As publishing moves into the digital future, Jonathan Karp sees the end of disposable books:
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it’s hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle.
Publishers mulch/recycle an absurd number of books every year that the retail chains can’t sell (in the book business, if you order a product and can’t sell it, you can return it to the publisher for a full refund). It’s extraordinarily wasteful, especially when you consider how many books are published every year in this country.
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