Ebooks, Blooks, and Too Many Cooks: The Renaissance of Independent Publishing Online

There was a time where small business was the only kind of business. Family-run and/or privately owned retailers and service providers made up a vibrant and important part of neighborhoods and communities. As little as a few decades ago, you could walk down a street in Paris or New York that was devoted entirely to small shops that made and sold paper – papiers, they were called.

Until recently, however, it seemed that the small business had had its day. Massive chain stores replaced independent operations almost entirely. There was never a hope in hell of papiers competing with Staples or Office Depot. Never a hope in hell, that is, until the advent of e-business.

In this small business renaissance, few industries have experienced a greater resurgence than that of independent publishing. The industry has long been dominated by a few stodgy old houses, secure in their dominant positions as THE final word on who’s going to read what. However, in recent years, the Internet has done nothing short of completely exploding the mythos and mastery of the sleepy old bears of the publishing world.

Independent publishers are able to flourish online for several reasons. For starters, they enjoy a completely unprecedented access to authors, printers, distributors, and sellers the world over. Independent publishing houses, most significantly, online independents, are able to come out with a huge amount of material that would never have seen the light of day in the age of paper.

This is thanks, in large part, to the plunging costs of publishing heralded by the advent of new, inexpensive technologies. Advances in formatting, printing, and marketing software allow small publishers to accomplish internally what they were obliged to outsource less than a decade ago.

Independents can now easily generate and distribute catalogues and advertisements online that they used to have to pay big money to have designed and printed by professionals. A small online publisher can also act as its own distributor, attracting business via pay-per-click advertising that allows it to compete with, and bypass the necessity of using, e-monsters like Amazon, which has long been a troublesome bane to the independent publishing house.

And of course, why deal with all that messy ink and paper when you can cheaply publish an e-book? Some traditionalists say that no computer screen will ever replace that musty scent, that rustle of pages, that ultimate pleasure of snuggling down with a good old paperback, but here’s a newsflash: times change.

In fact, just the term itself, “newsflash,” now brings to mind the ability to get all the most up-to-date new stories online without waiting for the evening news, or the morning paper, which, with its over-large, clumsy format, and messy print is rapidly going the way of the dodo.

Print magazines and journals are even more at risk. Especially in science, technology, and entertainment fields, where new discoveries and revelations are made every minute, the idea of waiting days and sometimes weeks for an article or paper to be published when it could be going up online instantly seems ridiculous.

And although aging pundits like to question the credibility and veracity of online publications, the truth is that e-publishing provides the ultimate peer review system. And really, any good newshound knows that Drudgereport is a holy heck of a lot more accountable that the zombie-robots at CNN.

With print magazines and newspaper on the way out, it then follows that books can’t be far behind. Who’s going to carry around the massive Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when they can read it anywhere at any time on their Palm Pilot, which, incidentally, won’t crush their face if they fall asleep reading?

On the other hand, independent online publishers can hit the big old houses where it hurts by beating them at their own game and bringing online publications to print format. ‘Blooks,’ the latest buzz in the publishing game, are books based on web content, usually blogs or web comics.

Nevermore than with the emergence of blooks does it hit home that, thanks to the Internet, anyone can be a published author. Of course, that doesn’t mean that anyone can succeed. In fact, the industry is becoming more competitive than ever as the resources required for publishing become increasingly available.

Interestingly, industry watchers suggest that this competitiveness stands to insure the continued success of small business on the web. What failed in your neighborhood may flourish in online communities. We must hope so, for the day when there is only one place to buy a magazine, read the news, or sell a book on the Internet will be a sad day indeed.

http://www.bizsession.com