Forget The Doom & Gloom; Look How Good Things Are In The Book Business
from the same-story-again dept
The book publishing business really does seem to be going through the same process that the recording industry went through not so long ago. That is, it's crying about all the doom and gloom. Layoffs are rampant, and there are all sorts of concerns about how the industry is going to survive. Yet, as with the music business, if you step back and look around, you realize the actual book business is thriving. Jason Pinter has written up a post pointing out that this is, perhaps, the most exciting time, ever, for book lovers. That's because a lot more people are talking about and reading books, and there are all sorts of exciting developments in the book world (and, also, he notes, in the movie business based on books). These sorts of things are important to remember. As we've seen in the music business: more music is being made and enjoyed than any time before, and more musicians are able to make money from their music than at any time in history. Yes, some of the big companies in those industries are going through painful transition periods, but if you take a step back and look at the actual market, things are quite exciting and healthy.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: books, publishing
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Keep your realitycheck, please
It's the same story indeed. Old business models need to be propped up by legislation, otherwise they'll all fail, and writers will have no incentive to write another letter.
Because after all, if the publishers go out of business, there will be no talent left. Same as there will be no movies made, if the big moviehouses fail, and no music will come out, if the labels fail. "We are too big/important to fail" to paraphrase the false notion of the banks.[/sarcasm]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Same thing repeated, they will lobby for laws to crush the competition.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
I foresee efforts to crush competition being met with absolute and dismal failure.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
why i read and gather books
and soon also user based billed , which means for me and loads of others the net is too expensive and at least ill have somehting to occupy and waste time.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
This is not a simple subject
What I'm seeing right now is hundreds of small businesses struggling to stay afloat when brick and mortor sales are down an average of 12-15% across the country. My own employer has been struggling to get any kind of new sales just to stay afloat, last fall one staff member was let go due to lack of sales. We have a smaller staff now that is working harder than ever. Ultimately due to a variety of factors I think we all feel like we're working twice as hard than before for about 15% less pay.
To put up my own opinion here, I'm irritated by the dearth of indipendant booksellers that are adverse to technology and almost refuse to learn anything new. As a woman in the tech industry who's helped thousands of stores/customers I'm pissed that I work so hard to help these stores who are already struggling and but they refuse to learn anything new to help themselves and yet want to whine about how Amazon is kicking their asses.
Ultimately, after 10 years in this particular industry, I've had about enough and am thinking of leaving it for some other industry that actually wants to use technology to keep up with the competition and learn new things. Yes it's getting harder to survive as an independant bookseller even if the publishers make as much as some people like to spout. But, if an industry can't manage to pay it's support people reasonably enough, then perhaps they're not making enough money.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: This is not a simple subject
[ link to this | view in thread ]
On-Demand Book Publishing
"Print on demand with digital technology is used as a way of printing items for a fixed cost per copy, regardless of the size of the order. While the unit price of each physical copy printed is higher than with offset printing, the average cost is lower for very small print runs, because setup costs are much higher for offset printing.
POD has other business benefits besides lower costs (for small runs):
* Technical set-up is usually quicker than for offset printing.
* Large inventories of a book or print material do not need to be kept in stock, reducing storage, handling costs, and inventory accounting costs
* There is little or no waste from unsold products."
[ link to this | view in thread ]
White
and does he own the New Zealand Media????
[ link to this | view in thread ]