the end is nigh

At the trade show Book Expo 2007, Mike Shatzkin told publishers that books are exploding, that their world is gone, and that they had better get cracking:

This speech is called “The End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World.”

We are not saying that general trade bookstores will disappear,
although we think there will be fewer of them and the consolidation in that sector will continue.

We are not saying that everybody will read on screens and paper books will disappear, although we already know that certain kinds of information formerly best housed in books is now better delivered through electronic media.

We are not saying that novels will be replaced by multi-media interactive adventures, although we think those will continue to grow and thrive. They are more likely to cut into movies and today’s games than they are into books.

And we are definitely not saying that long form reading is doomed over the next two decades, although we don’t think anybody really knows how much it will be reduced by changes in attention spans and information absorption habits of the
generations that are kids today and those that will follow them.

We don’t see any indications that long form reading will increase, but, given the unpredictable ways that change works on the human psyche, we wouldn’t rule it out.

But we are definitely saying that every general trade publisher of 2007 must have a plan to change over the next decade or two if they want to survive.

As Jeff Jarvis, among others, has been saying (shouting about!) for years, the revolution in books, as in other media, is being driven by the people formerly known as the audience: consumers who want to use all cultural products in their own way, on their own time schedule, and on (multiple) devices of their own choosing.

Shatzkin sketches out how the process will work for books—the imprimatur of a Publishers Weekly or a New York Times Book Review will no longer be meaningful, because publishers will be selling to “communities of the interested”:

While the engineers will be building storage capacity and bandwidth faster than we can create intellectual property, our audiences are going to be organizing what we do create, and organizing themselves to discuss it, add to it, and mash it up in various ways. That’s the other thing that we can already see that is a critical change dynamic challenging general trade publishing: people moving from the
horizontal media we’ve always known to niche communities of the interested.

Then he gets a little utopian about the far-reaching implications of the information revolution:

Every obsession, no matter what it is, will be ultimately indulged. All of the books and movies and songs and more– many articles from periodicals and journals and people’s private notes and amateur and professional commentary on all of the above — will have been sorted through, or will be being sorted through
by the community. It will be gathered, rated, graded and hyperlinked. And it will all exist in such a way so that your own observations and insights can become part of the wealth of knowledge anytime you want them to be.

Getting back to reality, Shatzkin also gets to the heart of the issue—how publishers can serve the niches: through the credibility of their brands:

All of this has profound implications for “brand”. Credibility is
a critical component of brand. In a niched world, credibility, and therefore brand, will move to an increasingly granular level.

There are people trusted in the left- and rightwing blogosphere that aren’t at all known in the mainstream media. That’s true for every subject. We’re close to a tipping point, or maybe we’re past it — nichiest subjects first — where web-based branding will have more credibility than print, because print, needing more horizontal reach to be viable, won’t deliver the attention of the real experts and megaphones in each field.

Got that? Web-based branding will have more credibility than print.

I’m on board. Can I see a show of hands of others who get this? And will they please identify themselves so that we can work toward this brave new world together?

I’ll be waiting. You know where to find me.