio; only she really spends most of her time smoothing personnel issues in her large editorial team and wooing big name authors with big plans and bigger advances. One could say the editor, the individual responsible for bringing the book to the house, who sculpts the text and makes critical calls on its presentation. However, they didn't design the book, produce it or get it into the shops or people's consciousness. Do publishers need to commission, finance or distribute books to be publishers? Must they do it all and in what order? Can you only do a couple of tasks? Must you own a book to publish it?

The point is, of course, no one publishes the book – publishing, that strange textual alchemy, happens through the entire organisation and is the sum of its activities. Publishing is the peculiar, elusive, above all emergent property of publishers. So what kind of emergent property is it?

Before we can begin, we need to consider what publishing is. Before digital came along, there were several fault lines to publishing. First, the definitions and usages of the word 'publishing', for instance, continually shift and tug against each other. Second, the historical situations of publishers, still understood as 'publishing' today, can in no way be dealt with as a single category. Third, we need to go beyond book publishing to the spectrum of 'publishings', and ask what this multimedia status implies. Lastly, we need to analyse the operations of publishing, find those aspects often thought identical to publishing, and see if they really are. If we can establish that these functions are not reducible to publishing as a whole, we have an aporia, a 'black hole' at the heart of an activity that employs millions around the world with a history stretching back hundreds, even thousands of years. An odd situation. By tracing each of these strands we can start to see a theory of publishing, not as a strange and unwieldy imposition but an accessory to this vital area of our cultural and intellectual lives.

What's the Problem?

Particle physics might require a unified field theory – but publishing? Publishing consultant Brian O'Leary suggested as much at the Books in Browsers conference in San Francisco, arguing for 'a unified field theory of publishing' (see O'Leary 2011b). Theories explain the world, resolving apparent anomalies. They are testable against parts of reality. Presupposed is the idea something needs explanation in the first place. As a profession, in some senses analogous to plumbing or teaching, or an industry, analogous to the motor or drinks industry, publishing doesn't seem to require a theory or an explanation as such. Most industries or trades are more or less self-explanatory. No one is offering unified field theories of the beverage industry. Why would you need one for publishing?

O'Leary (2011b) constructs his theory in response to a new problem: the impact of digital technology on publishers. He sets out to critique the 'container model of publishing', whereby publishers fill 'containers', or books, with content, and then sell them. In digital settings, this model breaks down because traditional containers don't work in the freely moving world of browsers and code – we need to start instead with content and its context ('the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata' (O'Leary 2011b)). Rather than seeing context as secondary to discrete physical units, it is at the forefront of a publisher's work in disseminating texts through convergent, digital, open, free, remixed and interactive spaces. Put simply O'Leary's field theory suggests that, with the advent of digital, what was a container industry should become a context industry.

It is a good theory. Yet it begs a question. Does publishing only need a theory post-digital? What's more, is it really a theory in the first place? A theory of publishing has to explain what publishing does in the digital age – O'Leary explains what it could do, he outlines a strategy, but he doesn't ask if the container model fully explains publishing before digital. In fact, publishing's problems are as old as publishing.

Publishing was never simple. Take an example, which will be explored in more detail below. What, exactly, is the difference between a published and an unpublished work? If I leave manuscripts lying around in public, does that in some way constitute publishing? There have long been separations between printing and publishing, and indeed, separations between the many acts now considered core to publishing. Publishing floats somewhere above the production and dissemination of books, neither printing nor distribution, sales, art, copyediting or copyright owning exactly, but a strange conceptual amalgam of all or none of them. The closer one looks the more publishing dissipates into a non-activity with blurred limits. While the Internet poses an existential challenge to publishing, even prior to the web publishing was existentially challenged. We don't just need a unified field theory for digital publishing, but for publishing in general.

To borrow Raymond Williams's (1983) term, publishing is a 'keyword'. Williams saw keywords as problems, concealing contradictions and alternative meanings. Culture...