Nicholas Spice has been Publisher of the London Review of Books since 1982. He has from time to time contributed articles to the LRB on fiction, music and psychoanalysis.

Nicholas Spice Photographed by Sebastiaan ter Burg at the Unbound Book Conference.

Spice prefaces his discussion during the ‘Digital Enclosures’ session by explaining that as a literary magazine, the London Review of Books is ultimately a commercial operation, at the capitalist end of the spectrum and therefore doesn’t spend much time stewing over questions of open-access.

The publications’ main interest in rights used to be strictly commercial, however this has changed in the digital age, in a universe without a sense of time where artifacts can surface at any given moment and everything is available online. The rights to this material, old and new, must now be protected. Prior to this, with the periodical press, everything was ephemeral and one could publish something with it inevitably disappearing soon after.

Previously, it was predicted to be impossible to transfer the magazine to the 20th century. However, this has proved false. In fact, the possibilities for the magazine and other literary works are greatly enhanced in the digital age. The digital era has prompted an unexpected business boom and an extreme rise in literary circulation.

Spice explains how we now find an “inversion of the search phenomenon”. Before the Internet, one had to go seek out and find readers, but now, “the public finds you.” The content has become its own advertisement, “words go into the world and sell themselves” through Twitter, Facebook etc. In the digital era of publishing, the words work for us.

Spice explains that the main problem here lies in the dominance of the corporate monsters (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.) These corporations wish to keep control of both the price and data which is problematic because it means a loss of control and agency for the author.

For more information please visit http://www.lrb.co.uk/.