Publishers are about to make all the same mistakes as the music biz.

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Permalink Reply by Victor Curran on February 28, 2009 at 4:51pm

I'm from the same planet you are. I wrote a lengthy response to the original post on your blog, but here's the executive summary: The survival of textbook publishers will depend on them leveraging the most important difference between entertainment and education . . . by changing their business model to one that reflects the real value they add by guaranteeing that content is correct and user-friendly.

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Permalink Reply by susan piver on March 2, 2009 at 8:58am

I really appreciate your response. I didn't know the bit about textbook publishers. That is so interesting.

Check out this article from today's Washington Post: Under Weight of Its Mistakes, Newspaper Industry Staggers http://budurl.com/t5jq

Two pivotal quotes, both of which book publishers could/should be saying:

"Most of the wounds are self-inflicted," says Phil Bronstein, editor at large of the San Francisco Chronicle, which Hearst Corp. has threatened to close unless major cost savings are achieved or a buyer is found. Rather than engage the audience, he says, "the public was seen as kind of messy and icky and not something you needed to get involved with."

"Years ago," says Jeff Jarvis, a blogger who has worked for the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Daily News, "why didn't we take more aggressive action and use the power of our megaphone to promote the product and change the organization?" The answer is that newspapers were "a cash cow," he says. "We thought too much about trying to preserve what we had."

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