You don't think of book people as warriors, but that's exactly what they've been for about 130 years. I thought it might be fun to examine why print on paper is losing the media battle. Until fairly recent times books held their own pretty well, which is remarkable when you consider how strong the competition used to be. Book publishing used to be a feisty industry and its battles deserve to be chronicled.
Here in three short paragraphs is the David and Goliath story of how publishing managed to survive and even thrive against fearsome odds for more than a century.
The first major hurdle that books had to overcome was newspapers, starting in the late 1800s. Newspapers improved rapidly in that time in content, presentation, and distribution, and an awful lot of people stopped reading books and read only newspapers.
Book companies fought back by sponsoring magazines, which were enormously successful.
Then came the double threat of film and radio, which threatened to sweep everything before them. Radio was free, and it's hard to compete with free. Print fought back manfully with the magazines about movie stars, the Golden Age of Pulp, and comic books.
Then came TV and LP records, and once again print fought back...
...this time with the cheap paperback revolution, which was so influential that it helped to create the youth movement of the sixties.
It also fought back with skin magazines like Playboy. Can you believe that a guy actually got rich by stacking a mansion with beautiful girls and then writing about it? Poor censored TV was powerless to compete! Man! Print people were gladiators back then!
So with a distinguished and combative history like that, how did it come about that the latest new medium, the internet, managed to do what film, radio and TV couldn't...namely, cripple the publishing industry? The short answer is that it didn't. Modern publishing self-destructed.
If you think about it, books should have had nothing to fear from the web. Book people were the natural providers of content for the web. Books had all the ideas, all the in-depth research, and a significant share of the recognizable public figures that people cared about. It was better than the net at providing fiction and fictional role models. The net, which even now is still primarily a reading medium, is potentially a terrific instrument for funneling people into bookstores. Of course this assumes that publishers are printing stuff that people actually want to read, at a price they can afford.
Sure the net is free and books cost money, but radio and TV were also free, and old-school publishing still managed to be competitive. With so many advantages at the starting gate, why did modern publishing fail to compete?
I can think of no other answer than that publishers in our era are less imaginative and less competent than their predecessors. Maybe we're paying for the anti-business attitude of the sixties. Older publishers stood up to film, radio, and television by innovating and redefining themselves. Our guys can't be bothered. Our best minds have either abandoned publishing or, more likely, been locked out of it.
I have my own ideas about what publishing should do to be competitive. I'd need more room to talk about it than I have here, so expect to see a pamphlet on the subject in the Theory Corner Store (...sorry for the delay in putting it up...I got side-tracked into learning Photoshop). In the meantime, I'm hoping that publishers jump on Amazon's offer to sell new top-of-the-line ebooks for $10, and on iTunes' offer to sell books by the chapter.
