What is the biggest challenge for publishers and bookstores today? The simple answer, of course, is that people are buying fewer books, and when they do buy books, it’s increasingly online. But it’s not as if people are reading less. They might, in fact, be reading more, except now they have a new option: free content in the ever expanding virtual world of the Internet.

I sometimes think of this as an American phenomenon. In the United States attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and people seem more interested in reading blogs or watching strangers lip sync on YouTube than doing something as sedate and tedious as reading a novel. But I was discouraged to learn recently that in France, too, book buying is on the decline.

This week in Nice I found a small book, Lettres à mon libraire (Letters to My Bookseller), that helped reassure me that the world has not completely abandoned the idea of books and the stores that nurture and sell them. For the book forty-five French writers wrote brief letters, verging on love letters at times, to bookstores and booksellers. In the preface François Busnel (a well-known editor and host of a literary television program in France) begins by arguing something seemingly antiquated but at the same time intuitively true for those who grew up in the nondigital world. “Soyons honnêtes: il n’y a pas de livre sans librairie, pas d’écrivain sans libraire” (“Let’s be honest: there is no book without a bookstore, no writer without a bookseller”). He then goes on to pin the problem of bookselling today on capitalism’s commodification of art.

Literature [is] the most useless of activities. That is what we hear every day . . . in this overloaded century, which made speed its supreme value and superficiality its guardian angel, which in metaphysical discourse asked the question “What is this for?” and insisted on profitability as the answer to everything, it is a good sign, I’ve said, that something resists the terrible temptation to declare itself “useful.” Beauty is useless, as poets and philosophers all affirm.

It is in this spirit that bookstores have more than commercial value that novelist Michèle Lesbre, one of the forty-five authors, writes,

Dear bookseller of my youth. I learned that you died several months ago. I couldn’t believe the bad news. Your tiny bookstore, at the top of rue des Gras and under the shadow of the cathedral, in Clermont-Ferrand, was so long the only real sanctuary for those that thought literature could save the world, one day.

True, these passages are nostalgic and in themselves of little effect, as is much of the commentary these days lamenting the decline of reading and wearily pushing against the upcoming digital revolution in book publishing. But if it’s any consolation, books and bookstores are still valued by a lot of people, and in the worst case, when everyone has a Kindle or an Apple Tablet for reading, you’ll probably still be able to find paper books. They’ll be right next to the vinyl record section.

So what is going to happen? The publishing industry is aswarm with utopian visions of an electronic, democratic future. Many find support in a theory developed by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, and described in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The kernel of the idea can be said simply. In the past there were limited distribution channels (e.g., movie theaters or bookstores), meaning only a small number of products found buyers. But the Internet has created unlimited access to goods, making consumers aware of niche and obscure products and increasing demand for them. Using the terminology of the idea, demand is moving away from the head (the most popular products) to the long tail (everything else).

Here is Chris Anderson explaining the theory.

Both publishers and self-publishers have seen potential in Anderson’s idea. Publishers hope for new sales in their own long tail—backlist and previously out of print titles. Self-publishers believe the Internet will draw sales away from titles controlled by publishers and toward material self-published or simply uploaded on the Internet. Not without its detractors, the “long tail” is so part of the discourse of online marketing that some view it to be almost self-evident, though especially in publishing, it remains an idea waiting for full validation. After all, book sales are often still in stores, and people sometimes want real human interaction. Sometimes 50,000 people wander to a small town to find books.

Below is Chris Anderson talking about the media.

Among the most interesting publishing visionaries today is Richard Nash, formerly editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Nash is one of many people who think traditional publishing is broken and needs to be replaced by the new tools and social habits of the twenty-first century. In Nash’s view publishing has to stop selling books as objects (wholly opposite to the current fetish of the object in literary publishing) and consider a different way to get writers and readers together, especially on the Internet.

Nash outlines that different way in a recent Publishers Weekly article. According to Nash, except for the 500 best-selling books, which will be published on the Hollywood blockbuster model, the future of publishing will be based on niche social communities. Reflecting this vision, Nash is starting a new publishing venture, Cursor, which will contain a “portfolio” of online membership communities to which people can subscribe. The first two will be Red Lemonade, a “pop-lit-alt-cult operation,” and charmQuark, a “sci-fi/fantasy community.” Nash explains these communities in Publishers Weekly.

Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Nash is looking for investors, so we’ll have to wait a while to see Cursor in action.

Wednesday night I had nothing better to do than to eat a light dinner—Gouda with cumin, mâche with tomato—and to read a short book I just bought, Insoupçonnable (Beyond Suspicion) by Tanguy Viel, a thriller about family deceit in the south of France. But before doing that, it seemed like a good idea to shut off my illuminating little seducer.

That’s when I saw the news, a bleak tweet stuffed in its 140-character jacket.

 QuartetPress  I truly hate being the bearer of bad news, but it has to be announced: Quartet Press has disbanded. http://bit.ly/17zUsS_about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

How can I explain my reaction? It was something like a heavy object and a thud. And suddenly gone were all thoughts of family intrigue in the south of France. I had a real death to consider.

There was, however, one problem.

I didn’t know anyone personally at Quartet Press. I just thought I did, sort of, in an Internet way. Quartet Press was an ebook publisher recently started with great fanfare and confidence, its little Windows-like flag flying bravely into the new world of publishing. But it didn’t last long enough to publish a single book.

So why did I care?

Quartet Press was to publish romance novels, a project far from our own. They were going to focus on ebooks, while we will be offering both paper and electronic options. But I admired the enthusiasm of its site, its clear desire to do something new, its courage. And, I guess, in the mysterious way the Internet, or a book, makes you believe in what you can’t see, I was seduced by the drama of another new publisher.

Only yesterday morning did I learn the cause of death: higher than expected editorial and technological costs. Kat Meyer, one of the quartet heading the press, said, “The financial risk was increased beyond what our financial backer was able to accept, and the only options we had were to close or to regroup and go forward without financing,”

So adieu, Quartet Press, onetime maker of digitized, illuminated colors on my screen. I’ll miss you, whoever you were.

One bright spot noted by Pitts is HarperCollins’s own HarperStudio, a new, experimental imprint intended to address structural problems, including high advances, afflicting the publishing industry. As part of its marketing strategy, it gives Flip cameras to authors so they can create online videos for readers. Another attempt to communicate with readers is the HarperStudio blog, The 26th Story, written by the imprint’s staff. Recent posts discuss crowdsourcing for books (a collective brainstorming process for writing text), the use of public domain classics (such as Edith Wharton) for magazines, and the latest in Twitterature. HarperStudio seems to be directly addressing Pitts’s warning: “Anyone choosing reclusivity or anonymity over engagement chooses irrelevance.”

Here’s a video from the HarperStudio website of celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, who signed a ten-book deal with HarperCollins under the HarperStudio imprint.

In a virtual office, where employees work in separate locations, “presence” can be more beneficent and comforting. Instead of working alone and having no idea if our colleagues are there, we can look at a program—Skype, Office Communicator, or something built into a larger application, such as Groove—to see if someone is at work. We can IM our coworkers, call them, or have a video conference, all from the same presence application. I have been working within a system of presence for some time now, and though I work alone most of the time, I no longer feel quite so alone.

Then one day your Internet connection is out of service, and you can’t connect to the virtual office. In fact, because all your company’s files are there, you can’t work. It’s as if the office lock has been changed, and you don’t have the key.

Or say you’re on a plane from New York to San Diego. It’s a long flight. You get your laptop out and start to work. This is great, you think. Now you won’t have to do that report tomorrow. But then it begins to sink in: you need a file that’s in the virtual office but not on your computer.

If you were a Groover, this would never happen. You would be using Microsoft’s simplest virtual office, Groove, which works on a different technology than most other Internet collaborative tools. Instead of connecting to a website, you install the Groove software, with its file directories, calendars, and discussion lists. You can make separate Groove workspaces for each project and share the workspaces with whomever you want. As long as you’re on the Internet, any change that you make in your version of Groove is instantly made on the computers of your colleagues (or the next time they’re online). You might be in India, but the moment you drop a file in a directory, it’s on the computer of your colleague in New York. When you disconnect from the Internet, all the files are still on your computer. An important feature is “presence,” meaning you always know if someone else is connected to the workspace, and you can send an instant message to the person through Groove.

Click image for Groove demo video

If Groove’s strengths are its simplicity, offline access, and low cost (once you buy the software, there are no more fees), what are its drawbacks? At least for now, Groove can be installed only on a PC. If you use a Mac, you can’t be a Groover. Another is the inability to create a common calendar for all your workspaces, though a third-party vendor, GrooveIt!, sells a solution to this problem. Finally, Groove’s simplicity is matched by its small number of features.

Overall, Groove, included in some Microsoft Office suites, is a great product for simple needs. We’ve used it in the past. But if you need more features or have a lot of people on your team, you might look elsewhere.

That not being possible, there are other interesting options for a “distributed workforce”—a group of workers in which each person is in a different physical location, often in a different city. When our company searched for a virtual publishing office, my favorite by far was a configurable, three-dimensional, animated workspace called Qwaq. Although it sounds like a duck, the service is one of the most serious attempts to create a useful, Second Life world for business users. I highly recommend Qwaq to anyone who can find a use for it.

Once you sign up, you can start setting up individual offices, conference rooms, and auditoriums. You can connect the rooms with doors, and suddenly you have a fully functioning office floor. Each worker is assigned an avatar (an image that represents the worker), which can walk around a room, change rooms, or even wander out into a park. On the walls are screens where you can project Word or Excel files, for example, so not only can you mingle with your colleagues’ avatars but you can look at the same documents with them and get serious work done.

When we signed up for a trial, our avatars were like the ones in the picture, but in the current Qwaq demo video the avatars look like people. The first thing I did was set up an office with a desk. I added a few furnishings. I put a Word document on a screen. Then I called a colleague and invited her to try it with me. After she signed in, I looked around the office and didn’t see her. I called her again. “Where are you?” “In a field,” she said. So I left the office and walked into the park.

As I remember, it was perfect weather, and the field, scattered with trees, stretched out forever. I felt discouraged at first, but in the distance I saw a small pink color. Pressing hard on the forward arrow key, I began to jog toward the pink spot, just to the left of a tree. As I approached, I saw it was, in fact, another avatar, the avatar of my colleague. I found her. And then, as we headed back to the office to create plants, configure our bodies, even jump into the sky so we could look down onto the office, I almost forgot that what we really wanted was a place to store files, share calendars, and hold video conferences, an office that provided the mundane but practical needs of our business.

Enough that I nearly drove one of my colleagues insane. After months of research, talking with people, free trials, and moments of fatigue and near surrender, we realized the perfect virtual office—one that worked without glitches, was easy to set up and organized for our type of work, and had all the features we needed now and for the feature—was found nowhere in the products we tried, remaining instead a mere vision, a feeble hope, on some hazy horizon of the future.

Like finding the perfect cell phone or car, the perfect virtual office existed only in the promotional materials of the products.

There was another complication, too, a form of near torture. New products seemed to appear weekly, and the ones we tried were later updated and improved.

So at Thomas Riggs & Company our quest dimmed from religious fervor to the practicalities of business. And although we never found our sought after paradise, we did learn an important truth: when looking for a virtual office, as important as finding a good product is understanding your present and future business needs. All virtual offices come with a distinct set of features, and the better you understand what your business is going to do with the office, the more likely you will make a good choice.

What we also found, and what you might experience as well, is that the virtual office that most grabs you and sets off your imagination might not be appropriate for your work.

In my next post I’ll talk about the most interesting virtual office we tried. To the despair of those around me, I found myself talking endlessly about the product. So fascinating, so cutting edge, so utterly useless for our work.