How publishing changed

 

The most exciting time of my working life was the early 1980s, when my employers, Oxford University Press, decided to digitize and update the Oxford English Dictionary. It is now almost impossible for the imagination to recapture the enormity of this task, looking back from a time when an infinite amount of text (not to mention images and sounds) exists in the virtual environment, ready to be accessed instantaneously using handheld devices. 

In 1983, there were no mobile phones, there was no internet or web, and so of course no websites, and there was hardly any digitized text available for searching. We were pioneers in the untrodden forest, and that in two ways: storing and editing the master version of written content in digital form, and making the publishable results available to users as a searchable online product. Where we led, the world followed, soon reaching the point where all this was normal practice for people born since the 1990s.

The boss who steered us through this exhilarating process was a man called Richard Charkin, one of those movers and shakers who keep you constantly on your toes. Once this project was on its way to successful completion, Richard moved on to other fields, but took with him his experience of conceiving and managing this completely novel enterprise. In the last thirty years he has been at the top of the publishing tree, in Macmillan, Reed International, and very notably, Bloomsbury. He has been deeply involved in the many changes that have swept through publishing during that time. And now he has recorded his experiences in a memoir, called My back pages: an undeniably personal history of publishing, 1972–2022 (Marble Hill Publishers). The ghost writers among you will be interested to hear that he co-wrote the book (with Tom Campbell).

At the time of writing I’m awaiting the arrival of the book, so unfortunately I can’t present any of its contents to you, but it promises to be a most informative read for anyone who’s interested in how publishing has evolved and what its prospects are. This may not seem immediately relevant to Christian writing, but I hope it will give one a helpful perspective on the way the industry operates.