Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. You print books? Well we have e-books now. You have a massive back catalog? Google just scanned all of it. You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarte…
Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term, their decisions make financial sense, but long term, it's a death sentence. Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I…
I read a lot of non-fiction books and don't think much has changed over time. For non-fiction you always had groups of people, typically academics and successful business people and politicians, who read tons and tons of books. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, for example, both read many books when they were young in around 1900 to 1930. How many people who worked in factories at the time would have read books? Not many I think. Today it's more or less the same. You have a few people like David Senra or Stephen Kotkin, who read 100-200 books per year, and you have the average person who reads maybe one. Just like book sales, it's a power law.