Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
Prognosticating here based on not much but my own opinion, but I expect the big publishers to join the newspapers music industry in their death march in the next few years. Some of them will hang on as there will always be a market for paper books, but I think they'll end up smaller and less influential. Ebooks and self-publishing are the future, maybe not the immediate future but they're coming.
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Commercial publishers fit Churchill's description of democracy: they're the worst way to get your book out there, except for all the other ways.
Ebooks aren't just the future, they're an ever-larger part of the present. I don't see paper vanishing, but ebooks are going to continue to grow market share - though whether at the expense of hardcovers or paperbacks we don't really know yet.
I don't see self-publishing taking over the same way, though many here do.
Self-publishing allows for far more variety in books, and much greater variability in quality. Some self-published books are really good - others are so incompetently written there's no way to know if the underlying story could be any good or not. The range is tremendous.
Also: Self-publishing = fewer readers = less money.
Physical self-publishing (as opposed to electronic) also often suffers from much higher per-unit production costs, which raises the prices without bringing any more money to the author.
Ebooks are much better, but they run into the problem of obscurity. Not every person will like any given book, so the best way to sell more books is to get it in front of more eyeballs.
Commercial publishers (despite all their flaws) are several orders of magnitude better at getting books in front of eyeballs.
Part of the problem is that getting books out there in front of eyeballs is a full-time job - often taking more time than writing. You can't build a solid writing career without regular production, but you can't write a new book if all your time is spent promoting the current one.
If commercial publishers fail, something very similar will arise to replace them.