I agree that the publishing industry is following the same path as the music industry. I was never a music industry insider, but I’m a music fan and for the last ten years I’ve been following the music industry’s death by a thousand cuts closely. Music has made so many mistakes: shutting down Napster and expecting file sharing to just vanish, resisting the mp3 and insisting on only selling CDs, embracing DRM, installing rootkits and other monitoring software on fans’ computers, suing their fans, and most recently writing legislation that will enforce draconian punishments on computer users who are accused of file sharing.

Not one of those strategies has worked. All have backfired, and if the publishing industry thinks it can employ the same tactics and get different results, they are delusional. Right now, the popular tactic is to wrap ebooks in DRM and cripple the functionality of ebook readers. But every form of DRM ever tried has been cracked (often in just a matter of days following its release) and any DRM used on ebooks will be cracked too. If ebooks and ebook readers start to replace textbooks in schools and universities, I promise that the DRM on those ebooks will be cracked, the files will be shared, and students will finally have a way to avoid the outrageous and obscene prices publishers charge for textbooks. Then, following the music industry’s model, publishers will begin suing everyone in sight: file sharing sites, students, professors, universities — everyone. But of course, that tactic will backfire and fail too.

Publishing corporations, like the music industry, just seem to be entirely clueless about how to proceed. The buzzword lately is “platform” — authors gotta have online platforms if they want to be published! But when I read agents and publishers write about “platforms,” what that says to me when I read between the lines is, “We have NO IDEA how to market books online, so we need you, our authors, to do our marketing work for us.”

I think the publishing industry, if it really wants to save itself, ought to take some lessons from the one group of authors that it has historically gone out of its way to ignore: self-published authors. It seems like most of the innovations in electronic marketing and distribution are being developed by self-published authors who have mostly embraced the Internet, since the Internet allows self-published authors to compete on a more level playing field with established authors backed by the publishing corporations.

But something tells me the publishing corporations will “play it safe” and just adapt the music industry’s strategies to themselves. If they do, the publishing corporations deserve to die — and the sooner the better.