"The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand."
So Canadian publishing thinker Mark Bertils just pointed me to this, from a while back, from Wired.
"The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand." The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.
Read the rest of the piece, because it's a fun piece, though it is about creating an algorithm for a film recommendation engine for Netflix. But that quote, about supply and demand, an almost paranthetical observation in the article, describes the book industry superbly.
For much of the 20th century, the book bottlenecks were in supply: lack of education, censorship soft and hard, racism and sexism, brutally expensive and time-consuming text composition, printing machinery focused on volume rather than flexibility, poor distribution infrastructure.
Those issues have not been solved, of course, but there has been across-the board amelioration. With an consequent explosion in supply (cf. all the complaints about too many books.)
So now the problem is demand. I believe—this is where I'm an irrepressible optimist—that the issue is precisely as he describes, sorting out demand. My emphasis because he presupposes demand. So the problem is matching up demand with the supply. And that, ladies and gentleman, is yet another way of expressing what I'm continually poking and prodding at here in these The Future is Now posts. Publishing is about connecting writers and readers.
Publishing is doing a much better job of finding talent than it was doing in the 1940's and 1950's (which is not to say that it is great now, but that it was appalling then, and I think literary agents can be credited with a lot of the improvement) but it is much less effective at matching those readers with the writers who'll turn them on best. That is the task of the 21st century publisher. And any supplier with any kind of market power who finds we're failing them will dump our asses. Fast.