kfitz

The Future of Publishing?

A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circles. In case you haven’t seen it:

I saw this video when DK first posted it, and have been thinking about it since then, mostly because I’ve been trying to figure out what makes me crazy about it.

When I watched it again yesterday it started to hit me: couched in the “hey, maybe social media isn’t going to kill reading after all; hey, maybe we really do need to start thinking about a new business model” stuff is an essentially conservative message about the ongoing primacy of the book. That only by reading everything exactly backward can you turn “books are dying” into “books are not dying!” That either the kids today only care about pop media crap or they care about reading, with no possibility that they can care about both, or that what appears to be pop media crap might in fact be important.

I dunno. It’s clever. It’s very nicely designed. And I’m happy it’s undoing some of the “kids today” rhetoric. But I’m not sold on the message overall. I genuinely believe that publishing has a future, but my feeling is that the future is going to look more like this video than like the book as we have known it. And no amount of running the tape backward will change that.

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