What hasn't changed

A friend of mine who works at O'Reilly was nice enough to put me in touch with their VP of Digital Initiatives, Andrew Savikas, so I could ask him a few questions. The company is forward thinking in their attitudes toward digital publishing: O'Reilly has a DRM-free policy, and Savikas writes for O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing blog, which is devoted to "connecting publishers with the people and companies that can help them understand and adapt to a digital future." He sent me the link to one of the entries, wherein I came across a most welcome line in which he notes that: "You don't get an "A" for effort just by spending time and money creating content (and you are not entitled to your business model--you have to earn that money every day by doing something that people find worth paying for--and they decide it's worth paying for, not you)."  The post also refers, in several places, to the conceptual, heady ideas of Kevin Kelly, whose piece "Better than Free" offers a way forward for the digital media business.

 Given all this, I expected my subject to have some rather dramatic responses to my inquiries about the future of publishing and bookselling. What he actually said, though, was that if you consider a publisher's main function not as selling copies, but as aggregating authors and audiences, the fundamental role of the publisher isn't really changing. Curating and filtering remain the core of the publisher's work, and helping people find good and interesting things is still at the essence of (e)bookselling. 

Many people have a lot of investment, both emotional and financial, in books, and as the medium evolves, and distribution changes, all this Google Books litigation and DRM mania seems to be an indication that a large portion of the industry feels that they've lost their way. It was good to be reminded of the constants in the book business.