Quote:
Originally Posted by jasonkchapman
Either the industry moves forward or it doesn't. Typesetting and pre-press are already digital, too. Granted it's not the end product, but it still starts out there.
One of the marvelous things about e-books is that they open up avenues to writers whose work, for one reason or another, just doesn't fit the publishing industry's cherished formula for acquisition. In paper, the alternative is small presses, but the small press business is almost impossible to do profitably. The costs are overwhelming. That leaves e-publishing, which promises to give a great big megaphone to voices that are usually drowned out by the mega-media-marketing campaigns of major houses.
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Personally I see e-books as an alternative form of publishing, not a replacement, at least not in the foreseeable future (a good exercise in imagination is to think yourself in 1800 or 1900 to see how pointless - though it can be fun or not depending if you are in the gloom and doom camp or in the singularity/end of scarcity comes and we'll live for a long while one - is to predict the future over more than a generation or two).
For some people it will be a way to sell more p-books, for some it will be the only form for a reason or another. Today the publishing industry is doing quite well despite perception to the contrary (maybe the literary fiction genre is not and is kept for prestige, but popular genres do quite well) and there is a lot of upside.
Kids and people more generally not reading so much - well for once it's not clear when they read that much at least here in America, for another get interesting books for them out and as we all know, they sell very well.
Sure the news industry is restructuring, many magazines are in decline, but those were always ephemeral things and the Net as the current top ephemeral thing is wiping the floor with them, but so what.
Despite the opinions of some, books are not and have not been ephemeral and they are here to stay, both e and print, in fixed form by and large and not in some constantly changing "cloud in the sky"