booktwo.org

Kate Pullinger’s column in today’s Guardian – Writers deserve a better deal from digital publishing – is very good on why authors should get a better, not worse, deal from digital publishing, and on the role of publishers in the new digital world.

But it’s particularly priceless for this anecdote:

At the moment the entire infrastructure of the publishing industry is geared toward shifting retail units; the head of digital publishing at a large publishing house told me that because their accounting system is entirely warehouse-based, for a time they had to find a way to represent the units shifted through digital downloads. Their solution was to have empty pallets in the warehouse, with invisible digital content, thus enabling the system to count the units that had sold.

I think this stands as an exemplar of the industry’s problems adapting. Although it was a temporary solution, publishers need to recognise that the game has fundamentally changed – in supply, distribution, and in rights and royalties – and the old ways are just not applicable any more.