From The Guardian:

The digital revolution is going into a decline, Tim Waterstone told the Oxford literary festival. Well, it’s an attention-grabbing statement, ideally suited to our culture of assertive headlines, but it’s probably not true. That’s not to say that the rapid growth of digital will necessarily continue, either, certainly not in markets that are already saturated with handheld devices.

Why? Because the future is – as William Gibson told us quite a long time ago now – not evenly distributed.

. . . .

There are fewer and fewer venues where digital technology has made no impact – and where there’s a digital device, there are ebooks, at least in potential. They need not be anyone’s primary method of consuming literature, but in some situations they will be the best one. Rather than circling the wagons as other media industries did (to no good outcome, it has to be acknowleged) publishers need to learn the more recent lessons from music and film and consider, for example, providing digital copies as standard with hardback editions.

Digital will continue to grow for a while at least, and continue to exist, because it is becoming part of the world we inhabit at a level below our notice, no more remarkable than roads or supermarkets. Ebooks are here to stay because digital is, and quite shortly we’ll stop having this debate about paper vs ebooks because it will no longer make a lot of sense.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Russell for the tip.

Different people adapt to new technologies in different ways. PG has no doubt that somewhere, people still stroll around listening to Walkmans and Diskmans. However, digital music isn’t tied to a particular device and people listen to music on their smart phones or tablets or their Sonos speakers (PG is currently in love with Sonos). Similarly, people watch digital video on a variety of different devices.

PG does think ebooks will replace paper books. For one thing, paper books require industrial-age scale to be sold at a reasonable price and still earn a profit for everyone in the supply chain. Publishers, distributors, bookstores and authors can earn money on a hardcover that costs $3 to print in China. A POD hardcover is going to require a higher price to generate the same profits or, more likely, cut organizations out of the supply chain in order to sell at a reasonable price that’s still higher than the same ebook would cost.

It’s dangerous to extend one’s own preferences and experiences to the rest of the world, but PG rarely buys paper books any more. He received a paper book in the mail yesterday because it was much cheaper as a used book than the ebook was. However, he immediately regretted the impulse purchase because he’s unlikely to read it. He much prefers a featherweight Kindle that doesn’t lose his place if he falls asleep and it slips from his fingers. PG’s stack of very good yet unread paper books is collecting dust.

From the Vancouver Business Journal:

Disruptive technology, more accurately termed “disruptive innovation,” is defined as an innovation that doesn’t just change a product, but an entire market. Classic examples include the automobile assembly line that made cars affordable commodities, and more recently, e-books and online music sharing that are ushering out traditional publishers and stifling the market for CD players.

Such innovation, said Mike Bomar, executive director of the Columbia River Economic Development Council, is a two-edged sword.

“We see disruptive technologies in two ways,” said Bomar. “They can represent major shifts that could shut down industries or make them move elsewhere. But they can also represent an opportunity if we can position ourselves to capture high-growth companies or sectors that could evolve out of the disruptive technology.”

. . . .

Thurston, chief investment officer for Ironstone Group, a venture capital firm that invests solely in disruptive businesses, said 90 percent of startup companies that concentrate on sustaining innovation fail. However, he said those who find ways to provide lower cost, more accessible, easier to use goods and services increase their survival chances to 66 percent.

. . . .

In the retail sector, said Roberts, the Internet is forcing major changes to the traditional brick and mortar business model. Consumers now have easy access to price comparisons and same-day delivery.

Link to the rest at the Vancouver Business Journal

From Pew Research:

The world is moving rapidly towards ubiquitous connectivity that will further change how and where people associate, gather and share information, and consume media. A canvassing of 2,558 experts and technology builders about where we will stand by the year 2025 finds striking patterns in their predictions.

. . . .

In their responses, these experts foresee an ambient information environment where accessing the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it will flow through their lives “like electricity.”

. . . .

To a notable extent, the experts agree on the technology change that lies ahead, even as they disagree about its ramifications. Most believe there will be:

• A global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.
• “Augmented reality” enhancements to the real-world input that people perceive through the use of portable/wearable/implantable technologies.
• Disruption of business models established in the 20th century (most notably impacting finance, entertainment, publishers of all sorts, and education).

. . . .

The biggest impact on the world will be universal access to all human knowledge. The smartest person in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plow in India or China. Enabling that person — and the millions like him or her — will have a profound impact on the development of the human race. Cheap mobile devices will be available worldwide, and educational tools like the Khan Academy will be available to everyone. This will have a huge impact on literacy and numeracy and will lead to a more informed and more educated world population. — Hal Varian, chief economist for Google

. . . .

A summary of the less-hopeful theses comes from Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and infrastructure for British Telecom, who predicted, “The greatest impacts of the Internet will continue to be the side-effects that tower so high that we do not notice they are continuing to grow far above us: 1) More people will lose their grounding in the realities of life and work, instead considering those aspects of the world amenable to expression as information as if they were the whole world. 2) The scale of the interactions possible over the Internet will tempt more and more people into more interactions than they are capable of sustaining, which on average will continue to lead each interaction to be more superficial. 3) Given there is strong evidence that people are much more willing to commit petty crimes against people and organizations when they have no face-to-face interaction, the increasing proportion of human interactions mediated by the Internet will continue the trend toward less respect and less integrity in our relations.”

. . . .

The ‘ghost of Gutenberg’ reappears and cautions humility in predictions

Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, wrote, “You give me no choice but to raise the ghost of Gutenberg and point out that, according to the greatest scholar on the topic, Elizabeth Eisenstein, the impact of the book on society was not fully realized until 100 years after the invention of the press. The book itself did not take on its own shape in form, content, and business model, departing from its scribal roots, until half a century after Gutenberg. The impact of the press — the physical impression of ink on paper — is only now, 600 years later, diminishing.   In the development of the net and its impact on society, we are at 1472 in Gutenberg years. John Naughton, a columnist for London’s Observer, asks us to imagine the good citizens of Gutenberg’s hometown, Mainz, using Gutenberg’s folly to predict the undermining of the authority of the Catholic Church; the birth of the Reformation and scientific revolution; the transformation of education, changing our sense even of childhood; and I would add, upheaval in our notion of nations. Today, we wouldn’t know our Martin Luther if he hammered on our door.   Consider the change brought by the web its first 20 years and now you ask us to predict the next dozen? Sorry.”

Link to the rest at Pew Research

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

The extended discussion in the comment string of the prior post had to do with to what extent publishers serve authors, and to what extent authors are better off eschewing publishers and working on their own. Unless and until publishers turn digital marketing at scale into a clearly compelling proposition, their power to serve authors effectively diminishes with each closing bookstore. The less bookstore- (or brick-and-mortar retailer-) dependent any book is, the less additional benefit in sales and exposure can be delivered by a publisher (although a cash advance and somebody to handle all the business aspects of putting a book out will still be both helpful and persuasive to many authors). Bookstore shelf space, and printed books, seem to be suffering slower erosion over the past year or two than they did in the several years before that. Michael Cader has made a convincing case that we actually know that for a fact. But, even if we accept the fact, whatever erosion continues will affect different books and authors to different degrees.

. . . .

So generalizations about the book business, whether they come from a self-published author or an industry expert like O’Leary, really require us to do a little parsing to make them useful. We’d be steering toward a more constructive conversation if we posed three questions every time somebody posits a Great Change we will see in the book business.

1. Which books, exactly, should we expect to be affected by this particular Great Change? This is necessary to specify now that most people would agree that “books” has become a pretty worthless generalization.

2. How soon can we expect a meaningful change in the perceived utility, and therefore the demand, for the affected books? That is, are we talking about a change that is already happening and evident and having a commercial impact (travel books are suffering and have been for years) or one we expect to see in the future (readers abandoning longer form books for shorter content choices) for which we might have only the scantiest evidence is affecting commercial reality today?

3. How likely is it that whatever the Great Change is going to be that publishers are well-positioned to affect or control or accommodate it? Brian suggested, and I wholeheartedly agree, the answer is “often not”. That being the case, the prediction of the Great Change should not necessarily be accompanied by the prescription that the publisher should change behavior to address it, although it seems to me they almost always are.

. . . .

Could a publisher of travel books have created Trip Advisor? Does the publisher-created Cookstr do the job of digital assistance for a cook better than allrecipes.com or cookbooks.com or betterrecipes.com? It doesn’t take a lot of deep thinking to see that a publisher’s skill sets are not the best match for building an interactive internet business where content is a component of the strategy but everything else about it is different from publishing books.

Over time, I expect the book business is going to get smaller, whether the number of books consumed goes down or not. Among the reasons for that is that, over time, the intrusion of self-publishing entities will be even more disruptive than self-publishing authors have been.

. . . .

Whether “book publishing” or “book retailing” shrinks, disappears, or changes form depends on how widespread across the various silos of interest and utility we call “books” today are the many disruptions that will affect those verticals in different ways and at different speeds. And generalizing about what these changes mean, let alone delivering advice that isn’t informed and bounded by an understanding of how any particular book or author or publishing program fits into the time and scale of any particular change, is as likely to be wrong and harmful as it is to be correct and illuminating.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

While PG sometimes disagrees with Mike, he usually thinks what Mike says makes sense when viewed from the perspective of an established publisher.

This post is pretty loosey-goosey, however.

What is happening to the publishing business begins with technology disruption – ecommerce and ebooks – and is manifesting itself in a massive restructuring of the publishing business that involves the disintermediation of traditional publishers, distributors and booksellers from readers.

Complaining that the precise boundaries and directions of this tumultuous change are not being forecasted with useful precision sounds a little like a surfer complaining that nobody can specifically describe what the next wave will look like.

One of the reasons disruptive change is interesting is that it’s impossible to forecast with specificity.

If Apple hadn’t rehired Steve Jobs in 1997, the music business would look much different than it does today.

Yes, digital music would exist and portable digital music players would be sold in large numbers, but the contours of the digital music business would not be the same as they are with iTunes, iPods, iPhones and iPads. A Microsoft-driven digital music business would look much different than an Apple-driven digital music business or a record-label driven digital music business.

Likewise, the ebook world would look much different if Jeff Bezos still worked for a hedge fund and Sony had led the market into ebooks.

One thing that is clear is that some individuals and some businesses respond better to disruptive technologies than others do.

So far, in PG’s persistently modest opinion, Big Publishing has been remarkably inept in its responses to ebooks and ecommerce. It’s not a business that is tech-savvy or tech-friendly, for one thing. It’s not a business that really wants to change, for another.

The fact that major publishers are owned by large media conglomerates (another group without a lot of tech chops) is a huge disadvantage in a dynamic and rapidly-changing technology and business environment. No big media conglomerate will allow a large subsidiary to lose money or fail to deliver steady profits like the stock market permits Amazon to do.

Mike and Big Publishing want predictability in a business which has become and will remain generally unpredictable for a while. Too bad they can’t choose a different business.

From Joe Konrath:

I’ve been looking to the future, wondering what is going to happen next, and I’ve got a few equally wild ideas.

1. The end of Barnes & Noble as we know it. In 2014, paper book sales will no longer be significant enough to sustain the nation’s largest bookstore chain. There may be bankruptcy and restructuring and the selling of assets (like the Nook), but ultimately it will result in many stores closing, and possibly the demise of the brand.

. . . .

4. Indie bookstores will need to start selling self-pubbed books, or perish. Paper isn’t going away anytime soon. But there won’t be enough of a legacy supply that will keep the necessary number of diverse titles on shelves to make indie stores a worthwhile destination for shoppers. If indie bookstores deal directly with self-pubbed authors, and print their own copies to sell in their stores, they can build inventory and cut out the share normally taken by publishers.

. . . .

5. Visibility will become harder. As more ebooks get published, and virtual shelf space expands, it is going to become harder to find eyeballs. Ebooks aren’t a competition–readers buy what they want to, without limits, even if TBR piles become impossible to ever finish within a lifetime. So someone who buys my ebook will also buy yours; there is no either/or. But only if the reader is aware of both.

The future will be about actively cultivating a readership. So far we’ve been lucky. With KDP Select and BookBub, authors have been able to get visible without reconnecting with longtime readers. There have always been enough new readers to sustain sales. But I believe maintaining a fanbase is going to become increasingly more important.

That means having an up-to-date website, making it easy to sign up for your newsletter, staying active in social media, and regenerating your brand with new titles and continued promotions.

My prediction: self-pubbed authors who don’t focus on their current, core readership will see sales diminish.

. . . .

7. Big 5 mergers and layoffs and bankruptcies. As the publishing cartel loses its quasi-monopoly on paper distribution, there will be no way to support its infrastructure. Manhattan rent, in-house employees with benefits, length of time to publish, and the temptation for authors to avoid legacy and self-pub, will bring down the industry. There is too much waste, their share of the pie is getting smaller, and when B&N disappears there will be no way to recover.

Link to the rest at A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing and thanks to Ant for the tip.

From TechCrunch:

In 1977, the first video-rental store opened. It was 600 square feet and located on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. George Atkinson, the entrepreneur who decided to launch this idea, charged $50 for an “annual membership” and $100 for a “lifetime membership” but the memberships only allowed people to rent videos for $10 a day. Despite an unusual business model, Atkinson’s store was an enormous success, growing to 42 affiliated stores in fewer than 20 months and resulting in numerous competitors.

In retrospect, Atkinson’s success represented the emergence of an entirely new market: home consumption of paid content. It would become an $18 billion dollar domestic market, and, rather than cannibalize from the existing movie theater market, it would eclipse it and thereby become a massive revenue source for the industry.

Atkinson’s success in 1977 is particularly remarkable as the Sony Betamax (the first VCR) had only gone on sale domestically in 1975 at a cost of $1,400 (which in 2013 U.S. dollars is $6,093). As a comparison, the first DVD player in 1997 cost $1,458 in 2013 dollars and the first Blu-ray player in 2006 cost $1,161 in 2013 dollars. And unlike the DVD and Blu-ray player, it would take eight years, until 1983, for the VCR to reach 10 percent of U.S. television households. Atkinson’s success, and that of his early competitors, was in catering to a market of well under 10 percent of U.S. households.

While many content companies realized this as a massive new revenue stream — e.g. 20th Century Fox buying one video rental company for $7.5 million in 1979 — the content industry lawyers and lobbyists tried to stop the home content market through litigation and regulation.

The content industry sued to ban the sale of the Betamax, the first VCR. This legal strategy was coupled by leveraging the overwhelming firepower of the content industry in Washington. If they lost in court to ban the technology and rental business model, then they would ban the technology and rental business model in Congress.

. . . .

While Sony won at the district court level in 1979, in 1981 it lost at the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit where the court found that Sony was liable for copyright infringement by their users — recording broadcast television. The Appellate court ordered the lower court to impose an appropriate remedy, advising in favor of an injunction to block the sale of the Betamax.

And in 1981, under normal circumstances, the VCR would have been banned then and there. Sony faced liability well beyond its net worth, so it may well have been the end of Sony, or at least its U.S. subsidiary, and the end of the VCR. Millions of private citizens could have been liable for damages for copyright infringement for recording television shows for personal use. But Sony appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court.

. . . .

After an oral hearing, the justices took a vote internally, and originally only one of them was persuaded to keep the VCR as legal (but after discussion, the number of justices in favor of the VCR would eventually increase to four).

With five votes in favor of affirming the previous ruling the Betamax (VCR) was to be illegal in the United States (see Justice Blackmun’s papers).

But then, something even more unusual happened – which is why we have the VCR and subsequent technologies: The Supreme Court decided for both sides to re-argue a portion of the case. Under the Burger Court (when he was Chief Justice), this only happened in 2.6 percent of the cases that received oral argument. In the re-argument of the case, a crucial vote switched sides, which resulted in a 5-4 decision in favor of Sony. The VCR was legal. There would be no injunction barring its sale.

The majority opinion characterized the lawsuit as an “unprecedented attempt to impose copyright liability upon the distributors of copying equipment and rejected “[s]uch an expansion of the copyright privilege” as “beyond the limits” given by Congress. The Court even cited Mr. Rogers who testified during the trial:

I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the ‘Neighborhood’ off-the-air . . . Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others.

On the absolute narrowest of legal grounds, through a highly unusual legal process (and significant luck), the VCR was saved by one vote at the Supreme Court in 1984.

. . . .

In 1982 legislation was introduced in Congress to give copyright holders the exclusive right to authorize the rental of prerecorded videos. Legislation was reintroduced in 1983, the Consumer Video Sales Rental Act of 1983. This legislation would have allowed the content industry to shut down the rental market, or charge exorbitant fees, by making it a crime to rent out movies purchased commercially. In effect, this legislation would have ended the existing market model of rental stores.

. . . .

As Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), explained before Congress in 1982:

We are going to bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects [our industry against the VCR]. . .we cannot live in a marketplace. . . where there is one unleashed animal [the VCR] in that marketplace, unlicensed. It would no longer be a marketplace; it would be a kind of a jungle, where this one unlicensed instrument is capable of devouring all that people had invested in…

Valenti’s comments were stark and designed to scare Congress to act: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Jack Valenti even threatened that if Congress didn’t regulate the VCR then movie producers may cut their movie production in half.

. . . .

One year after the Sony case, with the legal issues on less precarious grounds, David Cook opened the first Blockbuster store in in Dallas, Texas, in 1985. Within two years it became one of the top 10 video-rental chains with 67 stores. Blockbuster expanded outside the U.S. with over 1,000 stores in 1989. And by 1992, Blockbuster was the undisputed video-rental leader with over 2,800 stores worldwide.

. . . .

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997 with a completely different market model. As Larry Downes explains in the Harvard Business Review:

The scrappy start-up built a distribution model that relied exclusively on mailing DVDs to customers through the low-cost U.S. postal service. It was almost as convenient as a neighborhood retail store but at a fraction of the price—and without the late fees that annoyed Blockbuster customers.

Reed Hastings has explained that the idea of Netflix came to him when he was forced to pay $40 in overdue fines after returning Apollo 13 past its due date.

In 2002 Netflix went public. Early on the bandwagon of streaming video, by 2010, Netflix went from “being the fastest-growing first-class mail customer” to being the “biggest source of streaming Web traffic” during peak evening hours. The old brick-and-mortar-style rental market was being disrupted at an incredible pace, and Blockbuster was ultimately unable or unwilling to adapt. By the time Blockbuster realized these market trends and disruption, it was too late.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

From The Huffington Post:

If you were planning on heading down to your local Target to buy the new Beyonce album, think again.

Target has opted out of selling “Beyonce” at its stores once iTunes’ exclusive sale ends after Dec. 18, according to Billboard. Retailers are expected to have the album on shelves by Friday, Dec. 20, but it likely won’t come with any bonus material or exclusive content.

“At Target we focus on offering our guests a wide assortment of physical CDs, and when a new album is available digitally before it is available physically, it impacts demand and sales projections,” Target spokesperson Erica Julkowski told Billboard. “While there are many aspects that contribute to our approach and we have appreciated partnering with Beyonce in the past, we are primarily focused on offering CDs that will be available in a physical format at the same time as all other formats. At this time, Target will not be carrying Beyonce’s new self-titled album ‘Beyonce.’”

. . . .

Back in 2011, Beyonce partnered with Target for the release of “4″ with a deluxe version of the album.

. . . .

This time around, Beyonce’s only target was her fans.

. . . .

“Now … it’s all about the single and the hype,” Beyonce said. “It’s so much that gets between the music and the artist and the fans. I felt like I don’t want anybody to give the message when my record is coming out. I just want this to come out when it’s ready and from me to my fans … I would make my best art and just put it out.”

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to Alexei, who thinks there’s a parallel to publishing, for the tip.

From FutureBook:

Publishing is a business that’s indivisible from language. Most people who go into it do so because they believe in the power of words to tell stories and explain complex ideas. So it seems only fitting that following the first Digital Publishing Xmas Fair, which aimed to encourage closer relationships between London’s digital publishing start-ups and the publishing community, that we spend some time considering the language we use to describe and discuss these businesses. This is because as it stands, I think this might need a little bit of editorial finessing.

The language that surrounds start-ups centres on the idea of creating “disruptive technologies”, a term first used by Clayton Christiansen in the 1990s. Start-ups, we are told are disruptive – the successful ones succeeding by their ability to destroy existing markets and create new ones. Disruption is what companies in Silicon Roundabout and Silicon Valley are all about, surely?

I’m going to disagree with this by saying no, not always.

Because I think the idea that start-ups have to be “disruptive” to succeed is becoming dangerously close to received thinking. Especially with start-up businesses like those that live alongside the publishing industry which I’d call vertically focused. These are companies dependent for their survival on the fortune of a certain category of businesses: in this case, publishers. If they disrupted these businesses out of existence they wouldn’t have customers.

. . . .

My argument is that publishing isn’t so much being disrupted as unbundled by digital forces. Analyst Benedict Evans describes this process in his latest presentation “How Mobile is eating the world”, explaining how the lead of a dominant platform like Craigslist, eBay or Facebook can be innovated away by other companies nibbling away at the margins. He suggests that the greatest threat Facebook faces is not that another network gets bigger than it, but it finds itself eaten away into irrelevancy by a large number of small players who do things like social messaging or picture sharing better.

. . . .

Let’s apply this example back into publishing, which is in the middle of being unbundled now. The formerly established well-understood supply chain by which books were written, commissioned, created, printed, marketed and sold has been broken up, with its constituent parts now managed very differently. The one part of the supply chain where we’ve seen disruption in its purest, violent form is bookselling, where has essentially created a new “market and value network”.

. . . .

I’d argue that the area where we’re seeing the least unbundling lies in the really important stuff: the content. You could argue that self-publishing is beginning to shift the paradigm (another ghastly, over-used word out there in start-up land) of how content is made available to readers, but this shift has also created other problems. Self-publishing platforms’ well publicised struggles with spam, plagiarism, obscenity and over-abundance of choice all reinforce the importance of the role of the publisher. The editor and publisher’s value judgement and appetite to take risks is the integral part of the process that hasn’t yet been disrupted, automated or unbundled out of existence. The editor and publisher’s value judgement, and appetite to take risks.

This isn’t to say change is impossible, but the business truly dedicates itself to the disruption of the publishing supply chain will probably look, smell and act like… a publisher.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

A lot of people in the traditional publishing business talk about disruptive technologies without ever seeming to understand what it is they’re describing.

As usual, traditional publishing is behind the times on this concept. Disruptive innovation came on the scene over 15 years ago with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Professor Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School. Christensen’s ideas went through the tech world like lightning and played a huge role in the explosion of new technologies and new companies in the late 90′s.

There are two closely-related components of the disruptive change that is in the process of dismantling the traditional publishing business – ebooks and ecommerce.

Ebooks mean that the whole infrastructure necessary to create, warehouse, distribute and sell paper books is outmoded, a financial boat anchor around the necks of publishers, distributors and bookstores. The ebook removes all the expenses necessary to support the paper book.

Ecommerce cuts out the enormous amount of overhead necessary to keep physical stores stocked with physical goods. It eliminates the physical store and the people who work there.

Ebooks and ecommerce are a marriage made in disruption heaven. All that’s necessary to sell an ebook is a means of processing credit card transactions and the ability for the etailer to squirt a bunch of electrons across the internet.

For many years, everyone in the publishing world thought their product was books. “I’m in the book business,” they would say.

For a very long time, publishers were correct. You couldn’t separate the words from their physical instantiation, the book, and have anything to buy or sell. Today, they’re dead wrong. The product consumers want is words in a form they can easily read – words that appear on an ereader, tablet, smart phone, computer screen, Google Glass and a bunch of other items that haven’t been invented yet.

You can’t produce and sell physical books without printers, truckers, warehouses, etc. Ultimately, this was the real value a traditional publisher brought to an author. If an individual author wanted to get into the printed book world, he/she had to pay a printer, warehouse, shipper, etc., etc. It made some financial sense to hook up with a publisher who was familiar with the process and players in that supply chain and willing to foot the bill for shepherding a book through that production and distribution pipeline.

With an ebook, the author just needs a computer that can produce words and an internet connection capable of sending those words to an etailer. Once Amazon and others opened their electronic stores to anyone who wanted to send them an ebook, publishers were left talking about editorial assistance and publicity, commodities that are readily available for about as much or as little as an author cares to pay.

Just because publishers were the ones who did this sort of thing in the past doesn’t mean they’re the best ones to do it today, particularly given the horrendously large bite they take out of revenues generated when books are sold.

The little tech companies that are swarming around publishers, trying to sell things to them, aren’t anything like the disruptors of the publishing business. Amazon and indie authors are what will kill legacy publishing.

From TeleRead:

Following the first Digital Publishing Xmas Fair, which apparently sought to bring digital startups and the publishing industry closer together, McCrudden took exception to the wholesale promotion of “disruptive technologies,” arguing instead that publishing was being unbundled, with its various component disciplines being split off and transformed piecemeal. “The formerly established well-understood supply chain by which books were written, commissioned, created, printed, marketed and sold has been broken up, with its constituent parts now managed very differently.”

. . . .

One slightly brain-dead point to make is that we never before had an alternative standard of comparison with what the publishing industry actually published. There were no comparables to indicate what the publishign industry might be missing or getting wrong, because there was no alternative. The remainder book trade and the periodic unearthing of great forgotten or ignored authors gave some hints, but nothing conclusive. But now there is. And the result? Self-published works cram the Top 100 list on Amazon, never having seen a publisher – only Amazon, and readers.

“The editor and publisher’s value judgement and appetite to take risks is the integral part of the process that hasn’t yet been disrupted, automated or unbundled out of existence,” affirms McCrudden, reiterating those first two qualities for emphasis. Well doesn’t a self-published author risk more, personally, when they put out a book? Let alone spend any of their own money on editorial services, cover design, etc. Mainstream publishing is not an industry that has exactly been renowned for edgy risk-taking.

Or rather, it has in one specific and not very flattering area. Mainstream publishing has a record of getting things wrong – misjudging reader appetite in spades. Remainder book trade again, anyone? It’s been cossetted in this through arrangements that gave it peculiarly favorable arrangements on product return.

Link to the rest at TeleRead

Nothing to do with books, but PG loved this on Kickstarter:

Link to the rest at Kickstarter