A curious thing happened yesterday. As I continued to plan for the RT Book Camp & Cocktail Hour, I noted the home page of Yahoo! was proclaiming that several industries were ripe for withering. Though bookstores weren't the main thrust of the piece (they were mentioned at the end of a view on why record stores are no longer thriving) it struck me as particularly ridiculous-but-of-course that Yahoo! had chosen this particular image as photo bait for a click. Hmmm.
I go about my day, juggling a thousand things. I quickly check email again before heading out to a meeting. What should happen to be in my inbox? This:
Oh, Borders. While the email is hardly a surprise given all the Borders closures of late, it functioned as another prick in my bookish armor yesterday. I sighed, I closed my email, I headed out to my meeting.
Upon return from my meeting six hours later (and after a disappointing NCAA championship game), I was catching up on my Google Reader bookish feed when I came across Moses, Media Piracy and the MPAA thanks to Peter Brantley. A clear-eyed (in my view, after all my time working with music clients when the industry could have done something about digital rights but chose to get grabby and piss on everything instead of being, well, clear-eyed) look at what could have been done to find solutions to some of the major challenges a sweeping digital change can have on an industry.
The money quote, very relevant to the book industry:
"Sooner or later -- and judging by Chairman Dodd's speech, it'll be later -- the industry will have to move from moralism to pragmatism. Their business model has been digitally disrupted, irrevocably, and they are already vulnerable to the kind of game-changing innovation, and carnage, that Apple's iTunes visited on the music industry. If the studios are lucky, before a Netflix or a Facebook does that to them they'll figure out that neither education nor enforcement will rescue them from creative destruction. Pivoting from Moses to merchant will be an awkward adjustment, but they will eventually be forced to conclude that their other options just aren't working. It won't matter that they have righteousness on their side. If they have to spend less on producing and distributing content, distraught fans won't repent of their downloading ways. If jobs are jeopardized, it will be just as wrenching, and just as stoppable, as the transformation that globalization and rising productivity are wreaking on the rest of the economy."
That was April 4th, 2011 in a lightning speed nutshell, in snippets of time I had between meetings and calls and prepping for RT Book Camp. Interesting, no? I suspect some of these tidbits will inform our conversation at the Unconference today. I'm looking forward to it.