Are publishers incapable of facing digital change?

I’m a few months late noticing this, but one of my Facebook friends posted a link to this editorial from April about the reluctance of the publishing industry to embrace change. It’s from the Novelr blog, which is a blog centered around independent Internet fiction (much like the net writing I talk about in my “Paleo E-Books” columns).

Blogger Eli James cites this New Yorker story (which I mentioned here) about the e-book power struggle involving Amazon, Apple, and Google, in the context of wondering why publishers haven’t been trying harder to adapt to the oncoming digital revolution.

James finds it puzzling that more publishers have not begun to move toward the digital future—creating more digital content, including publishing brands readers can identify with, and beginning to get rid of legacy printing systems.

But despite a number of writers, publishers, panels, and conferences offering advice on how to do it, James writes:

[P]ublishers appear to be more interested in squabbling over eBook prices than in investing for long-term change. I’ve waited four years for some of these changes to happen, and none have yet materialized. In the meantime – articles like the ones I’ve linked to above have begun appearing at increasing frequencies. Why has the publishing industry failed to act? What has gone wrong? Can no publisher see what these writers currently do?

James then looks at the possibility that publishers are, by their nature, incapable of changing. He begins with “The Shirky Principle”, as articulated by Kevin Kelly from a quote from Clay Shirky, which is that “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” The publishing industry, James points out, is “a highly inefficient solution to a real problem”—the problem of how to get knowledge and stories from authors’ pens into readers’ hands.

For a long time, the publishing industry as it now exists was the best possible solution to this problem, even as inefficient as it was. (Much like we say that “capitalism is the worst possible system of government—except for all the other ones.”) But now a much better system exists for disseminating information—the Internet. And even without blogs and digital books, there are more efficient ways of getting printed matter to consumers as well (print-on-demand, the Amazon bookstore).

James points out that disruptive technology usually arises out of the margins of the old institution, and so it is with e-books. He also suggests that web fiction—independent writing published on the writers’ or communities’ webpages, rather than through thir-party stores like Smashwords—might be the key to publishing’s future.

He concludes:

The only way to make publishers change is to force them to do so, and the best way to force them is to render them obsolete. Publishers currently control the distribution chain between the reader and the writer, and so – if we are to do this – the fastest way to make them obsolete is to empower the writers. To give them the keys to the distribution chain, and to see what they do with it.

While I have my doubts that independent web fiction will ever make traditional publishers “obsolete”, I certainly can’t fault him for thinking big. After all, I write independent web fiction myself. And also, it reminds me of a more recent post from Techdirt about how big businesses are often reluctant to change to new ways of doing things until it’s too late to get started.

In the Techdirt piece, Mike Masnick cites as examples Kodak’s belated switch to digital photography (and Masnick has actual experience here, as he worked with a professor on a presentation explaining “why Kodak needed to embrace digital now”—back in 1997), and the way that Netflix came along and ate Blockbuster Video’s lunch.

Netflix, it’s worth noting, is doing fine—it just launched a streaming-only video “rental” service in Canada. And it’s continuing to innovate in rental by streaming, as its founder was looking ahead to a streaming future even when he founded the business as a DVD rent-by-mail shop in 1997 (he named it Netflix, not Mailflix). Meanwhile, Blockbuster—at one time the giant of the video rental industry—just filed for bankruptcy and is going to be closing over 900 of its 3,000 stores.

So whether web fiction is the key to making publishers “obsolete” or not, it’s a safe bet to say that if they continue taking their time about the digital transition, something probably will. It’s not clear what it would be; it might be something that hasn’t even been invented yet. But sooner or later, something will come along and eat the publishers’ lunch.

Of course, I could be too optimistic here. After all, for that to happen, people would actually have to still care about reading books. And it seems like that’s the case for fewer and fewer people these days.