Inaugural Post

Filed Under Books, Fiction, Free Speech, Nonfiction, Publishing, Writing

Ahhh, just what the world needs, a new blog. Especially one dealing with writing and publishing. Heaven knows there aren’t enough of those yet.

My back ground is mostly in journalism and nonfiction book publishing so I suppose nonfiction and books are likely to have an edge in the posts I make. But I love to read fiction—someday I’ll write the Great American Novel—and am passionate about freedom of speech so let’s throw those into the mix as well.

Comments are always welcome.

Well, since it this is my first post and it is also the first day of a new year, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a few predictions about the next five or10 years:

1.) Printed books will not become obsolete. There will still be bookstores in 10 years. You’ll just buy some of your books in other ways.

For instance, sometime in the next five to 10 years, you’ll be buying many of your books from in-store machines that print and bind your selection as you shop—just like the 1-hour photo developing now found nearly everywhere.

This technology—downloading a digital file from a repository of such files and printing one book at a time—will be used by online bookstores to fill their orders too.

All of this will result in fewer books that don’t sell being printed and shipped (today as much as 30 percent of books sold to brick and mortar stores are returned to the publisher where they are pulped or sold off as cheap remainders.) This is good for the publisher’s bottom line and the environment.

2.) Reading devices such as Amazon.com’s Kindle will become as popular as Ipods. We’ll all have one.

3.) Blogging will continue to grow as a news media. From wars in the Middle East to collecting wristwatches, more and more people will get quick updates from bloggers who focus on the same slim slice of the cosmos in which their readers are interested. This isn’t bad. It’s journalism at its most democratic.

4.) Large print newspapers will continue to consolidate or die off, although I think there is room for small, community newspapers funded by local advertisers to thrive.

5.) Writing will still be a tough way to earn a living, but the good will thrive.

Comments

One Response to “Inaugural Post”

Victoria on January 10th, 2009 3:53 pm

Your predictions about books are no doubt accurate. The print media will evolve to be efficient but the demand will remain. I can’t disagree either with the tough, hard slog writers face in their careers. But I that’s a good thing – and that brings me to your idea that blogging will grow. I think blogging will peak and then decline for the very reason that most are not worth reading. As the comment above yours states, good writing is rare and getting rarer. I don’t have the time or the taste for weak ideas, badly expressed. And that covers about 75% of the blogs out there. So I’ll keep reading the newspaper, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic.

Happy New Year!

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