(From “Surviving a Digital Disruption: Smart e-Book Publishing, Small Houses” by Victoria Sandbrook, Emerson College, December 2009)
The stability of the American economy has a reputation for disintegrating in a fiery ball of hubris. In the 1800s the U.S. faced a crippling series of five financial panics, crashes, and depressions caused by an overdependence on credit and reckless speculation. The Great Depression—preceded by the Roaring Twenties and caused by reckless trading—not only devastated the quality of living and peace of mind for people in the U.S., but also sucked the rest of the world into an economic crisis. Warning signs of each crash could have been identified, but were either overlooked or downplayed by the media. In hindsight, the results seemed most catastrophic when panic met a lack of foresight.
I contend that the publishing industry may face similar consequences should fear and unpreparedness continue to rule decision making across the industry, but the business of book publishing should not consider itself dead in the water yet: the technology currently available for improving efficiency in production through digital workflows will not only keep the print business alive but will allow publishers to move into digital publishing as quickly as the market demands. Once in place, a strong digital workflow will allow for better editorial control of content, more effective marketing, and improved sales channels, all leading to stable profit despite the current economic downturn. The changes that must be made to the traditional publishing model will come easiest to small publishing houses with low overhead costs and ready support for experimentation, making the contest to become future leaders of publishing—in print and digital forms—anyone’s game. Traditional scholarly sources, a collection of astute blogs, and interviews with four optimistic publishing professionals support my conclusion that thoughtful modernization of business models will have more lasting, valuable effects than any hastily acquired list of blockbusters or even a respected backlist of classics.
The basis for hope for any solution depends on both identifying the roots recent collapses of other modern industries and differentiating the industry’s problems and strengths from all other trades in decline. Michael Nielsen, a scholar researching the “shift…in how scientific discoveries are made, a shift driven by online tools of collaboration and sharing of scientific information,” believes that minicomputers, music, newspapers and other industries faced “disruption” when they reached the point of their catastrophic decline, not the social and financial effects of foolish or malevolent leadership. When technology surpassed that of the established powerhouse, new companies with “a radically different organizational architecture, using an entirely different combination of skills and relationships” began creating more useful products—microcomputers, mp3s, and blogs, in the case of these three industries (Nielsen). To compete, the existing companies would need to “make drastic, painful changes” with financial investments at a level that would “actually place incumbents at a disadvantage, locking them in” (Nielsen).
On top of this digital disruption, American publishing is dealing with several issues at once. The current 2008-2009 recession occurred as the housing bubble popped and the subprime mortgage market collapsed and as the publishing industry began to come to terms with its own impending digital disruption. As the industry stepped into the national spotlight—the following act to a decade of panic in the music industry and the Hail-Marys of periodical publishing—banks were tightening their belts and cutting access to ready cash, retail sales were slumping to depressive lows, and all signs pointed to the end of reading as consumers turned to their electronics. Under the magnifying glass of American news media, publishers are under pressure to change or fold quickly and to find better solutions for survival than the failed industries that have gone before them.
