Books by the Kings and Grishams of the world may not be literature, but they are good writing. With King, I’d say excellent writing. Movies such as “Toy Story” aren’t “Citizen Kane” but they are, also, well-written. An entertaining, well-written, well-researched story that takes the reader out of their everyday world will remain hard to create and valuable.

Literature with a capital “L” will continue, I believe, as the niche market it’s always been. I’m not sure that group ever made a living solely from writing except for a rare few.

Publishers will continue to exist as gatekeepers. All the choices in the on-line world are staggering, daunting. I don’t begin to want to find my way through the thicket. I’ll be depending more than ever on who published a certain book, the reviews it gets, the genuine word of mouth it gets. (Yes, you can create a false “word of mouth” on the Internet but it’s getting harder and harder to fool people.) The quality control that publishers represent will be more valued than ever, I think.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we aren’t in for a bumpy ride!

But I had a lot of problems with that article, and shared ideas with several hundred of my mystery-reading friends, which (what the heck) I will repeat here because I can. And you can skip it. Isn’t technology wonderful.

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Pronouncing books dead has been a longstanding practice, and everyone’s a coroner. A few rebuttals.

Writing has never paid well for most writers. There’s really no reason to expect it to become a well-paying profession today when it’s never been – for most writers. Yes, advances may be shrinking, but those are bets being placed that lose more often than they win; in hard times bettors become both more reckless and more cautious. Big advances are still pretty big, but the average bet – maybe caution is kicking in. It’s quite possible that writers will in time have a differently structured revenue stream than advances and royalties and will do no less well than in the past. They still should probably hang on to the day job, though. That’s been useful advice since the printing press was invented.

More books are published (on paper as well as in electronic form) than ever in history. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it doesn’t seem a symptom of imminent death.

Piracy is less of a problem than second hand sales have been. I’m not saying piracy is okay or that second hand sales are bad (in fact, I’d say sharing books, preferably legally, is essential to a healthy reading culture), I’m saying that piracy’s impact on the market is much, much less than the second hand market has been, and books have continued to be published even as the second hand market has flourished.

People will pay for books. They may not pay $25.00 for every book they read, but they never have. Why should they start now?

We don’t know what the digital impact will be, but we know it’s in Amazon’s and B&N’s interest to exaggerate the dominance of e-books. Don’t take their word for it.

Writers may write for love, but not for sweatshops. Today, they have more alternatives than ever to working in sweatshop conditions. They may not get rich (and they never have), but they don’t have to be exploited. In fact, knowing what kind of work goes on in actual sweatshops, I get a bit cross with this particular analogy. Nobody has chained writers to their laptops – they have options that most people who work in actual sweatshops do not.

It’s a mistake to equate book publishing with the current state of journalism. The newspaper industry had been a fairly profitable business that, when it became less profitable, trimmed staff, which had grown tremendously in the post-war years. (US newsrooms shrank by 30% since 2000.) News is expensive to gather, report, and edit, and it’s tough for those professionals to work outside a news organization and earn a living (though freelancing is a big piece of the employment picture for print journalists – it still comes out of the wallet of the news organization putting out the news.) The profit margins at newspapers dwindled to around 5% in 2010; book publishers have lived with profit margins of around 5% for generations. Writing books, with some exceptions, doesn’t take a huge overhead or credentialing, and writers are not generally employed by book publishers; they are free to make whatever arrangements they want. A publisher can dump a writer if they aren’t making money; a writer can dump a publisher if another one offers them more. There’s much more latitude than there is in putting out the news. Writers of books can hold day jobs to pay the bills; working a full-time job apart from the news business would be difficult for a news reporter to manage. One person can invent a world, but it takes a lot of shoe leather to report on the one we live in.

It’s strangely comforting for people to say nobody (but them) reads. The data indicate otherwise. There has always been a significant percentage of the population that is simply not inclined to read books. That percentage has not changed in decades. There are as many people today interested in reading as ever – and, I would warrant, are not going to insist on free books. (Really, stop listening to Chris Anderson; he had a book to sell.)

Saying books are dead because people share books, they are averse to paying top price for everything they read, they don’t read enough, and writers can’t make a living is exactly what doomsayers pronounced in 1970 and 1920 and today. Books are more resilient that we give them credit for. (So are writers.)

If you’re interested – and still awake, data can be found in the annual “State of the News Media” report – http://stateofthemedia.org/ – and in a reassuring little book full of hard data called Reading Matters edited by Catherine Sheldrick Ross.

—– thus endeth the sermon.

I’ve just begun reading a wonderful book, “Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology” by Neil Postman. It addresses some of the questions in your comment and I’ve thought of libraries while reading nearly every page.

Almost anyone can type out 250-300 pages of anything. If your anything is marginally better than my anything but costs 10-15 times as much, I’m willing to bet on my anything capturing at least some of your audience.

Maybe it wasn’t that way when the publishers were the artificial gatekeepers, but the gate has been destroyed.

Traditional publishing as it stands is currently dominated by “rock star” authors, the Kings and Rowlings of the world, who make the majority of the money. Midlist and new authors rarely make enough to quit their day job. Authors who fail to catch on right away are eventually dropped and not given the loving career attention they once were. Advances are shrinking as publishers have to cut costs.

So it isn’t a great time to be a writer, not that it’s ever been particularly lucrative for any but a lucky few.

I’ve elaborated more here: http://thewriterlibrarian.blogspot.com/2011/09/potentially-bad-news.html