Poetry and Short Stories

The Wave of the Future and an End of an Era

Everything changes. The sun rises and sets, the earth rotates, people get older, language morphs, and technology advances. Everything undergoes a continuous flow of change and nothing can prevent that.

In most cases, change is welcomed however in various parts of business, change is frequently met with distrust and dislike Big Business builds its life around profit and anything that might cut into that profit is met with intense hatred.

Yet try as Big Business might, there are changes coming that it can not prevent. Those changes have already hit the recording industry and record labels are now finding that they no longer have a strangle hold on the dollars to be made from various artists. They are trying to retain that hold. They are mounting lawsuits left and right, yet more and more artists have discovered that they can sell their music online, directly to their fans, and keep the profits for themselves rather than lining some rich mans pocket. At first just a trickle of artists no one knew were gravitating to the online venue. Now it is a flood of all sorts of artists, big name and unknown. Record labels must either change or die. Most are going to die. Tower records, one of the main players has just declared bankruptcy, and cites online sales as a major reason for its collapse. Online sales that it was too slow to capitalize on.

The same changes are due for all other aspects of media. Television players such as CBS are now making their shows available online, on demand, the day after they air. Movie trailers from big movie houses are showing up on google video and youtube. The same thing is now happening to print media.

Todays consumer wants everything on demand. Right now, exactly the way they require it. Because it is possible to provide them with this online, todays consumer is doing more shopping online and less with brick and mortar stores.

Magazines saw this coming several years ago and dove into the online format happily, with E-zines flooding the net. Newspapers are fighting it, and those that are not adapting are going under. Now books are headed that way as well.

Todays reader doesnt mind a printed copy of the book, but he or she is busy. Too busy to go to a book store. A five minute login session to Amazon.com works just as well. Most of those readers also have a PDA or other hand-held device and frequently those readers prefer an E-book over a printed book if the option is available. There is a battle shaping up in the print industry which will have only one winner. Those publishers and authors who are too stuck in the past to see the wave of the future will die the same death as Tower Records. Already it is possible to drive around an entire town and not find a book store. Even in major metropolitan areas book stores are a vanishing item, and those that still exist tend to be the large conglomerate types, located near a university and partnered with a Starbucks.

In order to survive in this changing world, resellers must develop an online presence and publishers must move to print on demand. Distributes such as Ingram have discovered that they no longer need to maintain a huge stock of printed volumes. They can take orders from their resellers and then request just the exact number of copies of a book that they want. Publishers who refuse to make this available to distributors, and authors who refuse to play the game, will find that there are plenty of others out there to take their place. Ingram has already removed the lightning bolt emblem that used to adorn their print on demand books, making it impossible for anyone to tell which came from a traditional publisher and which came from a more progressive one, or even from a totally self-published author.

Add to this the fact that readers dont, as a rule, care who published a book. All they care about is that the content in it servers their needs. Its informative, its entertaining, its easy to understand, its well written. When self-publishing first got started, the only authors involved were those that wrote poorly, didnt edit their work and couldnt find any traditional houses who wished to spend a couple thousand dollars on garbage. However that stigma is rapidly fading. As more professional authors discover that todays reader is an online personality and that they can sell their books directly to them instead of settling for the dips of profit that the traditional houses dole out, they are also entering the self-publishing field. Their work shines. Its written well, edited better and calls loudly to the reading public. Some professional authors are choosing to stay with the traditional houses, turning their nose up at the rest, but they, like the traditional houses will soon find that no one is interested in them any more... because their books are not available as readily to the reading public as they could be.

Unfortunately, traditional publishing houses are just like any other Big Business. Unwilling to change. They like the strangle hold they have had for so long, being able to pick and choose what goes into print, lining their pockets with most of the profits. The good news for authors is the same as it is for record artists. The readers who will want their books dont care what publishing company the material came from, and are just as happy to buy it directly from the author as from someone else. Authors can upload their work to Amazon without the need of a middle man, and there are a number of good publishing companies who do not do things in the traditional manner to choose from now, with more coming on the scene daily.