Being Dragged into a New Age

With the battle over e-books still raging, I would like to take this opportunity to address the publishing industry as a whole and the danger the industry faces as it moves into the digital era.  Presently, book publishing is on the cusp of a complete change in the way books are perceived as a product.  As a result, publishers will need to carefully decide how to proceed in the near future if they want the industry to be about the books rather than about the business of selling a product.  The closest likeness to the current situation that publishers have found themselves in can be found by looking at the Music and Movie industries.  Both are industries based upon providing entertainment to a customer and both have gone through the rocky road to digitization.  The first thing we can learn from these industries is simple; digitization cannot be resisted or put off.  It will happen and it will need to be dealt with regardless of the desires of those controlling the majority of the industry.  Furthermore, the slower the industry moved in accepting digitization, the less control the industry will have over the methods in which the media is produced and distributed.  It is absolutely necessary for publishers to move upon this new media form quickly and aggressively.  We should be seeking to broaden our e-product horizons by releasing more media at low costs and with fast and easy access online.  This is the time when readers need to become aware of who the publishers of their favorite books are and how they operate.  By seeing the publisher as the powerful money holder who will produce anything that might make a profit, consumers are left with little desire to fight for their favorite publishers and less moral conflict over stealing e-books through online sharing programs. 

The greatest mistake that the music and movie industries made when dealing with the move to digitization was to try preventing the free flow of data from one person to another online rather than taking advantage of the media to become the main online distributor.  For the most part, people are willing to pay for the entertainment they consume, however when you present someone with the option to either pay a high price for a product that has only minor value to them (e.g. One song off an album of 13) or easily steal the one part they want with very little chance of reconciliation, the choice becomes much fuzzier than it should be.  The battle that raged over digital music media and the record industries failed attempts to control it have spawned a new beast which is forced to keep selling hit singles at an astounding pace just to make ends meet.  The consumers have completely lost trust in the industry, and will often seek to support the bands directly by going to concerts and purchasing other merchandise rather than buying albums.  iTunes has helped to stem the tide, but the resulting model of selling only hit songs has left the industry forced to abandon fringe artists and artists that have fallen out of vogue in order to turn a profit.

Publishing is now where recording was about 10 years ago.  As it becomes easier to consume books digitally, the demand for these books will continue to grow.  If publishers take the queues that the Recording industry left behind and act aggressively to become the primary distributors of electronic books, we may see publishers gain from this paradigm shift.  If publishers follow in the recording industries wake and allow third parties to control prices while attempting to control the proliferation of the product with an iron fist, they will find themselves steamrolled by the unforgiving torrent that is the internet.