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Originally Posted by Phogg
I do not see an end result resembling what you forsee more than superficially.
I think best seller lists will generally have to now compete with dozens of other best seller lists.
I think that those lists will each cater to constituencies with different outlooks on politics, religion, sexuality, family, general philosophy, etc. They will overlap about as much as Horror and Romance genre lists overlap now. And adherents to each list will extole the list of their patronage while excoriating lists diametricaly opposed to their preference.
Thats where we are headed in my view.
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And, each new release in those categories will have to compete with pretty much every successful release ever made in that category.
It will take a while to get there but the eternal backlist by itself will be far morendisruptive to traditional publishers that self-publishing. So no, the mainstreaming of ebooks will *not* be a shallow facade change leaving the old overlords still in charge; on the contrary, it will be a fundamental change.
To see which way the winds are blowing among Established Professional Writers, try this, the Keynote Speech at the annual conference of the Romance Writers of America:
http://www.stephanielaurens.com/rwa12keynote.html
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Which transition? You might think I mean the transition from print to digital, but no - while the shift from print to digital consumption is a major driver contributing to the critical transition that's causing the upheaval in our business, it's not the critical transition itself - which is the migration of readers from buying offline to buying online. Whether they buy print or digital doesn't matter - it's the fact that readers access our works online that's key, because once a reader is buying online, the author can reach that reader directly, and that alters one critical segment of our business irrreversibly.
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Very much worth reading, as are the comments at The Passive Voice:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/07/20...ing-the-faith/