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Aug. 5th, 2011 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupOkay guys, I have thoughts about publishing and nowhere to put them, so you get them. Sorry.
One: I'm seeing a lot of articles lately about how trad publishing needs to "fight back" against e-books or buck the trend or some other utter nonsense. And the truth is they don't. What trad publishers need to do is yank their heads out of their asses and build a hardcopy publishing and sales model that actually functions in the modern world. You know how long the traditional "do a print run, hope it sells, remainder the remainders" model has existed in stasis? Something like four hundred years. Gutenberg was awesome but he's dead now, time to move on.
Because I want traditional publishing to succeed. And I want ebooks to succeed. I refuse to pick a side in the books versus ebooks debate because if you think one has to preclude the other, you're drastically missing the point. Books and ebooks aren't an either-or proposition; they're an "awesome, both" advantage.
Can I build a model for trad publishers to fix what is so drastically broken? No. I could give suggestions, but I'm not a professional restructuring consultant nor am I an economist. Still, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of those out there who actually live in a world where ebook readers exist, and they'd be happy to help.
Two: I have a really hard time feeling sympathy for Borders and their constant bankrupcy/recievership/whatevercakes drama, because Borders is one of the Big Box bookstores and in its time has edged out countless smaller independent bookstores without offering any significant advantage to the consumer, except for maybe about a ten year period between "big box bookstores open" and "the internet appears" when they offered heretofore unknown diversity. But that's over now, and for a long time Borders has been part of the problem, both for the publishing industry and for independent business.
(Sidenote: I cannot tell you of my enraged reaction to You've Got Mail, even as a teenager. The big bookstore corporation and its slimy, manipulative, lying mouthpiece won? The douchebag gets the girl and closes down her store and that was sold to us as an actual happy ending. What the hell was a film from 1987 doing in 1998?)
So yeah, I'm sorry a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and a lot of giant retail spaces are going to stand empty, but don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, Borders. I hope Barnes and Noble follows you down in flames and someone opens a Trader Joe's in all your retail spaces.
Three: On a less aggressive note, the above boils down to the fact that I would love to see a new model emerge where small bookstores flourish because they serve a different purpose from the past and a different purpose from the big online bookstores. I was talking about this with some friends the other day and I think it would be fantastic if we developed a sort of social order where if you're looking for a specific book, maybe you go online for it, okay, but if you're looking to browse or to find something new, you will have a small bookstore in your neighborhood where you can go for an experience. (Which incidentally would also be a nice step towards exploding the filter bubble.) I think this would actually get more people out to bookstores, in the same way our cultural expectation that everyone likes coffee gets more people out to coffee shops.
And you know what's awesome too, small bookstores can generally order any book you can order online. That does require that you go out and speak to another person, which I'm generally not in favour of. But they can do it -- and if you're just browsing, most of the time the clerk will leave you alone.
And that is my Friday morning rant.
One: I'm seeing a lot of articles lately about how trad publishing needs to "fight back" against e-books or buck the trend or some other utter nonsense. And the truth is they don't. What trad publishers need to do is yank their heads out of their asses and build a hardcopy publishing and sales model that actually functions in the modern world. You know how long the traditional "do a print run, hope it sells, remainder the remainders" model has existed in stasis? Something like four hundred years. Gutenberg was awesome but he's dead now, time to move on.
Because I want traditional publishing to succeed. And I want ebooks to succeed. I refuse to pick a side in the books versus ebooks debate because if you think one has to preclude the other, you're drastically missing the point. Books and ebooks aren't an either-or proposition; they're an "awesome, both" advantage.
Can I build a model for trad publishers to fix what is so drastically broken? No. I could give suggestions, but I'm not a professional restructuring consultant nor am I an economist. Still, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of those out there who actually live in a world where ebook readers exist, and they'd be happy to help.
Two: I have a really hard time feeling sympathy for Borders and their constant bankrupcy/recievership/whatevercakes drama, because Borders is one of the Big Box bookstores and in its time has edged out countless smaller independent bookstores without offering any significant advantage to the consumer, except for maybe about a ten year period between "big box bookstores open" and "the internet appears" when they offered heretofore unknown diversity. But that's over now, and for a long time Borders has been part of the problem, both for the publishing industry and for independent business.
(Sidenote: I cannot tell you of my enraged reaction to You've Got Mail, even as a teenager. The big bookstore corporation and its slimy, manipulative, lying mouthpiece won? The douchebag gets the girl and closes down her store and that was sold to us as an actual happy ending. What the hell was a film from 1987 doing in 1998?)
So yeah, I'm sorry a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and a lot of giant retail spaces are going to stand empty, but don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, Borders. I hope Barnes and Noble follows you down in flames and someone opens a Trader Joe's in all your retail spaces.
Three: On a less aggressive note, the above boils down to the fact that I would love to see a new model emerge where small bookstores flourish because they serve a different purpose from the past and a different purpose from the big online bookstores. I was talking about this with some friends the other day and I think it would be fantastic if we developed a sort of social order where if you're looking for a specific book, maybe you go online for it, okay, but if you're looking to browse or to find something new, you will have a small bookstore in your neighborhood where you can go for an experience. (Which incidentally would also be a nice step towards exploding the filter bubble.) I think this would actually get more people out to bookstores, in the same way our cultural expectation that everyone likes coffee gets more people out to coffee shops.
And you know what's awesome too, small bookstores can generally order any book you can order online. That does require that you go out and speak to another person, which I'm generally not in favour of. But they can do it -- and if you're just browsing, most of the time the clerk will leave you alone.
And that is my Friday morning rant.
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Date: 2011-08-05 02:20 pm (UTC)There was an awesome kid's bookstore here which had a back room where a bunch of authors signed the walls and ceiling. Neil Gaiman signed it. So did Brian Jacques, I think, and so many others over the years. I went to book day camp there as a child. It's gone now. I cried when it closed.
-sigh-
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Date: 2011-08-05 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 11:21 pm (UTC)*sigh* I do know how you felt though. I was heartbroken when our kids bookstore closed, and even more heartbroken when the indie I worked at closed its doors.