Sunday, July 20, 2014

Can the publishing industry do a better job of managing change than the music industry did?

by / / Talking New Media


The news that Amazon had launched a new eBook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, seemed like the perfect piece of information to pass on to an acquaintance – a verocious (that’s almost a real word) reader of what she describes as mostly trash novels.
“I haven’t bought a book in months,” she told me this morning. “Don’t have the time.”

VF-April-iPadAnother person I know, name withheld, said the same thing about magazines. “I used to subscribe to a bunch of them, but just don’t have the time to read them anymore.”

It doesn’t help that this person is really into Game of Thrones –  those thick volumes take up a lot of time. But her addiction did lead to her reading the one digital magazine issue she has ever opened: the April issue of Vanity Fair (which featured Game of Thrones on the cover, of course).

It’s tough to live in a household made up of publishing veterans where the only one actually consuming digital publishing products is the one that writes about them (now you pretty much know who I talked to). But I don’t think that is very unusual.

We are in the middle of a revolution in the publishing industry that will prove to be no less disruptive to the industry than what occurred in music over the past two decades.
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