In The Future, There'll Be Plenty Of "Fucking Unreadable" Books On Amazon

And there's few better to speak to the subject, Birmingham having written 19 books, including the much loved 1994 classic He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, and having jobbed as a journalist - he is currently a columnist for the Brisbane Times.   

We ask if it is even possible for a young person to publish the great sharehouse memoir in 2016. "You could, and in fact, it's been long enough now since that book came out that another one is probably due," he chuckles.

"You know what a huge amount of what the traditional industry puts out is fucking unreadable and awful too, and some of it ends up being massively fucking successful."

Birmingham says that he's "a lot less worried about the future of the book industry than I am about the future of the print media industry".

"Book publishers, they're not going away - they have one really, really significant comparative advantage over all the new models that have popped up, their superpower is putting physical copies of books into physical bookstores. People, the industry and writers and a lot of readers were really worried five or six years ago that the emergence of the Kindle and what looked like the unstoppable, inevitable total dominance of Amazon in that space would mean that physical books would go away, and what seems to have happened is that ebooks, electronic books, which is still a market massively dominated by Amazon with Apple a distant second, they seem to have topped out at slightly less than half the market."

Birmingham says that he believes that while traditional publishing models, and bookshops too, particularly independent book stores, will remain, more writers will sell their self-published wares on Amazon. "There will be this massive raucous, unruly independent publishing industry which will consist of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of authors just throwing their work out of there, and a huge amount of it will be awful and unreadable, but you know what a huge amount of what the traditional industry puts out is fucking unreadable and awful too, and some of it ends up being massively fucking successful, and some of it's really high quality stuff, and the high quality stuff will occasionally be picked up by the publishing industry and put into paper form, and occasionally the really fucking awful stuff will be picked up by the traditional publishing industry and put into hardback and trade paperback just because they can see, as they did with Fifty Shades Of Grey for instance, that there's a really large market there for it.

"What I suspect will happen in the future is that most writers, even most good writers, will end up with a hybrid model. They might do some trade publishing but I suspect that the bulk of their earnings will come from what's called self publishing but what's effectively independent publishing, because anybody who tries to put a book out on their own is going to fail - if you want to do it properly you actually need to hire editors and copyeditors and cover designers."

As traditional advertising-based funding models fall by the wayside, and more and more journalists are made redundant, the newspaper industry is radically changing as well. "Will the media as we know it today be around? Some media will be around, some very, very old-fashioned media businesses like The New Yorker, the magazine, have adapted really well to the changed environment, and hundreds of other newspapers and magazines haven't - they've gone out of business and thousands of journalists have ended up driving for Uber.

"Strategies and ways forward are very, very different for a guy like Sean Aylmer who runs Fairfax, than they are for whoever is running The Saturday Paper, than they are for whoever is doing Buzzfeed, than they are for somebody with an idea for a little niche blog that they can just do off an iPad or a Macbook. Everybody has to examine what it is they want to do and who it is they want to sell it to, because in the end that's what you're doing. Unless this is some kind of passion project, you're selling content to people, so it's what's the content you're making, who are you selling it to, and why are they buying it. Why are they buying what you're offering rather than getting it for free, because that the thing the internet has done, it has created an effectively infinite supply of free content and you have to ask yourself why someone is going to pay for yours."