There have been a lot of panels discussing the future of “Old Media”. It’s a topic that’s both exciting to many, and frightening to many. Blogger journalists are exhorted, while at the same time the loss of newspapers is lamented. Author and emerging technologies consultant Clay Shirky was the moderator, most of the panelists were from Penguin.
Several other panels discussed how newspapers are going out of business, and the writing is on the wall for other forms of “analog media”. People are passionate about books, so they’re worried that the book publishing industry is next. We hoped to hear how the book publishers have a plan to move forward in a digital world and avoid this fate.
The answers we got from the panel was a shock to all the audience members: THEY ARE CLUELESS! Its like everyone in the audience sees them speeding down the rails and the tracks end about a mile from where they are now, and they don’t even realize it!
The Q&A session was the most enlightening part.
The first question was more of a statement: “we hoped to hear what their ‘New Think’ was that would save book publishing… and we heard nothing!” Everyone applauded. Clay Shirky then said (paraphrasing) “We are asking you what we should do. That is why we are here.” People’s mouths were hanging open.
More people came up and made very good, very obvious suggestions. The Penguin people were honestly reacting like this was the first time they’d heard it, and kept saying, wow, that is a great idea, and leaning over and whispering to each other and taking notes.
The icing on the cake was when an author came up and said that in reality today, publishers give very little aid to an individual author, so why should they bother going through the trouble of publishing through them rather than self publish, and the entire panel sat there, silent for a good 15 seconds!
Book publishers probably do provide a good focused pool of talent but if they don’t have a list of why they should exist that they can rattle off at a moment’s notice… then they need to rethink what they’re doing.
It’s like what’s happened with record labels: the major labels now add barely any value to a musician who wants to release their work. Small labels still have reputations of only releasing quality material, and people will trust the label’s opinion that if they released it, the music will be good. So people will trust those labels.
But if book publishers follow the path of the major labels, no one will care about them, and there isn’t any value they’re adding. It’s already happened in music. It’s starting to happen in TV and movies. And it’s about to happen to books.
Hopefully, the folks from Penguin learned something about this from this panel, because the audience surely didn’t learn anything from them (aside from the fact of how clueless the industry is).
After the panel, everyone adjourned to The Firehouse for a happy hour, but it was crowded and the music sucked so we didn’t stay long.
