Future of Publishing

I was very surprised, to say the least, when Nathan Bransford announced recently that he was leaving publishing, meaning he was no longer going to be a literary agent. Even though he said it wasn't because of any concerns for the future of publishing, I still wonder. With the surge of epublishing, and the new ebooks coming out more than ever, how can you help but wonder.

The bottom line is the profit these companies make. Isn't that always the bottom line? And I keep hearing that profits are down. And it's understandable that the epublishing thing and the ebook thing may very well be responsible for that, because I can't believe fewer people are reading. With the population ever increasing, logic would suggest that more people are reading. Still, there are reasons to believe fewer people are reading.

Look at video games and television for instance. When I was a kid, there were no video games. I remember the fist video game came out when I was a teenager. Remember that very primitive ping pong video game? What was it called? Video Pong or something like that? It was so basic, I might have played it a few times before I lost interest. Then when I was in my twenties, more video games came out, but they were those big machines that you played in arcades. You know, where the pin ball machines were. I never got into Pin Ball. Even the song by The Who never got me interested.

Then there's TV. When I was young, you had a few channels on VHF and a few on UHF and that's it. Maybe a dozen total channels. Now the number of channels on TV has increased to hundreds. Incredible. My two sons could last an entire week in front of a TV if I let them. I remember watching a cartoon when I was a kid, and you had to wait a whole week before you could watch that cartoon again, and now these channels show the same cartoon over and over again, one right after another. THE SAME CARTOON!!

Then Video tape came out, and you could tape your favorite shows and/or movies and have your own personal video library. Amazing. Libraries were no longer restricted to just books. You can have a video library of movies, TV shows, sporting events, you name it. Then CDs and DVDs replaced tape, and now iPods and DVRs are replacing that.

So, maybe it all cancels each other out. More people in the world, to be sure, but much more entertainment to go around. Still, books are eternal, imo. Even if the Star Trek episodes are right, as I mentioned, and ebooks are the future, I hope with all my heart that good old paper books never go away.