“Booking the Future”

I had a root canal today. I’ve got another article on description mostly written, but I’m not up to finishing it tonight. So here’s a particularly interesting post on future publishing:

Booking the Future, by Ransom Stephens

Is the book dead? Can the Six Sisters of publishing rescue books? Will publishers find a new profit model? Can bookstores survive the internet? Can writers make a living? What about e-books? Is Kindle the beginning and end of the revolution? Will Google Books be literature’s savior or executioner? Where does Scribd.com fit in?

Though the role of publishing has not changed – connect readers to writers – the revolution will not be led by an established publisher. To date, no established player has prospered through, much less led, the transition to the digitally-based economy. What’s left of the recording industry is still pursuing the fascinating how-to-best-prosecute-our-customers business model. No one was better positioned to profit from the web-based economy than Sears, with its legendary catalog, but Amazon all but killed it. Even IBM barely survived the computer revolution.

For some reason, even when entrenched companies can see the iceberg they can’t turn the ship.

There’s some interesting economic thought in this article. It lacks the naiveté displayed by some digital revolution proponents, and it’s also free of the reactionary “Everything in Publishing is Going to Stay the Same Because Our Way is the Right Way” of most critics of said naiveté.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Ebooks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.