I’ve mentioned many times before that changes affecting the publishing industry are taking place at an amazing pace. I keep up with them, but I don’t know how long I can keep talking about them. Take today, for instance. Two big things happened.
Kobo, the Canadian ebookseller with its own ereading device, dropped the price of the Kobo Wireless eReader to $99.99 (with free shipping). That’s huge! You now have a high-end device for a low-end price. You know that Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s nook will soon drop to that price or lower. Price of the reading device is no longer relevant to the ebook discussion.
Ed Victor, the venerable British literary agent, announced that he was forming a print-on-demand and ebook publishing venture called Bedford Square Books. He follows other recent moves by literary agencies such as Andrew Wylie’s Odyssey Editions, Scot Waxman’s Diversion Books, and, of course, the forerunner of them all Richard Curtis’ E-Reads. All of these ventures offer slight variations on the business model but, short form, they all represent a significant shift in the industry enabled by ebooks and print on demand technology. After publishers, agents control more publishing rights than anybody. They are now exploiting those rights. It makes such good sense. What is now a trickle will soon be a flood.
Okay, so agents are going into competition with publishers. Yesterday, or maybe the day before, three of the big six announced the pending launch of Bookish.com, a social networking site that looks a lot like publishers going into competition with booksellers, at least of the Amazon/Barnes & Noble/Google type. I just watched an interview with the head of Lulu, the self-publishing giant, announcing a change in initiative inviting authors to become publishers, so that authors are in competition with publishers.
Imagine an elephant (the Big Six publishers) being swarmed by ants (content providers of all ilk). Will the ants eat the elephant’s lunch? Or will the ants eat the elephant for lunch? If I were an elephant, I’d be nervous.
Be that as it may, publishing is changing irrevocably and precipitously. The news is outdated almost before it’s reported. It’s time to start focusing on what this is all going to look like on the other side of the news.
Via Stephen Roxburgh’s Visions & Revisions blog
how come it isn’t the same price in canada i wonder given the value of the $?
Sigh. Last time I raise this:
This is a site about ebooks. Some familiarity with – well, reading ebooks – is assumed.
Paragraphs need breaks. Either a change of indentation on the first line, or a vertical gap between.
These paragraphs have no breaks. If you’re unlucky, you’ll miss a break entirely (if the final line is the same width as the text box).
If copy+pasting from someone’s blog doesn’t come out right, it just takes 5 seconds to just insert a new line after each paragraph. And, you know, actually look at the result. Thanks.
Hi,
So what do you suggest for us new writers and would be writers of this Millenium? Do we self publish, even though it is still shunned upon by ‘genuine’ publishers. Or, do we self publish via the ‘e’ trend? You, have been around the industry for a long time, and I would really be interested in your view on what us ‘newbies’ should do.