Is It The End Of The World As We Know It?

On the heels of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the world's oldest and most well respected financial houses, New York magazine has published an article about the demise of publishing. Coincidence? Purely. And since the demise of publishing has been predicted for at least fifty or so years, on the surface seemingly nothing new other than another doom and gloom scenario. But look a little deeper and the similarities are remarkably unsettling...

For one we have the decline of book sales, the mega mergers at the top of the industry that have all but swallowed the mid-size and small guys and the entry of media giants into what was once a semi-scholarly and presumed-intellectual enterprise. Read that another way and you have the underpinnings of the Wall Street collapse: GREED.

"So publishing ends up looking like a mini-Hollywood, but even more dependent on sleeper hits and semi-reliable franchises," says Boris Kachka. "Forget literary taste; everything is cost-benefit analysis."

Everyone wants the mega-hit that can be followed by mega-sequels that ultimately will become blockbuster movies. Everyone wants the memoir written by the bad-boy celebrity or recently diagnosed with a horrible disease film star. Nobody wants to take a chance on an unknown unless that unknown writes in a copycat style to a known best seller.

And lurking off in the distance is the on-line presence of Amazon that threatens to destroy the two remaining significant booksellers, Borders and Barnes & Noble, even as one wonders how much longer Borders is going to be able to survive.

True, as the last dinosaur of the old boys' network, publishing has been incredibly slow to embrace the new media like on-line sales and heaven forbid on-line marketing for a) fear that everything will take away from their profit margin and b) the "old world" style of thinking that believes books are not sold electronically, some of this is justly deserved. However, the problem is that while publishing may finally be suffering its rude awakening, it is doing so at the expense of those who may never get through the door, through no fault of their own.

Count me in as one of the ones who have been trying for two years now, with two different proposals on two different topics that came complete with their own fan-bases and marketing potential that even a semi-enlightened Neanderthal could see, as well as an agent who is more Hollywood than Harvard and still nothing. Oh sure, praise from editors and even the passing "Great idea" kudo, but no one wants to fork over the dough or take a chance.

So while publishing is going through its identity crisis, readers as well as writers are all suffering. Perhaps no one is buying books because there is nothing worth buying. Perhaps not everyone wants to read sound bites. And even if they do, most televisions these days come with a closed captioning option.

Is is the end of the world as we know it? I'm not sure. But I do know that if publishing falls, the old way of doing business will have forever ended and heaven help us if we have a president in office who doesn't know his way around the internet.