The Sword and Laser discussion

I do a fair amount of reading on the publishing industry (hopeful author here) and I came across this today. If you have a chance, listen to the MP3 speech that is linked to in this article.

Good information from someone who's telling the publishers to stop bitching and start looking for ways to make money as we make the move to digital books. As a future author and an avid reader I hope more people will heed advise like this and avoid what the music industry did.

http://www.publetariat.com/business-e...

For those of you that don't want to visit or listen, the idea is that publishing industry does 6 main things right now, but with the changing from paper to e-ink, they need to focus on the one thing that will continue: "Curate" Too many publishers think they are in the killing tree industry, when they really should cultivating authors and readers.

I just listened to him again and I have to say I'm excited that some people really are trying to work their way through this change and it scares me a little that so many other publishers are unwilling to budge and are starting to do the same things the record industry are doing: i.e. sue their own clients.

In listening to his speech I'm reminded of two things:

John Scalzi. I love this man's blog, been a follower for a while. When John announced that his new novella The God Engines was out, I hit up Amazon, clicked buy, without a second thought. I read it that night. Luckily I liked the novella, and will continue to pick up John's work. That's the power of a good network, good brand, and devoted readers.

Another one: Brandon Sanderson. I follow him on Facebook and watch his constant twitters during his monstrous 17 hour editing sessions. The man is a total machine. After watching him do all this effort to put out a book to us, keeping his thousands of fans updated to the second on the progress, and posting pics of the author copies of his book when it arrived to him, of course I was going to buy.

In fact (as stated in another thread) I pre-ordered both the Kindle and the Hardback versions. One to read, the other to eventually get signed and look pretty along with the next 9 books in the series.

I hope the publishing industry takes notice and learns from mistakes of the past. There is plenty of money out there for book. In the speech he said that a 45 year old woman will buy three times more books on the Kindle than she will from the store. I know my reading has increased substantially since I got my Kindle and iphone. I now have a re-Kindle'd (yuk yuk) love for books, and I can carry them everywhere. I can then tweet about how much I loved a passage or tell my friends on Facebook to go buy the same book while I'm waiting in line in the Post Office. Such is the power of the internet.

Now somebody tell the MPAA.

I'm still waiting for ebooks that actually look as good as real books.

Tamahome wrote: "I'm still waiting for ebooks that actually look as good as real books."

Take 1 Kindle and a glue gun, some thin yarn, beads, and feathers. 20 minutes later, you're there!

Seriously, though, I've been using the Kindle app on my wife's iPad some and it's great for books with color illustrations and often displays them in larger format than you could get on a physical book. William Blake's wood cut illustrated verse looks gorgeous on the iPad but lame on the Kindle itself and only ok in a book unless it's oversize.

Tom thanks for posting this. We all know history repeats itself because some buisnesses have their blinders on and don't take notice of technology progression until it's to late. Like you and the article says there are other ways to make money from books and consumers are all different. As long as their are options consumers will purchase the tree version or the electronic version. It will be all about marketing the product.