The Book-Publishing Industry is Dead, Long Live Book Publishers

Brett Clay, author of the award-winning book Selling Change, recently attended Book Expo America 2010 in New York City, where he observed the waves of change pouring through the publishing industry. “Goodbye Gutenberg. Hello Tim Berners-Lee and Jeff Bezos. The book publishing industry, as we used to know it, will soon die. It will be replaced by the experience industry,” declares Brett Clay.

(Vocus/PRWEB ) June 22, 2010 — Brett Clay, author of Selling Change, recently attended Book Expo America 2010 in New York City, which was buzzing about the uncertain future of the book-publishing industry. One speaker, Richard Nash, proclaimed “The copyright is dead!” He reasoned that with one million books now being published per year there is essentially an infinite supply of content among a finite demand, due to humans’ limited ability to consume content. Therefore, applying simple supply-and-demand theory, the price of books, and hence the value of copyrights, would go to zero. It would seem that printing and shipping one million different new titles onto store shelves every year only to be purchased at a price of zero, would be neither practical, nor economical. So, how will those free books get on the shelves and who will pay for them? Read more