This is a follow-up to my previous post, in which I made the argument that traditional publishing is dead, due to the lack of value that they add to the process and the higher cost of printing when most people switch to electronic books.
There is a way out, however. The big publishing houses are still the gateway to respectability for published authors. They are still the stamp of approval for quality writing, and are able to get published books attention from the wider media. For a time. Eventually there will be micropublishers doing just ebooks who will take over some lucrative projects that would have gone to Random House, Harper Collins, etc.
These large publisher must embrace the new form of publishing and either buy successful micropublishers or, better yet, start their own exclusively electronic publishing ventures. These in-house epublishers have to be free to poach projects from the paper publishers and offer big advances and better terms. Of course the traditional publishing divisions won’t like it. They will complain that the epublishers are luring away projects, that ebooks will no longer have complimentary paper books or will have different paperbooks, that the epublishers are generally undercutting the profits of the larger corporation.
All this will be true, but they big houses must do it anyway, because they will be preparing themselves up for the future. If Polaroid had allowed an in-house division to use corporate capital to set up a digital camera branch, that company might still be around today. Instead, an innovative and profitable company was made completely worthless by the even better instant pictures that digital cameras could produce. Kodak, who’s main profits came from photographic paper and film sales, has survived only as a shadow of its former self. The big publishers can write a different ending for their stories if they are brave enough to take the plunge into digital-only publishing.