dude, i’m not an editor, but that comment of urs makes u sound ignorant & suggests ur word isn’t to be taken v seriously

Anyone want to review a copy of GUD Magazine?

http://www.gudmagazine.com/vault/reviews.php

Nice dig at pomposity Steve. But neither you nor your commenters referred to probably the biggest real change well underway. This is the rise of the small publisher and publishing author using POD, short run offset and online selling.

I maintain the printed book will continue to increase its number of titles, though actual number of copies printed will fall because technology enables tighter matching of production to demand.

At the same time ebook sales will rise and free ebooks will be eagerly downloaded!

However, the economic downturn is going to have a few effects that most in publishing and particularly those forecasting the end of print and tree pulping have not considered. That is the full testing of the web economic model!

There is a lot to shake out in this in terms of cold hard assessments of investments, the value and supportabioity of ‘free’, and how far users will be faced with the full costs of the system. Calculations are near impossible because so much of the cost is hidden by the optimism about the ‘online revolution’.

You may have noticed a few banks which ditched traditional trading models have already had difficulty . The more conservative ways of trading have weathered a lot of stressful times; many of those will adapt and survive again.

And the biggest problem for the dedicated ebook and other digital content readers is that the hardware are all classic mass production items. But not cheap! Thir continuation ill be in the balance. By my calculation it will be a very testing time for all business, as well as we jane and joe does!

You’re right, calling Gideon’s piece “stupid” was a bit harsh. It’s well-written, with plenty of wit and elegance. What’s so maddening to me though is its premise that a “behind-the-scenes” look at the horse-trading and whatnot at book-fairs will tell me anything I couldn’t have guessed beforehand. Is it really news that publishers — or professionals of any stripe, for that matter — will abuse expense accounts at an industry event? Or that the week will be as much about partying and logrolling as about the principles underpinning the business? Certainly this behavior doesn’t happen at AWP, right? Or SXSW? Or Cannes?

What’s more, Gideon keeps circling back on this daft Richard Ford vs Lauren Weisberger/Paul Coelho opposition. Early in the piece, he writes,

“What is coming to an end is the idea that Richard Ford is going to be richer than Lauren Weisberger [or Paul Coelho] … What is coming to an end is the wishful insistence — for it is, ultimately, a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people — that Richard Ford is going to be rich at all.”

Honestly, what serious writer a few years out of college still believes that literary merit makes people rich? Who is surprised when the lowbrow and the middlebrow sell better than the highbrow? I’ve got no proof of this, but my gut says that the Paul Coelho phenomenon isn’t all that different from the Khalil Gibran craze, or that the pulpier of the chick-lit titles aren’t all that different in market share from 19th-century penny dreadfuls.

We all know that great literature doesn’t often sell. There’s exceptions of course, and it’s wonderful for everyone when that happens, but is Richard Ford really the first great author (not counting top-notch writers of genre fiction) who’s not getting rich? Faulkner, anyone? Joyce, Dick, Bronte, et al? Not to mention the large majority of our talented colleagues from writing programs?

Finally, my last beef with Gideon: if someone is going to write 10,000 words on the death-throes of publishing, even if they choose to focus on bidding wars in Frankfurt, shouldn’t they at least devote a few paragraphs somewhere the demand side of the equation — the people who buy books? These are the real customers, not the tippling publisher at a book auction.

As NYT reporter Streitfeld writes in his piece, “No industry undermined by its greatest partisans will thrive long. CD sales plunged after music could be downloaded. Newspapers are hurting even as their readership is mushrooming online.”

Nowhere in Gideon’s piece does he even mention online markets, unless you count that passing mention up top where he lumps Amazon together with Barnes & Nobles because they both discount bestsellers. Um, what about the fact that few students I know buy textbooks from campus bookshops anymore if they can help it? *Everyone* knows you can get books cheaper — both new and used titles — online. The revenue from the backlist that’s kept so many bookstores and publishers afloat this long is vanishing, and that’s a problem at least as worrisome as the questionable behavior of editors on a business trip.

This, in the end, is what kills a business model: the drying up of revenue streams its executives have counted on for so long they’ve forgotten how to survive in their absence. Look what’s happening to newspapers now that they’ve lost their classified revenue to Craigslist, their eyeballs to Google, and their print ads to — well, we don’t know where the print ads went. But they’re missing.

I hope this is under 10,000 words or I’ll really look like a fool.

Jim