Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Obviously Johnson is looking at his own company's financials, and projecting.
Will publishing survive? Yes.
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Of course there will allways be publishing. It is an activity that anybody and everybody can practice. We're doing it right now.
What Johnson and compatriots fret about is the pbook business as *they* know it. With all its disfunctions, inefficiencies, and legacy peculiarities that continue today even though they ceased making sense decades ago.
They fear the loss of a nice and cosy business they are used to and fear even more having to learn a whole new way of doing things. They just want things to endure... at least until their golden parachutes vest.
The problem is the outside world recently knocked down the walls of their cosy little "utopia", exposing it to the bright light of modern reality. So they fret about the loss of the last champion of their "orthodoxy" even though it is far from a certainty or even imminent, merely a likely event.
And, of course, when orthodox utopias are challenged the knee-jerk reaction is to circle the wagons and try to kill the messenger. So far, "circle the wagons" has brought ebook windowing (lasted 3 months), a price-fix conspiracy (lasted about 2 years depending on how you define the endpoints), a pair of megamergers in the making, and now wistful talk of the BPHs banding together yet again, to save their "champion".
Some might think that changing the ownership/funding of B&N might not achieve much as long as B&N's retailing business model continues to require higher prices (and near-zero profits) for the exact same product that other channels can deliver at acceptable profits.
But hey, if they keep throwing ideas out there, they might throw out one that won't be D.O.A., right?
