On Quality, Content, and Change

Here's where I'll try to bring a bunch of disparate things together to make a point. (Let me know if I succeed.) The point is, evolution is inevitable, and even good, no matter how we may try to cling to the past or wax nostalgic for the way we were.

I just read (and commented on) a blog post titled, Amazon's Long Play, about how and why Amazon is changing book publishing and selling forever. The author of the post is well-informed about the publishing world and is worried about the fate of independent booksellers and what their demise might mean to our society.

Disclosure: Some of my fondest memories as a kid, a teenager, a college-student and an adult in Chicago, center around bookstores, the smell of books, the heft of a hardback, beautiful typefaces, creamy pages, and the mystery of how anyone could actually WRITE A BOOK.

That said, I love Amazon.com and I'm pretty sure that a LOT of books will be read on Kindles, phones, computers and the like in years to come. I also feel a certain nostalgia for independent bookstores, but not enough nostalgia to get in the car and go to one, or pay one penny more for a book than I must. For the most part these days, I do not care a whit about brands and will not pay for them. I care about, and will pay for, quality and content. If I can buy something that is of the same quality for less money, that's what I will do every time (yes, I'm an Aldi girl).

I realize this behavior puts certain businesses, and the people who run them, at risk. It means that those businesses (or the owners of those businesses) will need to adapt to get my business.

Just as Detroit's auto manufacturers and the dealerships that sell those cars must adapt to changing times, so must book sellers and authors and people in my business, custom publishing. Five years ago, nearly everything we produced at Imagination Publishing ended up in print somehow: books, magazines, newsletters, annual reports. Today, much of the content we produce will never know paper; the content is the content, and the way in which it is delivered to the reader is mainly up to the reader. I suppose we could have clung to our print-only business model; instead we built an audio/video studio and invested in digital infrastructure. We produce content and deliver it in the most appropriate channel.

And speaking of cars, my last car purchase is a good indicator of how and why I purchase anything. I had five criteria for my "new" car. Each criterion was a deal-breaker, meaning the car had to have all five in order for me to purchase. They were:

• 4-wheel-drive or all-wheel-drive
• third-row seating
• the highest-available trim package (sunroof, heated seats, leather seats, DVD player, etc.)
• a six-cylinder or four-cylinder engine
• a price-tag of less than $20,000
  

There was nothing in there about brand (American or foreign), color, year, or mileage. And by adhering to those five criteria, I ended up with a three-year-old Ford Freestyle (now called a TaurusX). I love it and, in fact, I paid considerably less than $20,000 and it will be paid off in less than two years.

The make or model of the car didn't mean a thing to me, nor did the place where I bought it, as long as I got exactly what I wanted. And how did I do that? I found a photo of my exact car on the Internet. I called the dealership, I went there, test-drove it and two hours later it was mine. When it comes to servicing that car, we take it to an independent shop for maintenance, because we have someone we trust. In this case, "trust" is the content. For repairs covered under the warranty, we take it back to the dealer because in that case, "warranty" is the content.

Similarly, I don't really care how I get my books, as long as I can find exactly the book I want at the price I want to pay. Again, the Internet makes this possible.

And now, the good news for authors and readers is, anyone can publish a book. Well, anyone with about $2,000 can get their work published as an actual book, and have it sold on Amazon or Barnes and Noble (online services such as iUniverse or Lulu make this possible). Even if the intended audience consists of 100 people, those 100 people can go online and purchase the exact content they want, from the exact author they want. Even if that author is nobody to the big publishing houses in New York. How great is that?

So, yes, publishers and car-makers and a lot of other businesses must change or die. And that's not a bad thing, nor a new thing. I'm pretty sure that scenario has been around for millions of years.