Frankly, Mr. Howey, I don’t think they can capitulate, even if they want to. It would upset too much of that backlist business and violate too many of those contracts with old established authors. (Most-favoured-nation clauses can be such a poison pill.)

I’ve been studying various disruptive innovations in various industries for over 30 years – long before Clayton Christensen coined the term, though I never had anything like his academic chops or his access to high-quality data. This particular disruption keeps reminding me of the mainframe computer industry in the early 1980s, after the PC had already begun to eat the mainframes’ lunch.

Mainframe computing was almost entirely in the hands of IBM and the so-called BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell). In 1980, the BUNCH all thought that PCs were useless toys. By 1985, they had all (except, I think, Control Data) released their own PCs in an attempt to co-opt the new technology. By 1990, all these companies had failed in the PC business, and by 2000 they were all out of the mainframe business as well.

IBM did better, but IBM created a separate PC business unit that did not have to answer to corporate headquarters. None of the Big Five have the foresight, the technical knowhow, or the organizational flexibility to do that with the ‘new’ publishing; so I expect them to fail in much the same way the BUNCH failed with PCs. Probably there will still be companies called Random House Penguin, Macmillan, or Hachette in another decade; but if so, they probably won’t even be in the publishing business as we know it now.

(By the way, I finally bought a copy of Wool the other day and devoured it. You may consider me suitably impressed.)