On Feb 13, 12:20 pm, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have to agree with Steve's point here, but there's a pattern emerging,
> and we've seen it before. The basic model hasn't really changed that
> much - after all, walk in a bookstore, scan the shelves, buy books,
> and we're still in the world we've been in for a long time.
>
> The 'but' becomes clearer...
Yeah. It's a truism that those who are part of a new model (in
anything: technology, fashion, culture, politics) always exaggerate
how quickly the world is swinging to their side and it's a truism that
those who are part of the old model always exaggerate how stable the
old world is. It's not even clear when the shift happens through the
lens of history. (We live in an Internet society. Except for about a
third of us.)
Nobody can say where we are now, exactly. My best guess is that we're
still very early in the swing and that the model that emerges will not
be what we have today. There are both rewards and penalties from being
an early adopter. (I've self-published two books, remember. I know
painfully what those are.)
My reason for saying it's still so early is the same as Dana's. Walk
into Barnes & Noble. For sake of argument it contains 100,000 titles.
How many of those came through the traditional route of agent, editor,
publisher, filter? At a guess, 99,000. That may even be conservative.
That's certainly not true of the books on Kindle. I've seen numbers
that guess that half or more of the titles (not in the public domain)
are self-published. Long tail or no, they almost certainly account for
no more than 1% of total sales.
Societies have enormous inertia. New models succeed when they offer
the public something clearly, obviously, immediately better than the
old model. Television crushed radio in a couple of years after WWII.
Yet television took two decades to get to the point of overnight
success. You can find ten zillion pre-war articles on how television
was already great and wonderful and would change the world. It didn't
until it was truly better and not theoretically better.
I firmly believe we're at a point in which the unfiltered model is
only theoretically better and hasn't reached the point of truly
better. That's an opinion, not a fact. Here's a fact. The people who
argue this on Internet message boards are not a representative
sampling of public opinion. I refer you to Conan v. Leno, with 96% of
the discussion favoring the former. (I saw that percentage somewhere:
don't hold me to it.) I guarantee that the whole of the country is not
split that way. (How they are split I haven't an iota. Just not 96 to
4.)
We're on the early upslope of the curve. I don't see any solid
evidence for anything else. That's all I'm saying.
Now, back to a book I want an editor to say yes to. {g}
Steve
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