Book Publishing in a Time of Transformation
Anyone interested in the current transformation of the book publishing industry should read "Publish or be damned," by Stephen Page, published in the Guardian. Kassia Krozser of the Booksquare Blog also does a fine job of riffing on Mr. Page's article in "Do Publishing Houses Have A Future?."
This recent interview with digital publishing advocate Morris Rosenthal is also revealing.
You may also recall the Shaking up Tech Publishing post on David Heinemeier's Loud Thinking blog that generated some buzz last year. Reading through the original post and all of the comments (particularly Tim O'Reilly's) is enlightening.
Some people have asked us, "You've started a book publishing company? Huh? Why would you do that? I thought all the book publishers were going out of business." The above linked articles do a great job of describing why we think there is a future for new publishers to succeed by embracing the change happening right now.
As an aside, Mr. Rosenthal is part of a groundswell that sees the new digital printing and distribution methods as a tool to empower self publishers. I do agree that it this is important, and a good thing. However, more along the lines of Mr. Page, I do not believe that the future will be changed in a fundamental way in the balance of publishing houses and self publishing. There will always be books that will succeed quite well as self published books (as 37signals found with Getting Real), largely owing to their particular subject matter (how-to books do quite well, traditionally), timing, and the ingenuity, perseverance, and audience reach of their authors; digital, on-demand printing, ebooks, and online distribution definitely make things easier, but the dynamics of self publishing are essentially the same as they always have been, IMO. And there will always be a role for publishing houses to "curate" and add value to books through editing, packaging, and promotion.
We hope that people who read our first two books, Software Conflict 2.0 and Software Creativity 2.0 agree that the books are worth the effort and reflect the care and design that went into them after the author finished the writing.
Happy reading!
Dan
I hope books don't go away
I might be an old fogy when it comes to books, but I certainly hope they don't go away. As much as I like my e-books, there is nothing quite so satisfying as going the bookstore or library and just wandering the shelves and thumbing through a few books. I can't imagine how anybody could improve on that as a way to decide what to read next.
If I may offer my opinion, that browsability is the obstacle that must be overcome. If you can't put the book on the shelf somewhere then you have your work cut out trying to get me to buy. With very few exceptions (and your titles have so far been among them), I simply don't buy without being able to thumb through a copy. I've tried making on-line decisions with table of contents, sample chapters, and reviews. It's simply not as accurate and it's far more time-consuming. I can cover the local McNally-Robinson in about an hour. During that time I will have identified 50 or 100 titles of interest (books and magazines) and flipped through perhaps as many as 2-dozen. Some get filed for future evaluation and I normally walk out with 2-4 magazines and 1 or 2 books. Online, it would take me all day to track down items of interest and perform what evaluation I can and then I'd still have to wait a week for delivery. A week? By that time I should be finished reading them and looking for the next ones!
Good luck and keep up the good work.