2010/2/12 SteveC <[email protected]> > In terms of pure numbers, the argument that the publishing world has > changed is as flawed as the chart that started the thread. >
Pure numbers are never pure. I'm aware that profit margins are pretty much what they've been for a long time. But what about median advance? Per-word rate? Median earnings of published authors? From where I'm sitting, it looks like the middle has vacated, both for authors and publishers: You're either fairly small or you're really big, without much in between. Also, I'd have to ask: Do the numbers account for the number of online publications, which charge nothing, or the number of people publishing all manner of work without benefit of publisher? Let's not limit this to fiction -- limiting it to fiction hides great swathes of data from us that have the potential to tell us where things are going, not just where they are. And if either Apple or Amazon have their way in the current digital distribution struggle, is the publishing world still not changed? > > There is no question that authors do have an increasing ability to go > around the mainstream publishing filter. But the problem is again one > of base line. The base line against which we're comparing is close to > zero. (Not zero itself, because there have always been self-published > or tiny press books that caught on.) > > We've seen a huge increase in that number. But we're still at the > stage where every single instance of such a success gets noticed. > There may be hundreds total, but hundreds are still less than 1% of > all the books published by mainstream publishers in a single year. > They are probably a smaller proportion of books than hybrid cars are > of cars sold in a year. Both get undue attention because they are the > supposed vision of the future but the overall model has not really > changed at all. > I don't think the hybrid car analogy holds for the simple reason that this entire sub-discussion about the nature of the industry is focused on the book as the unit of sale, with no attention to the fact that the publishing industry is much larger than books. Newspapers and magazines are also part of the publishing industry. We all know about what's happening to newspapers, where online wire services and TV network news websites have supplanted print sources for national/international news and TV station websites are starting to trump local print newspapers. (Newspapers reaping the whirlwind, it could be argued: They diminished their own value by relying too much on the wires, so disintermediating them leaves the information consumer with a net gain.) Now original websites like Huffington Post are finally trumping print newsweeklies. Now and again I find myself on Time.com or Newsweek.com, and I'm always surprised when I do. It's kind of a "hey, wow, these guys still exist!" moment. So to look at this as a situation where we have a new minor-league player (the hybrid car / digital book) in a market dominated by [books / cars] is to miss the larger development. With regard to publishing, we're not a a point where we change from one kind of car to another, we're at a point where we change from one kind of publishing to another. And as with the move from horsepower and rail-traction to cars (via the bicycle, I must add), we will be able to look around us and say "where's the evidence?" That's what people did here in Rochester when presented with a city plan from Frederick Law Olmstead's firm that focused on street traffic to the near exclusion of trains (intra-city rail gets about three paragraphs). There were something like 3K cars in what we think of now as the Rochester MSA; mass-transit was supposed to be the future. Ford et al. hadn't yet made cars middle-class affordable. "Visionary" folks at the time thought the future of working-class transit was on rails, not wheels. So they more or less ignored the report's focus on street traffic and built a subway. I'd like to say 'we all know where that went but lots of people don't: It cost twice as much to build as expected (there are foreshadowings of this in the Olmstead city plan of 1911 that went un-heeded, as is usual around here); it made money only for a very short time, long after its introduction and under very special circumstances (gas rationing during the second world war); and it's a money-pit we're still trying to fill in -- quite literally, as the Broad Street fill project gets underway. Meanwhile Ford and his compatriots forged ahead and now we live in a world where it seems appropriate to draw an analogy between digital books and hybrid cars. One of the likely reasons people missed the coming of the age of the car is that they were seeing things as they were at the time. Cars were still unreliable, expensive, and difficult to operate. When people talked about changes in transportation, they talked about it being the age of the bicycle, not the age of the horse. Reliable bicycles seemed revolutionary in their day: You could own a cheap and reliable means of relatively rapid transport that you didn't have to feed and stable [and which was faster than riding a horse in any case], and which with a little basic practice was much easier to operate than a horse. Yet aside from inspiring paved thoroughfares in a few places, they hadn't had a grand and revolutionary impact. So the limitations people looked at in the world were the limitations of bicycles and of fixed-rail transport -- much as people today (or more to the point, people of about 10 years ago) could point to the internet and the ready availability of texts in digital form and say "see, it really hasn't changed our lives that much." The point is that there is now a huge infrastructure out there that is prepared to supplant traditional publishing, and that there is every evidence, historical and extrapolative, to expect that it will do so and is currently in the process of doing so. So, yes, the profit margins may be the same. But I remain unconvinced that means much of anything. We are, as far as I can see, well past the watershed. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
