The answer does depend on the kind of material being published.
If you know anything about Salt Desert, you will be aware that we are committed to publishing work produced by “an inquiring and intelligent mind (with) an ability to write for the layperson as well as for the scholar” – as Richard Charkin, reflecting on “how important books and scholarly journals can be in a world drowning in instant, unproven, and mainly unreliable information”, puts it in the latest issue of Publishing Perspectives.
Salt Desert cares not only about the quality of what it publishes, but also about the aim and effect of the content, while nurturing a diversity of voices – from the political Left as well as the political Right, and from Atheists, Agnostics, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs.
So far, Salt Desert has avoided taking commercial considerations into account, which it cannot continue to do, but I hope and think and am working to ensure that while market factors are vital to keep in mind, those remain subsidiary matters, because reputation and brand are what create sustainable and long-term success. “The best publishers can be relied on to publish what’s good and avoid publishing inaccurate or second-rate material”, says Charkin, and adds “That cannot be said of social media”.
Why can’t it be said of social media? Because social media isn’t well-known for having “an in-depth editorial process that (does) not allow inaccurate or biased information to be published”.
True, social media can rapidly gain a following right around the world, but this 3-year-old publisher improbably and astonishingly does already have distribution around the world – or at least around the English-speaking world.
And social media does not, on balance, seem to have any larger an audience than books – yes, a few people on social media succeed in having a followership of a million or more, but so do more than a few books.
Continuing the thoughts about numbers but on a slightly different note: the sheer quantum of book publishing is still growing, even if it is shrinking as a proportion of total sales when other communication media are taken into account. And the disadvantage of other media (radio, TV, podcasts) is that they are even now much more expensive to launch and maintain, easier for governments to control and more desirable and useful propaganda instruments in relation to the masses who may not be illiterate but are generally disinclined to think. On the other hand, books are much tougher to control
(a) because they can be produced comparatively cheaply,
(b) because of their sheer number,
(c) because they can more easily evade detection, and
(d) because they are addressed to those who are willing to do the hard work of reading substantial material, and thinking through large-scale and “wicked” problems.
It is those who are willing to do the hard work of such reading and thinking who have any chance of gaining some possible comprehension of our complex world, let alone any chance of actually making the world better.
Oh, and don’t forget the role of inspiration – of the right sort. The wrong sort of inspiration is that which is stirred by a hate-monger such as Hitler. The right sort of inspiration is rather deeper and slower-burn… of the sort that might be derived from reading books such as Ram Gidoomal’s My Silk Road or Varghese Mathai’s The Village Maestro & 100 Other Stories. In other words, the right sort of inspiration is directed towards humane ends.
So my point is: does publishing not remain the single essential to knowledge-preservation, knowledge-propagation, and knowledge-creation, and therefore to human freedoms and prosperity?
That is ultimately why publishing matters.