(2007-06-15) Shatzkin Future Book Industry

Mike Shatzkin predicts the future of (Trade) Book Publishing:

• the trend toward Digital Media is inescapable, and will change the Book Publishing industry just like the other Creative Industries.

  • with the explosion in Content supply, focusing on a single delivery format makes you a Commodity

• the physical Book Store business will continue to exist, but is driven by Infrastructure costs, which will lead to consolidation, leaving possibly just 1 Book Store company, probably Barnes And Noble.

  • the main physical competitor will be the Library

• Publishers need to Fo Cus on a small number of Market Segment-s, as defined by audience/interest not product format. Host a Virtual Community for each.

  • these need to include/support books from other publishers if they fit to the audience interest

  • they have to build a Social Network of writers and other partners to support this

  • this reminds me of Dave Winer's advice for the Newspaper Publishing Industry. 2006-10-19-WinerNewspaperAdvice

• there will still be some/fewer many-niche general-interest books. So there will need to be a publisher with expertise in handling them. But how many of them will we need?.. In fact, the Book Store-s of the future will have the greatest interest in finding those books, which will be doable by Data Mining across millions of web sites and thousands of publishers.

Also:

• EBook-s, at least Non-Fiction, should be broken up into stand-alone "chunks" (MicroContent).

Dec10 update: Ben Vershbow points to pieces by Barry Eisler making similar points, but focusing on effects of A-List crowd being the first to Dis-intermediate their publishers, removing a Subsidy from the process, plus a bigger focus on Print On Demand.