Publisher perish? Legacy publishers must adapt or be replaced

Legacy publishers: dinosaurs who are having trouble adapting to the new digital climate, or here to stay and planning for the future? As with any such question, the answer you get largely depends on who you ask.

On the “dinosaur” side, The Guardian ran a piece last week looking at how publishers were comporting themselves at the London Book Fair. The article included the viewpoints of publishers who said the publishing industry was in trouble.

Simon Potter, of Fast-Print Publishing, said: "The book industry – and I think most people in the industry would admit it – is a mess. There’s a lot of people stuck in their ways. Maybe they’re in denial that the world is changing. Maybe they don’t want the world to change."

And the article noted that most of the publishers at the fair admitted off the record that their biggest worry was Amazon in light of the DoJ’s anti-trust lawsuit. It also included comment from 24-year-old self-publishing fantasy writer Ben Galley:

"Publishing houses need to change their business model," said Galley. "They are still going by the slush method, sifting through a pile of manuscripts from authors they know nothing about. If they look around they’ll see people like me, with proven track records, fan bases and sales."

Galley thinks publishers will change like record companies, which increasingly look for unsigned bands that have already built up fans online or on the festival circuit.

However, Richard Mollet, chief executive of the UK-based Publishers Association, took exception to the focus of the article, and wrote in a letter to the editor that publishers are changing with the times and will become more rather than less important as the digital revolution proceeds.

Mollet took the position that the functions of helping writers refine and polish their works, nurturing new authors, and helping sort out complicated international rights contracts will remain important no matter how the books are distributed.

It seems the Guardian would have its readers believe that publishing is unnecessary, that copyright is outdated and that digital is going to blow it all away. The converse is true. Whilst transformation will not be straightforward, pPublishers (sic) are going to be at the forefront of the knowledge and creative economy in the digital future.

We’ve heard the same argument and counterargument dozens of times over the last few years. I think I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. There’s no reason publishers can’t survive into the future of the digital age. There’s definitely a place for the services they provide, even if those services are delivered in a different context.

Publishers have changed with technology over the last few hundred years. Before the end of the 19th century, writers delivered their manuscripts in longhand because there were no typewriters, let alone computers—but good luck getting a longhand manuscript accepted now!

However, change is never easy, and there’s a pronounced tendency in publishing (and, perhaps, in big business across all sectors) of hanging onto legacy structures long after the need for them vanishes. Just look at the current system of allowing bookstores to send back any merchandise they don’t sell for a complete refund. It was started back in the 1930s as a way of getting bookstores to take a risk on buying product during the Great Depression.

As such, it was an understandable product of its time; a lot of businesses had to change the way they did things back then. But it’s been continued for 80 years since then, through several economic boom and bust cycles. It’s pretty clearly not necessary in this age of computerized inventory and just-in-time shipping—do you think Amazon ever sends back a shipment of books that don’t sell? But it’s pretty hard to change direction when you’ve built up several decades of inertia.

Over the last few years, it seems as if the publishing industry has done everything it possibly could to try to hold onto the old, inefficient system. The only reason Amazon has gotten as big as it has is that it was built from the ground up to target those inefficiencies. Jeff Bezos saw an opportunity and he took it—and almost before publishers had any idea what was going on it had traded on those inefficiencies to become the single biggest bookseller in the world.

Rather than try to keep up, the publishers want to try to hamstring Amazon. It’s easy to understand why they would want to—change is not only difficult, it’s often scary. The movie studios wanted to kill off VHS the same way, for the same reasons—Jack Valenti famously compared it to the Boston Strangler and was concerned it would kill the movie industry by letting people rip off movies. They didn’t want to have to figure out how to adapt. But they did, and now home video is a far bigger revenue source for Hollywood than theatrical releases.

Essentially, the dispute over agency pricing, and the impending legal battle, boils down to publishers trying to hold onto their old business model in a world that isn’t best suited to it anymore. And there’s a Robert Heinlein quote I’ve mentioned before that comes to mind:

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

More and more lately, I’ve started hoping that the Justice Department prevails on all counts as soon as possible. The publishers have had plenty of time to adapt of their own volition. The fact that they still see Amazon as a danger to them (indeed, the fact that it probably is a danger to them if they insist on clinging to their old business model!) rather than a way they can sell more and more books to people who previously hadn’t bought books in years shows that they haven’t yet. If they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age by a court of law, then the sooner they get it over with the sooner the publishing industry will be able to adapt and thrive again, or else die out and be replaced by something better in tune with today’s world.

The more I think about it, the less concerned I am that the end of publishers, even if it does happen, will lead to “the end of publishing.” That writers want to write is a given, and so is that readers want to read. In that hazy space in the middle between the writers and readers is a business opportunity that publishers sprang up to make more efficient—peo

ple were both writing and reading before publishers were ever invented, just not as widely. And neither writers nor readers are likely to stop wanting to write or read just because a publisher goes out of business.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the free market. If the big publishers die out, we’re not going to return to the days of copyist monks—businesses will see an opportunity to make money and we’ll get other publishers (or even other business models altogether, such as the no-longer-vanity self-publishing model ushered in by Smashwords, Amazon, and others) to fill the gap and make sure that readers can continue to read what writers continue to write.

They may be different from the publishers or models we grew up with, and they may not work as well in some areas but work better in different areas. (Just as print publishing is better at widely-distributing books than copyist monks were, but poorer at producing lasting objects d’art.) But they will improve to meet customers’ needs, or they will be replaced by something better. As, it seems, legacy publishers are in danger of being replaced right now.