Publishing

A friend sent me this blog post titled The End of Book Publishing As We Know It and asked my thoughts about it.

My stream of consciousness back to him:

This is an interesting post. I think I generally agree with him. The best we can say about this sort of seachange is "I dunno." But I have noticed that I'm not very motivated to read a book on the Kindle, even though it's quite impressive. I'm still a book guy for the moment. But if the ebook format improves, I might convert.

I was waiting for his thoughts on the people who will still deal in paper books. I love his analogy with candles. There is something romantic about a paper book relative to an ebook. [insert rant about gnosticism and electric things like lights and ebooks here]

The salvation for publishers at the moment is that we can publish electronically for free (without doing all the added value he's talking about—yet). We can lower print runs to not get hosed with inventories while we wait for the economy to recover. And for the type of books where we know the key audience wants a print book, we can do smaller print runs print on demand at a somewhat higher cost, but still make margin because those mavens will pay for the slightly more expensive book.

It's funny to look at this in historical perspective. I know that the manager/publisher/abbot of the local scriptorium was pissed when the printing press started cutting into their workloads. Every merchant who has ever dealt in the technology that's becoming obsolete has cried that it's unfair (or at least been tempted to). The papyrus guys were a bit bent out of shape when vellum became practical. Then we discovered wood pulp paper and put those guys out of business. The merchants/publishers who thrive will be the ones who say, "Let's try our hand at the new thing." It's either that or go ahead and waste away into oblivion. If we try and still fail, that's okay because we were going to fail anyway. And it's better to have a good attitude about it, saying change is inevitable, and more rapid in this modern world. However as you teach, history is not inevitable, and we get a chance to help write it with innovative ideas of our own. We're not merely at the mercy of "those change forces" like technology.