Piffey

I was going to skip over this article and just leave it as a re-tweet from my Twitter account, but decided it had to get a mention on the site. Over at PublishingPerspectives there’s a great post by Richard Eoin Nash entitled “Why Publishing Cannot Be Saved (As It Is)” that looks into the economic effects of digital readership and exactly why the publishing industry cannot survive in its current form.

“The question increasingly arises in today’s media: can publishing be saved? No. It cannot and should not. There are plenty of non-profit publishers that exist to create and distribute the un-economic content. For-profit publishing should not be saved — it should figure out new business models, ones that offer services that both readers and writers want and are happy to pay for. We cannot wait for a deus ex machina to descend. (In other words, neither MySpace, nor Twitter, nor price-fixing, nor some new piracy-inducing extension of copyright law will save publishing — we simply need to start doing business better.)”

(PublishingPerspectives via O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing)

I’ve written about this before, but it’s always good to tautologize when you’ve got a free forum for your mental hamster wheel — right? I’ll keep it brief.

Content industries, in their current form, simply cannot be rescued. Writers such as Nash, Doctorow, and hundreds of others continue to reiterate that the current system works for the industry and the writers, but not for the writers and the readers. We cannot expect the current system to magically rescue the downturn of the content provider industry. People continually call for a new model and while dozens have been proposed, few to none have been embraced.

“We’re also going to have to recognize that reading increasingly is writing — readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.”

(PublishingPerspectives via O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing)

Reading has become increasingly social, along with dozens of other digested content. Consumers no longer just use media, but interact with it on a whole new level of ease. The days of drafting letters or waiting for a band or author to come through town are over. Social media is the norm yet still content providers can’t seem to figure out the necessity of utilizing this vast communication network to bring readers and writers back together; to make the industry profitable in the digital era.

Nash has a more optimistic view than I do. He believes that some brave innovator will come along and reshape the industry. I feel similarly, but think it is only possible after a complete collapse. Where will that leave the writers in the mean time? Writing will return to a labor of passion instead of an industry mostly devoid of legitimate, readable content. In a collapse the readers will be given the choice of what to buy instead of what Barnes & Noble or Borders has been paid to put on the first shelf.

The digital generation doesn’t succumb to these advertising tricks like their parents did and the first publisher to realize this and instead let their advertising be done by their reader’s mouths, let their best sellers be chosen by interest instead of manipulation, will be the one to remain when the major firms collapse due to an inability to change. Consumer choice is what the content industry needs to embrace. Let a best seller emerge based on societal merit not from clever placement of cardboard cutouts.