Feed pointed to a fascinating and educational essay on book publshing by Jason Epstein, editor-in-chief of Random House. It’s long, but worth setting aside time to read if you are interested in the evolution of publishing and how he believes it will change with new technologies. He begins with a nostalgic trip back to his earlier days at Random House when he had an office in a lovely mansion and authors such as Dr. Seuss and Ralph Ellison would drop in for a spell. His details regarding the current state of the publishing world are harbingers of vast changes to come. Previously, publishers’ bread and butter were their backlists of steady sellers. But “the retail market for books is now dominated by a few large bookstore chains whose high operating costs demand high rates of turnover and therefore a constant supply of best sellers, an impossible goal but one to which publishers have become perforce committed.” There is a concentration of authors amongst the bestsellers. “Between 1986 and 1996 the share of all books sold represented by the thirty top best sellers nearly doubled as retail concentration increased. But within roughly the same period 63 percent of the one hundred best-selling titles were written by a mere six writers—Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, and Danielle Steele” And what will become of the brick and mortar bookstores in the face of ecommerce? “Like shrines and other sacred meeting places bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.” He says that readers may prefer bookstores as they prefer eating out in restaurants instead of ordering in, but the convenience of online ordering “will profoundly affect current book marketing practice, to say nothing of the effect on readers and writers.” The role of the publisher could change markedly and perhaps be collapsed into that of the writers and their business managers and agents. “The obstacles imposed between readers and writers by traditional publishing technologies — a system of improvisations accumulated over generations from the vagaries and impasses of obsolete forms of production and distribution — will wither away.”