News: The End of Book Publishing as We Know It?

[fashion_piranha]

FASCINATING (but long) article about the decline of the publishing industry's profits and outlook for the future from New York Magazine.

Original Article Can Be Found Here
The End
The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming

Comments

[saru_kage]

I was only able to skim the article because I'm not in a place where I can sit down and read all nine pages, but I'm sort of surprised they've been doing as well as they have been for so long. With the fact that the publishing industry is so ridiculously centralized, and that the vast majority of product distribution is in the hands of huge chains which insist on idiotic practices like ordering to the net, I think a lot of people saw trouble on the horizon. I've been hearing authors bitch about how screwy the publishing system is for at least a decade.

You might be interested in this. It's a TED talk which deals with making books available to everyone, and micro-publishing in developing nations. It's pretty neat.

[janicu]

Oh yes, we have a subscription and I read the article. Lots of name dropping and I noticed they only really talked about fiction, not genre fiction. The comments about Amazon and it's threat to publishers were interesting.

[elfbiter]

There is a matter of large bookstore chains ordering only bestsellers (which leads that those who want something else go to net bookstores like the Amazon). Publishers also disfavor "slowly selling" books and want only bestsellers - and half of those are bestsellers only in the sense that some marketing company claims they are. That does not necessarily translate into real-life profits.

At the same time various publishers make more restrictive contracts with the authors, including lifelong exclusive contracts and wanting to hold onto the publishing rights even if the book would not sell because they just _might_ use them for future electronic publishing. You can guess what the writers think about that - meaning that self-publishing and print-by-demand outfits like Lulu may become more popular.