With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
Clay Shirky
3 thoughts on “With the old economics destroyed”
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It’s not just publishing.
If anything, that is one of the least impacted industries.
Pretty much everything has been and is being impacted by tech, with more to come.
Just about the only area that refuses to accept it’s not 1968 anymore is education. And it shows.
(That and the political party heads but the limits of medicine and senility will take care of that.)
Directly and indirectly 90% of the troubles zoomers face are because of the educational establishment. The other 10%
Yeah, the pandemic.
100% avoidable.
The smarter ones are adapting, though. Some in…interesting ways.
Story fodder: backup spouses.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/college-students-can-be-marriage-pact-matched-with-backup-plan-spouse-if-all-else-fails/ar-BB1lynZp
The report is new, the tactic (also called Mr. Plan B) isn’t.
Psychology Today had a piece as far back as 2019 that two thirds of college women had as many as 3.78 Mr. Plan B’s. Very 50’s.
(Social media at work.)
The world doesn’t work as folks think it does.
Well, sort of. More precisely, there are now alternative solutions to the problem besides going to a publisher.
That publishers have not twigged to this and started to either upgrade the other services they offer or make their terms less onerous to authors is a searing indictment of the industry’s mentality.
Which they won’t.
Trade publishing’s only adaptation was to offer early Amazon the same volume-based terms they offered to B&N and Borders. Which excluded the standalone B&M stores.
Once they noticed what they had created, they turned to Apple to try to counter what they made of Amazon and in the process handed over to Amazon the ebook sector. (Plus lost $500M in fines.)
Since then they’ve done nothing but whine about the end of bandwagons and coast on their legacy authors and the odd one-hit wonders.
They’re going to ride the old business model to the bitter end.