gabe [he/him]PSA: Expect books to increase in price on average
CaptObviousIt’ll be interesting to see how long publishers last before they price themselves out of business. We’re already seeing it in academia. A growing number of professors are refusing to assign texts from Pearson (who are trying their very best to become a monopoly) and other traditional publishers. Instead, we’re either writing our own or contributing to open source textbooks that we then give freely to students.
I wonder how long before this becomes the case with pop culture literature. There’s already a large number of very successful writers (by number of books sold) who cut out the traditional publishers and sell directly to readers. It seems likely that this number will only grow as books are priced out of reach for more consumers.
I didn’t know that academia was already bypassing traditional publication systems, but I am all for it. For literature, seeing how in many cases publishers are more into gatekeeping what is published than doing quality control or improving it I am very happy when authors become independent and do everything on their own. As you said, next years are going to be interesting in this sense. Let’s just hope that Amazon doesn’t take over the whole system, as it is already trying to do.