Richard Nash: Writing And Reading In The Digital Age

Huffpost reporting:
Shivani: How should publishers think of readers? How should they reorganize themselves to come closer to readers? Can you be as far-fetched as possible in pursuing this speculative exercise?
Nash: Publishers need to not even think of readers as readers. We need to go straight from recognizing their existence to recognizing that they are active participants in the making of culture, not just passive consumers, and the publisher needs to actively engage them in that, not just finally grasp they're important and start grabbing their email address.
Engaged reading, after all, produces writing, like your criticism, or like anyone tweeting a book rec, and doing #FridayReads. We should support reading, but I almost think we need to skip right past recognizing readers to recognizing we're facilitating engaged writing and reading coming from an array of creators, some writing books, some trying to write books, some writing about books, some writing literally and metaphorically on books, etc.
A publisher should be convening them all, not merely selling the work of the few to extract money out of the pockets of the many.
Shivani: How about readers? Do they have a new role and responsibility in finding good books?
Nash: Yup. No one gets a free ride in this system. I'm deeply influenced by Clay Shirky and am very lucky to have him as an Advisor for Cursor. Clay is mistakenly viewed as a techno-utopian whereas in fact Clay merely notes that the internet helps solve collective action problems. Just like nuclear physics, that can be used for good or ill.
The internet enables participation but if you don't participate, you gain nothing. As in any civil society, you have to read, you have to speak, you have to vote.
Shivani: How should books be priced? Is there something wrong with pricing today?
Nash: Everything is wrong, with the pricing and the product. All kinds of things need to happen at once, above all to diversify the product range. Not just hard, and paper, and digital, and not just books. To start with, we need options that allow people to buy at very limited risk, that is, for free or close to it. The reason being that the reader has to pay with hours of her life just to sample the book. Once a reader is hooked on a writer, the fear of wasting one's time is gone.
The notion that we're "devaluing" a product by charging less for it is hokum--we do far more devaluing of books by publishing sequels, knockoffs, celebrity memoirs etc. People pay $25K/year to do an MFA--I don't think there's a problem with the loss of cultural value around books. So limiting the range of means by which writing and reading connect to books priced $15 to $25 is economic and cultural suicide..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/richard-nash-publishing-_b_913378.html