Where Publishing Is Going

As someone who hopes the publishing industry survives long enough for me to carve out a career in it, I'm reading Mike Shatzkin's four-part series on where the industry will end up--with separate entries envisioning that place in both a few years time and in twenty years--with rapt attention. I'm not sure that I have much of substance to add at this point--and it might be wise to reserve statement until parts three and four are posted--but I'm thinking a bunch about the points Shatzkin makes in the following paragraphs:

The change for publishers, though, is far more profound than a simple change in delivery mechanism would suggest. Publishers, indeed all commercial media in our lifetime, have been defined primarily by format. Some do books; some do magazines; some do newspapers. Others called producers do movies or television or radio. The capital and skill set requirements for a format effectively channeled the media company. For the most part, big media was not topic- or subject-specific; it was format-specific.

But when the exchange between publisher and content consumer becomes a file, rather than a book or magazine or movie or TV show, then format becomes irrelevant. A file can hold any of the formats we have historically thought of: text, photographs, diagrams, maps, video, audio. A file can also hold games and productivity software. So the publisher that is limited by the formats of the 20th century will not be competitive in the cloud-and-screen based media exchange of the future.

[snip]

What all of this means, taken together, is that the successful publisher of the year 2030 will own a web community which is both a principal source of content and provides the audience for it. The community will not be content-centric alone; but we aren’t getting into that in more detail right now because sketching out the whole concept for “vortals” is “out of scope” for this exercise.

The publisher who owns “knitting”, or perhaps “knitting sweaters”, will develop and curate the content and control access to the audience just as surely as a major publisher has controlled access to bookstores shelves or a newspaper publisher to newsstand sales in our lifetimes.

If you're wondering why everyone in business these days is obsessed with building communities, well, this is why.

Publishing School and the Bat-Man Experience

In some ways publishing school is very different than the normal type of school. I've met, for example, more NYT bestselling authors (=two) in the last ten days than I have in the previous 23 or so years of my life (=0). But in other, more different ways, publishing school is pretty much the same as regular school. We get homework, our teachers give us grades, we eat in a cafeteria and complain about the food (Plain vegetables from the salad bar again? Keeping Kosher rocks.), and the ratio of females to males is 8.6:1. But, most importantly, we love field trips. Box factory it wasn't, but the publishing factory (or, company) was pretty OK. They even gave us a flimsy folder and a free book. Publishing school: like regular school, except with way more copy-editing.

I went last night to see that new moving picture about the bat-man. I'm not going to share my thoughts on the film itself because there are plenty of people way smarter than I writing about movies on the internet. But I do want to relay some thoughts about the film-viewing experience. It was pretty much unlike any other film-viewing experience I've ever experienced. On Sunday, I ordered a ticket to the Tuesday night, 1900h showing at the local i-maximum theater. By the time I emailed out to the publishing school listserv to invite some fellow publishing students to join me, the show was sold out. So I went by my lonesome. (Not the first time I've gone to a movie theater by myself, by the way; it's not too bad.) I didn't really know where I was going (Did you know that maps.google.com now gives directions via public transport? Take that hopstop!), so I left early and arrived early. By the time I showed up at 1820h, there were around 100 people--who had already purchased tickets--waiting on line inside the theater. Around five minutes later, the theater workers finished sweeping up from the previous show, the doors were dramatically thrown open, and all ~100 people scrambled in to find good seats. I've never been to a movie where all the good seats were taken a full half of an hour before the previews even started. (I managed to get a good seat.) The crowd was pretty much engrossed in the film while it was showing (i-maximum makes it hard not to be completely engrossed; take that, peripheral vision!). The audience erupted into applause as the movie finished (not so surprising, especially for your blogger, a veteran of the AMC Theater in West Orange), but I was surprised by some of the more intimate post-viewing reactions. I saw a bunch of couples--young and old--kinda hugging and kissing, as if they just experienced a seminal moment in their relationship. I got the sense that people viewed this viewing as some sort of important historic event. It may have been. I just think that it's pretty interesting that people reacted like that.