Publishers: Let the Containers Go

In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:

Businesses don’t survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher “To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks.”

(Via the Book Oven Blog)

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