The Publishing Industry is Dying. Long Live The Publishing Industry!

In this recent Time Magazine article, Lev Grossman argues that the traditional publishing industry is dying. The article states: "Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades.""

But the article also provides a few interesting data points ...
While there has been a drop in hardcover sales in the US in 2008 of 3.6%, there has been a rise of 3.5% of adult readers of literature since 2002. Further, the percentage increase in revenues at Author Solutions, a self-publishing firm, in 2008 has been 10%. Most interesting of all is the fact 4 out of Japan's top 5 books were written on cell phones.

So the question is: Will 2009 be the worst year for publishing, or, will it be the beginning of a new golden age of publishing? A golden age, where the physical book as we know it has been transformed into free (or nearly free), re-mixable digital bits with a huge amount of reader participation & input that reshapes the book-reading experience ...

My bet is that this golden age has already begun!