An old breed is walking into the tar pit like a blind mammal.

Are the publishers the new dinosaurs to follow in the steps of the record companies and face extinction when the digital meteor hit the book market? Or are we, like, gonna witness a grand revolution in the field of book publishing?

Publishers are walking into a field of land mines and they don’t see the craters in the sand from an ancient time when the music business walked along this dying land of dead dinosaurs. Spreading .pdf documents in every direction as the new way of selling books just to be a part of the digital world is like walking into a trap built by your own hands while sleep walking and breaking a leg in the fall, being trapped in your own stupid hole just because you were an ignorant, naive fool. Nobody’s gonna keep their fingers of the Ctrl + C button follow by a push on Ctrl + V button, copy & paste it baby, do it, it’s that easy.

.PDF’s are a product not meant for book publishing but somehow the worst solution was chosen. I mean, how stupid are you? Haven’t you all learned from the music industry? Haven’t you seen what digital products are? It’s easy copying and easy sharing. Don’t even think for a second that people ain’t going to share shit, ‘cause they are.

“Hey man, you got the new Stephen King on eBook?”
“Yeah, just let me make you a copy.”

This conversation may seem a bit weak, but you get the idea. If the new way of selling books is a .PDF based system the product will be treated like an .mp3 file where the users share books among them self, and don’t even try to compare sharing with a library. If the library was giving away copies of a book to everybody that walked through the door you’d get close to what file sharing is.

And who wouldn’t share? Consumers are not faithful towards producers of material, they are loyal to other consumers, to their friends and family. If you ask a friend if he can send you a copy of this or that eBook and he says, like, “no way man, buy it”! You will think of him as a cheap bastard. And who want to be a cheap bastard? But sharing the digital products are not a phenomenon among people knowing each other, The Pirate Bay and its peers/siblings/equals provide the service of Wide Word Sharing. But is there a solution to this?

First of all; stop thinking of digital products as something you’ll get your hands on, start thinking license, start thinking fresh and new or the digital costumers will in time rip away your whole market.

Second step in this process is a system or platform in the realm of Spotify. If people are willing to stream music, they will stream books. iPad with free 3G, a spotifyish kind of platform where you pay a fee to open a license for the title you want to read, that is more likely a way to go. This is user friendly and it protects the interest of the writers.

Well, what can I say about myself? I freaking love books. I love to read, to put them on my book shelf and watch them standing there as a cabinet full of prizes, as a token or symbol of my own fake intellect. Books do that to me, probably, but I love the product, not just the words inside them. That’s why I don’t care much for a red and white adobe-icon on my laptop, or are tempted to by a hand held pad that will cheat me out of my experience with a book. And a lot of people are like that, but the generation growing up and the next will be more and more used to quite other ways of reading.

So, do something now, before it’s too late and find a better way to meet the market in the digital world. The answer it out there, just open your eyes and a new world will unfold before your eyes. Your future depends on it. It’s do or die. Fuck or be fucked. Kill or be killed. Drink from the fountain of prosperity before the meteor hits you in the face like an iron fist.

When this shit is taken care of I too will go digital. Until then I’ll swear to the old ways.