We found an excellent article at The Economist describing the perilous questions that digital publishing poses for the traditional publishing world.
It’s a very detailed discussion of the difficulties awaiting traditional publishers as they are forced by market and technological advances to adapt their business models to the eBook Revolution.
The problem these corporate giants face is not whether they’ll be able to compete, it’s about whether they can get it through their big-business mindsets that a shift in product content and content delivery to something that has a fraction of the production costs of the old product, must mean a shift downward (hopefully, temporarily) in the perceived and actual product value and the profits that result. A shift in product cost and value should redraw the bottom line. Ignoring that will guarantee extinction.
Traditional publishers simply cannot succeed in the new milieu if they’re going to focus on maintaining outmoded and unjustifiable profit levels. They have to be willing and able to take a loss. And, they’ve got to be market savvy enough to find a valid way of making up any short fall.
