Does publishing need the Silicon Valley way?

Publishing used to be a simple straight forward affair: get your author, edit, proofread, do the layout, design the cover, choose your paper, send it off the the printer, and pray. But things have become complicated, so complicated that there doesn’t seem to be a publisher in the world who seems to know what’s going on. Ebooks, agency models, self publishing, POD, Google editions, dead-tree editions, e-readers, tablet computers, smart phones, etc., are all conspiring to make the world an unsafe place. And with so many of them being incompatible with one another, every one seems to have an opinion, including tech magazines.

In his story, Why book publishing needs the Silicon Valley way in Computer World, Mike Egan argues why, “Book publishing would thrive by working more like the technology industry .”

“The book publishing industry is in trouble. Book sales are declining, and the quality of books is in a precipitous freefall. The reason is that the industry is clinging to an obsolete business model. And the whole process of discovering new talent is broken beyond repair,” he says in the first paragraph.

Is the book industry in trouble? I guess it is, except for those still whistling in the dark. Book sales are declining. But are the quality of books in freefall? Although I wonder sometimes why some books get published, I am not sure I agree with that. The industry is clinging to an obsolete model. Agreed. And the whole process of finding new talent is certainly broken; and it’s about time publishers got rid of those agents and started doing their jobs.

It is a strange piece but he has some interesting points. “Browsing a bookstore is like picking through trash in a garbage dump looking for something of value. Meanwhile, entire generations of brilliant authors never get the investment necessary to enter the system.”

The first point is true. Entire generations of brilliant authors being ignored? True, publishers often make appalling decisions but Egan has, obviously, never been a publisher: reading through manuscripts is not much different from browsing a bookstore, and far more painful. There are very few gems in there.

Computer World