I was a writer long before I joined Nokia. So, I have a particular fondness for anything to do with publishing – online or print. Indeed, publishing is a good industry to look at, since it is both old and mature, and is constantly ‘suffering’ attacks from digitization, democratization of distribution and publication, and online stuff in general.
As I mentioned earlier, a mature industry is not a dead industry (heh, not even mobile phones). One way to continue extracting value from a business is to look for the value elsewhere.
Browsing about, I ended up in Slashdot, reading a great post by Neal Stephenson, responding to some reader questions. Neal is an amazing writer, his Snow Crash book is considered one of the conceptual forebearer of the Web, along with other cyberpunk novels of the time (go read it!). He makes an interesting comment between Dante writers and Beowulf writers – writers with and without patrons. As a writer who has always had a patron, I enviously look over to the Beowulfian writers. 🙂
He also makes a final comment on the fate of publishing (see below), and he’s so right. I’ve heard so many stories about how publishers (of sheet music, music, books, music, movies) have shuddered when the game rules changed, only to regroup and redefine the game – in their favour.
I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing books. I published two of my books (someday publicly) via Lulu just to understand the process. Even though Lulu makes it dead simple to sell, ship, and print a book, there is so much more to publishing than that, as Neal says below. And that’s why publishers will stay in the game.
Link [via anti-mega]: Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor.
Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of bits and sells them, then you’re going to predict the elimination of publishers. But that’s only the smallest part of what publishers actually do. This is not to say that electronic distribution via CC is just a fad, any more than online bookstores are a fad. They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time.
