Remember that movie? A vietnam soldier dies after a vicious combat, but he refuses to let go and after a moment of flatlining his vitals resume. Upon returning home he is increasingly freaked out by what appear to be horrible demons chasing him. Finally a friend and mentor tells him that by refusing to die, he cheated Death. As long as he clings to his old life Death will appear to him as demons, tearing him from those he loves. But if he can accept that it’s his time, those demons become angels, leading him toward a loving light of the next life.
Well, the content publishers are living that right now. Books, movies, music, newspapers, magazines – they’re clinging to old models, which were highly profitable and carried great respect. But death, in the form of new media, self-publishing and streaming access, are tearing that old life apart, destroying it viciously. The longer they hold out and the more they try to fight it off, the uglier and more difficult their business is.
But if they’d only look at content distribution with fresh eyes, they’d realize there’s real money to be made in offering content that consumers want, how they want it. They have to find their core expertise and push that forward, letting the rest drop away. As Friedman describes in The World is Flat, IBM stopped making computers and became an enterprise computing service vendor. They couldn’t compete with parts aggregators (sound familiar?) and outsourced labor, so they stopped trying. If book publishers want to keep themselves as the sole gateway to publishing, they’re dead. <cough>ebooks<cough> But a million digital self-publishers could sure use their editing, marketing and publishing expertise, and they could even still be the curators of great literature, both digital and physical. Think Oprah’s Book Club in which they get a cut – as long as the cut is reasonable it’s a great deal for the authors, it’s money for them, and provides a recommended reading list for consumers. Everyone wins.
It could be a heavenly new world of content distribution. Sadly, today, it’s stuck in a nightmare where nobody wins (digital versions cost as much or more than paper versions, libraries can’t lend books more than 26 times, kindle books aren’t allowed to be loaned to friends, authors make a pittance while publishers and retailers duke it out for obscene profits on each book, making up for losses everywhere else, authors left to find their own path through self-publishing create works without professional editors and marketing guidance, etc).
Let the old go, Publishing Industry; embrace the light and let’s all live happily in the next world. Whether easy way or hard way, that world is the future.
