I also agree with him that this sea change will not occur with a single stroke. Many, many small changes are mounting up together to form this big wave. That’s part of the reason it’s so hard to predict its direction.

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/05/this-week-in-publishing_21.html

Yes, Steven, I think the situation we are in is tremendously complex, not a simple either-or proposition. What *does* seem clear to everyone is that publishing is going through a sea change, the same sort that swept over the music industry ten years ago. What exactly the changes will be is uncertain, but it seems clear to me that the publishing giants that were built for another world will have a great deal of difficulty surviving in the new one.

Phil summed it up perfectly: “The survivors will be lean, mean, niche-content providers, which should open the media world in general up to smart, creative people working outside the dying system to create a new system of their own.” When the dinosaurs died, the world went over to these little scuttling shrewlike creatures who could survive a nuclear winter and inherit what remained. There were fruits hung a hundred feet off the ground that could be reached only by the neck of a brachiosaurus. But when they were gone, tiny pre-primates with grasping fingers learned to shamble up trees and feast where only the big boys once did.

I’m hoping that I’m one of those little climbers.

And, Curtis, I agree with you that print is not dead. It never will be. But it will be greatly diminished by what is happening. This is a new Guttenberg moment. When the printing press first arrived, scribes no doubt thought it couldn’t replace them. How many scribes do you know today?

I *do* look forward to this new world. Perhaps it is because I vainly think I’m smart enough to adapt and thrive in it. Perhaps it is because I wasn’t all that thrilled with the old world, in which the little hole I dug in the stream bank kept getting squashed flat by those lumbering sauroopods.

“Prints imminent demise.” Being a contrarian by nature this theme, to my lights at least has been to easily adopted by to many to quick. To me, it has the ring of the untrue.

There are a couple of choke points in publishing that need to be broken up for the river to flow again. A handful of beavers have had it their way for a long time.

The implosion of the big players might have been inevitable, but seeing it happen is still surprising. The survivors will be lean, mean, niche-content providers, which should open the media world in general up to smart, creative people working outside the dying system to create a new system of their own.

I’m looking forward to it.

Can I be the Geoffrey of Monmouth to your Arthur, should you take up the banner you’ve set up here?