Futurists love to make predictions about the death of a particular form of media (ie. books will be dead, the short story will be dead, science fiction is dead, etc.) but I’d argue that these portrayals are greatly overexaggerated by attention grabbing headlines of news, and despite these predictions, the medium that best suits the message will remain pertinent through technological upheaval.

As Cory Doctorow tells us in his article: “Reports of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated:”

Do a search-and-replace on “blog” and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Now suppose that books wont phase out all of a sudden and consumers still like consuming the dead-tree version of <insert your favorite author here>. What does this future look like?

Image from flickr user libraryman
Continue reading “Thoughts on The Future of Book Publishing” →