I read an interesting blog entitled, “I Declare the War is Over: We need a new word for the things we used to call books.” The premise is we are in an era where the traditional book doesn’t adequately describe the many ways we package book content.
The article complemented the Pew research study that says e-reader and tablet ownership nearly doubled over the holiday season.
This threatens many people within publishing. But should it? All these readers still need content. Without something to read or view, e-readers are useless. Authors and publishers need to come to grips with the fact we are in the content business, not the product business.
I’ve come to realize we’ve fooled ourselves over the millennia. Publishers claimed it was all about the content, but the profit came in the physical book. We claimed the ideas within the books were important, but we were really selling the pages and cover.
Now that we’ve entered a new age, the ideas within the “book” really will matter. Let’s start selling worthy content, and not worry about what form it could take. Leave that to the consumers.
The businesses that the most to lose are the printers, not the publishers. Heaven help them!
