The New York Times has a report from Book Expo: high-tech innovators confidently predict the future, while traditional publishers wring their hands. The whole thing is interesting, but here are a couple of representative snips:
In a pavilion outside the main exhibit hall Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House and the creator of the Anchor Books paperback imprint, and Dane Neller, founders of OnDemandBooks.com, demonstrated their Espresso Book Machine, which can print a small paperback book on site in less than five minutes. “This could replace the entire supply chain that has been in existence since Gutenberg,” Mr. Epstein said.
and this one, from former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown, who was promoting her new book on Diana:
“Giving an author’s book away for nothing on the Web as a way to market books seems a mirage to me,” Ms. Brown wrote in an e-mail message after the lunch. “All it does is feed the hungry angles of journalists and bloggers who plunder it without any of the author’s context or nuance and makes the reader feel there is nothing new to learn from the genuine article when it finally limps on its weary way to a book shop.” Although “The Diana Chronicles” will be excerpted in Vanity Fair, Ms. Brown pointed out that both the author and publisher are generally paid for such excerpts.
I'd like to point out that my book was excerpted in a mainstream magazine, Tikkun, and I never received a cent - nor did I care. What all of this says, to me, is that there is a widening gap between the big-time and the small-time - whether that is the difference between Vanity Fair and Tikkun, or between a talented poet and Tina Brown -- and it's very hard for people like Tina Brown to understand. I think we will be seeing parallel universes in publishing for a while, but the days when all "books" had similar histories and pedigrees are long gone.
FOLLOW-UP NOTE, June 5: there's a good post, reacting to the same article, at The Reading Experience. I just left the following comment there:
"If there weren't a real threat, those who felt threatened wouldn't be trying to discredit those of us who write and publish outside the mainstream system. The irony is that it is precisely people like Tina Brown who have accelerated the demise of traditional publishing, where literary merit, creativity, and originality have been completely eclipsed by concern for the bottom line."
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