Missed It: Amazon.com Enters Into Publishing In A Big Way

I kind of held off on this for the emergence of a list -- I still can't find one -- to see if someone in comics might be on it, but it's worth mentioning right now: Amazon.com will publish 122 books in Fall 2012 in what feels like a major potential disruption of, or at least major addition to, traditional book publishing. The implications seem fairly obvious. What's suggested is that traditional book publishers no longer serve enough of a function to justify the cut of money they grew used to taking under the traditional publishing paradigm.

I think this will be a super-compelling argument for a lot of people. In fact it's so compelling that I think it may fairly blast away the more difficult-to-grasp implications and all the ways that exploitation can begin to rear its ugly head if such relationships become the norm. As always, comics can be said to have already had a wide-ranging discussion of a similar set of issues, in that 20 years ago self-publishing enjoyed a surge of popularity through what was then a decreasing number of physical distributors. I think you'll see a lot of those same, basic issues hashed out here, only magnified by the growing realities of digital publishing.
 
posted 4:40 am PST | Permalink
 

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