Who Will Save Our Books?

With multiple books on the New York Times bestseller lists, author James Patterson doesn't need any help, but he thinks that the book industry does. So he has paid for an ad in the New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly calling for government bailouts for books:

"The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the important subject of books? Or, if the answer is state and local government, where are they? Is any state doing anything? Why are there no impassioned editorials in influential newspapers or magazines? Who will save our books? Our libraries? Our bookstores"

Daniel D'Addario of Slate interviewed Patterson on why he decided to raise the call for help for the publishing industry:

So do you think a bailout of books is actually realistic? Or was it a kind of purposefully outlandish “Modest Proposal“?

I don’t think it’s a question of bailing out, necessarily. In Germany, Italy, and France, they protect bookstores and publishers. It is widely practiced in parts of Europe. I don’t think that’s outlandish. But people have mixed feelings about the government doing anything right now.

I haven’t thought about it but I’m sure there are things that can be done. There might be tax breaks, there might be limitations on the monopolies in the book business. We haven’t gotten into laws that should or shouldn’t be done in terms of the internet. I’m not sure what needs to happen, but right now, nothing’s happening.

The press doesn’t deal with the effects of e-books as a story. Borders closing down is treated as a business story. Where we are in Westchester during the summer, you’d think that’d be a bookstore haven, and there’s nothing. And that’s not unusual. I don’t think we can be the country we’d like to be without literature.

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The death of Borders was a business story, the fact that B&N is on life support is a business story. The traditional publishing industry has played itself into a very flawed business model that needs to change.

Borders and B&N played the race to the lower price game and pushed the small book stores out, then came Amazon who hasn't been interested in making money selling books. If you were in the industry and didn't see all of this coming you failed your basic business classes.

Amazon has self publishing with an editor service, and that is one of at least a dozen such services. None of the big publishing firms have made any real self-publish service effort, why?

Books will be written, they will be reviewed, they will appear on "best of" lists, they just might not be in the same places they have been for most of the last 100 years. Patterson is a fine writer but the Potter series was passed over several times before if was given a chance so who can really say that the traditional publishing industry hasn't cost us just as many great stories as it has shown us?
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Fuck them. "Publishing" has been something of a shady business for quite some time now. Why do you think it costs the same for a digital copy of a book as it does for a hard copy? It sure as hell doesn't cost anything to print or ship or shelve an ebook. Do you know who gets to pocket the extra? Not the author. Price fixing is illegal, yet it's perfectly allowed when publishers do it. The fact is that they have been cheating the system in many ways for a long time, and it's just now starting to catch up with them a little.

Publishers have been cultivating an air of elitism that simply can't survive the modern technological era when anyone can publish their book online. They treat authors like so much slave labor who ought to be grateful for the chance to be published at all.

Publishers are filthy middlemen, and they deserve to fail. Let authors publish their own books, and charge what people are willing to pay instead of pricing shenanigans and par lour tricks.

Publishers should be clamoring to get authors, and not the other way around. It's somehow the only business where the salesman is more revered than the product.
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Nobody's going to save the book industry : internet cost killing approach is burning the libraries, among other things. Be glad we still love hard covers and paperbacks and that there is no 'kindle' revolution erasing books like the CDs are being erased...
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Who will save our scrolls! Books aren't as good, only the rich can afford them, they have to be bound and given covers.

I can get all the books he listed online and some of these books are hard to find in brick and mortar bookstores.

There will always be book stores and libraries, they will just move online and stop killing trees. I'm sure he feels threatened now that anyone can publish a book, but the cream should rise to the top just like with anything else.
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The entire idea of books as a commercial product is being transformed. The means of producing copies of books in large numbers used to require expensive machines, and their dissemination entailed a transportation infrastructure with warehouses and retail outlets. Today, a "book" is really a body of words that can be produced, copied and distributed electronically by anyone. I hardly ever read books that I must pay for. I have enjoyed many hours of good and entertaining reading of amateur fanfiction. While the majority of these works are not worth my time to read, I have been privileged to read many epic-length works that kept me enthralled from start to finish. I have been moved to sobbing tears or nosebleed-inducing laughter by reading free fanfiction written by people who have day jobs.
There is no shortage of great writing in this new century, but the declining ecosystem of publishing "houses" with their printing machines, marketing and paper will need to learn to recognize and co-exist with a new paradigm of written expression.
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Publishing is going through a disruption transformation because of new technology - the ebook. I think that the experience that Best Buy has concerning 'showrooming' is relevant. People go to Best Buy and feel the product, then order it online. I've done the same at B&N because the price difference was too dramatic to ignore. If bricks and mortar stores could solve that issue they would come up with a winning business model.

I notice that B&N devotes a lot of floor space (and inventory expense) to keeping multiple copies of many paper books on the shelf. At the same time they have a tiny cafe and almost zero seating elsewhere in the store. I think that's backwards. I think they would be more successful with a store-wide cafe setting with lots of seating while providing in-house WiFi to their catalog.

That WiFi could be subsidized with ads for books and other offerings. If they made the space an experience all by itself, they might even be able to charge an entry fee.
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