Book Publishers: The Last Dinosaur?

By now everyone has heard about on-line book publishing in the form of free or fee downloads of books, e-books for Palm Pilots, books on disk, print on demand and so on, that is supposed to change the face of the stoggy book publishing industry. Also, this technological change will make it more likely that a new writer or novelist will get into print without having the expense of self-publishing printing costs.

First, a short story: In 1996 I self-published at great expense to me my first novel, "Battle of the Band" (available at "http://www.amazon.com"). If you want to read the first few chapters of this unique book about a rock band that finds God, go to: "http://www.omegaserv.com/omegabooks.html". However, had I known then (I did not have net access until 1998) what I know now about e-publishing, I would have waited to be e-published, by, say, "http://www.publishersonline.com" which pays a royalty, but keeps all electronic publishing rights.

Today I read an article in "http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03..." entitled "Biting the Bullet: Publishing and the Net", and I'm afraid I might be wrong. Book publishing by stoggy institutions, even in electronic format, might still be stoggy. The article states that all book publishers are doing is changing the format of product delivery, ie. downloads over the internet, without being more resonsive to the consumers and without creating a better forum for new writers. One supposes by this that new or midlist authors won't get any better a shot at "best-seller-dom" than they have now. I quote: "Canyon-dwelling executives who study tea-leaves and frog entails" to pick "hot" books still assume, without reaching out interactively to consumers, still assume they know what book buyers want. As a test, the article says, an excerpt from Steven King's new novella was available from Simon and Schuster by free download the other day, and the company couldn't keep up with it--something like nearly a million copies was downloaded in one day!

But what does this mean for traditional book producing? Will it go the way of the dinosaur, the feel of a warm page on our fingers dissapearing forever? And will electronic publishing get corrupted into submission by the big New York publishers and conglomerates by their taking the new frontier soul and spirit out of e-publishing?

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