10/02/06

More predictions

I know these are taken from ever-brilliant GOB, but that’s the point of this place: to aggregate what I read into one place an an outboard memory.

So, first of all, the similarities between Sundance and publishing

Once the festival took off, beginning with the blockbuster success of 1989’s “sex, lies and videotape,” suddenly studios took notice.

The book industry needs to tear a page from Redford’s book.

And my tech-industry sources say both an online and live event is on the planning board at Amazon to showcase emerging authors. I’m sure there’s an appropriate quote in Latin that translates: it’s about time!

The book industry is next in line for massive disruption. It’s in the air; the planets are getting aligned.

A tech-industry friend and colleague, Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto that ushered in the Internet Era, wrote about the change sweeping the music and film and TV industry in one of this week’s posts.

Doc quoted a conversation a year or so ago with a representative of the Record Industry Association of America:

RIAA guy: You don’t understand. We’re in the blockbuster business. We don’t care about the rest of the catalog. We pay a lot to make and promote blockbuster artists. We have a system for that. You’re not in it.

This is the mindset of the old world media companies who thrived in a world of distribution scarcity, rather than today’s world, a world of attention scarcity.

he then goes on to say,

The biggest names in the music industry must now bow to the young Sheffield band [The Arctic Monkeys] whose records are distributed by an independent label. The Beatles’ 1963 debut Please Please Me spent 30 weeks at No 1 but took more than a year to sell 500,000 copies.

And they did this by bypassing the music industry, relying on the Web, free downloads, playing live gigs and word of mouth.

But they’ve done more than set a new record, they’ve created a new model that allows emerging artists to bypass the dysfunctional roadblocks of a broken industry.

It will happen, soon, to the book publishing, like music, a broken dysfunctional industry, primed for disruption.

The lesson here for emerging authors and artists is starkly simple: break the rules, disrupt your industry, and capture marketshare by engaging your audience virally where they live: on the Web, on blogs, on podcasts, and live, at seminal, core events.

At the same time (and boy this lady sounds like she drinks a lot of coffee) and again via GOB, we hear from the publishing contrarian, in an article called, Publishing & Google & The 10% Imperative.

Let’s stop fooling ourselves that all of the men and women in the upper echelons and inner sanctums of publishing are serious about overhauling the industry. They’re not. The fire in the belly that once propelled many of the entrenched old-timers is burning out and the damper is half-shut. They seem to be more concerned with big paychecks, stock options, bonuses, Callaway Golf Clubs, tee times, the Beach Club, the status quo and The State of the Prostate.

But how about those young Turks at Google? Fire in the belly raging 24/7 and forcing change upon the publishing industry. Let’s take the hint about management and innovation from CEO Eric Schmidt. We all know their 70/20/10 approach to business. We do, don’t we? We have read something other than Publishers Weekly and publishing blogs like this one, yes? Seventy-percent time spent on core business, 20% time spent on adjacent business, and 10% time spent on “things that are truly new.”

Pinch of salt.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Podcasts, Publishing, Reading.