media earthquake: are book publishers paying attention?

Covering the goings-on at NBC Universal, Jeff Jarvis links to this piece in the L.A. Times, which sees parallels between what’s happening in the television business and what’s happening “in print.” The piece concludes, ominously, thus:

Wall Street in the last couple of years has begun to view the newspaper industry as doomed to unending declines in circulation and advertising, analysts said. What’s happening with NBC “could be part of the same structural issue,” said analyst Edward Atorino of Benchmark Co. “Because of what’s going on in new media, we’re seeing dramatic changes in consumer behavior that will impact the big picture for years to come.”

Jeff means the newspaper business when he talks about print, and doesn’t say anything about book publishing. Not that I blame him. Certainly, no one inside the industry seems to be thinking about how to do something about—and for—book publishing before it implodes, or if they are, they’re keeping their plans very, very close to the vest. Which would be beyond stupid.

The eminences grises emeritus [emeriti ??] of the industry have been thinking about it, however. There’s Peter Osnos, whose Caravan project I mentioned here (it envisions a simultaneous multi-platform release for all books: print, digital, and audio), and Jason Epstein, whose On Demand Books enterprise I mentioned here most recently. Both of them have a vision and are doing something about it. What’s more, they have a lot to say, and it makes sense. If only someone, or a few someones, where were paying attention.

Once more into unto the breach. Here is Jason Epstein explaining, in clear, concise language that even a child can understand, why book lovers have nothing to fear from the digital revolution (a subject I started discussing here, where I [sort of] accused the New York Times of downplaying the dire situation of the book industry by removing the scary headline “What Will Happen to Books?” from its online version of the cover of the New York Times Magazine, whereas the print edition carried it: in orange. You can see the two photos by clicking the link. Read the rest of my posts about the publishing industry by searching my publishing archive).

Here’s Epstein:

Page’s original conception for Google Book Search seems to have been that books, like the manuals he needed in high school, are data mines which users can search as they search the Web. But most books, unlike manuals, dictionaries, almanacs, cookbooks, scholarly journals, student trots, and so on, cannot be adequately represented by Googling such subjects as Achilles/wrath or Othello/jealousy or Ahab/whales. The Iliad, the plays of Shakespeare, Moby-Dick are themselves information to be read and pondered in their entirety. As digitization and its long tail adjust to the norms of human nature this misconception will cure itself as will the related error that books transmitted electronically will necessarily be read on electronic devices. Only those who have not read the Iliad or Moby-Dick, or Bleak House or Swann’s Way or The Origin of Species, will entertain this improbability. Until human beings themselves evolve as electronic receivers, readers will select such books as these—the embodiment of civilizations—as files from the World Wide Web, whence they will be transmitted either to a personal computer and printed out—a cumbersome procedure resulting in a stack of unbound sheets—or, much more satisfactorily, to a nearby machine not much bigger than an ATM which will automatically print, bind, and trim requested titles on demand that are indistinguishable from factory-made books, to be read as books have been read for centuries.

Again I ask: is anybody at home?