http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?ref=technology

In the Amazon business model, there’s no advance, and often no agent, although some agents are beginning to participate as publishers.  I have to say that my sympathy for the big commercial publishers  (not that Amazon isn’t or won’t be one soon) is very limited.  They dropped me unceremoniously 25 years ago– well, not entirely true, that was Scribner’s.  My last big publisher was HarperCollins for the Marco kid books, and that was only fifteen years ago– anyhow, the bottom line is, Conventional publishers dropped me and a lot of my friends– mid-list and literary writers of high repute and great accomplishment– and we’ve been scrambling ever since.  I’ve used small presses, nonprofit presses, university presses, cooperative presses:  I’ve published with all of these, as well as with Scribner’s and HarperCollins, and had Sc & HC been more nurturing of me when I was not a best seller for them, I might be less ready to embrace the Great Change going on now with ebooks and self publishing.  There are myriad problems including, at the very least, who are the gatekeepers, but also vast opportunities.  And for me, a lot of fun too.  The opportunities include simply being able to make books available to people who who might want to read them– miniscule numbers beside what bestseller oriented publishers except, but human beings, readers, communication.  I have been having a great time with my various ventures.

The irony of course is the hundreds of  people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).

She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine .  This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading:  the instant hard copy books but also e-books  (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!).  I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books–  I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books.  Nice, don’t you think?  Or at any rate, not bad.

Universities have been picking up on the possibility of  instant books much  faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010  New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet.  See my article reviewing The Business of Books.