The new issue of the Wharton Review is online and in it there's special coverage of a conference Wharton hosted in NYC humbly headlined as The Future of Publishing. Among other articles, ranging from SEO to search to newspapers, I spied an article on book publishing, my former haunt, Upended by eBooks: Is This the Last Chapter for the Book Business? Lo and behold, Alberto Vitale, who once ran Random House and has funded the creation of Wharton's Lab for Innovation in Publishing, is quoted as saying, "For over [sic] 600 years, there was only one way to publish. Now we have an alternative to Gutenberg." --While that isn't exactly a breakthrough in 2010, one must take encouragement where one can find it.
Here's another extract from the article that should be closely parsed:
To some of the panelists and speakers, the current tumult foretells a return to other earlier models of book publishing. Epstein predicted that much of the sales and marketing infrastructure in the book business will prove superfluous, and that small groups of editors with expertise in specialized areas like trout fishing or Keats will coalesce and attract like-minded authors and readers to their websites.
According to Jim King, senior vice president of market tracker Nielsen, "lots of things that are happening now were happening in the 18th century. Book shops were publishers. Piracy was rampant. The new technology revolutionized content." And "the feedback loop was very quick. Samuel Johnson would finish an essay at 3 a.m. By 3 p.m., it was being discussed in the coffee shops."Okay, so just as I get the feeling book publishers might be getting a grip on the 21stC, we tumble backwards into the 18th. Let us pray.
