Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
With all due respect, Tuna, I am afraid that the division between "pioneers" and "normal people" is simply outdated concept at the beginning of 21 century.
It is not a phenomenon limited to publishing world, it is affecting practically everybody today. A constant and neverending change is a fact of life. Whatever is our profession, we have to be "pioneers"... or become obsolete, and quickly.
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The important distinction here is between the change we all experience, and the changes to businesses. Even in today's rapidly evolving market, businesses don't go bust overnight. Changing your business model is a risky, disruptive and expensive process. In some cases it can also mean that the reasons you went into a particular business no longer apply (you might have opened that bookstore more because you like meeting people than because you want to sell literature).
Whilst we as individuals will do the best we can to evolve (and when we do, we like to kid ourselves that it's easy and we'll always be up with the times), changing a business is a whole new ball game. If you have even just a couple of employees who's income depends on your decisions, you won't take such changes lightly.
In that respect, I think that yes, people who are changing their business models so early in the new market for ebooks are pioneers. There's no model for sucess yet, no ma and pa stores to emulate, no stable market to join in or even stable format to back. Whatever you do this year will need to be revised next, and the year after that and beyond. There is a reasonable choice between hanging on for as long as you can whilst things settle down, and jumping in with both feet knowing that you're going to be making radical decisions every few months for the next few years. Knowing that just one of those radical decisions could be very costly (you could have just converted all of your publishing to .lit), it's hard to be casual about 'constant and never ending change'.