Is Publishing Dead?

Written by Eric Olsen
Published September 02, 2002

I would imagine not, but Ray Ozzie votes "yes":

    PUBLISHING IS DEAD. Gone, a relic of the past, dead as a doornail, breathless, buried. According to police reports, one-way publishing was killed off by a technology - Weblogs - that has reshaped journalism forever. According to observers, there was formerly but a single effective way to get messages out to an audience - through major mass-market publications that possessed exclusive control of the final form of those messages. "Add Weblogs to that mix", one highly-respected and influential journalist recently wrote, and an entire industry's "world view was shaken". Indeed.
Equally interesting is the fact that I found this post via a sub-genre previously unbeknownst to me: a PR blog - in this case the "Mudd PR and Marketing Weblog":
    I don't believe publishing is dead, but print-on-demand technology for book printing, e-book technology and weblogs certainly have changed the publishing mix. These changes have inadvertently changed the way people get their message out, how they mediate and manage information and with whom they share information. Because these new publishing technologies allow everyone to have a voice, information managers need to be extra careful and more thorough when it comes to distributing information to third parties.
Interesting.

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and publisher of Blogcritics.org, which, quite frankly, rules - as do his wife and four children.
Keep reading for information and comments on this article, and add some feedback of your own!
Is Publishing Dead?
Published: September 02, 2002
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Writer: Eric Olsen
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Comments

#1 — September 3, 2002 @ 00:12AM — Ian A. Ralph [URL]

What types of publishing are we referring to?

I haven't seen much that would replace the traditional publishing cycle for fiction, though I can see Blogcritic, and any spinoffs (knockoffs?) provide an alternate means for a new author to get some visibility.

I feel that, for the near future, anyway) a new author is dependent on the visibility that going through the usual publishing houses provides, such as marketing and placement in stores, plus the dubious qualification of surviving muster with editors.

Once some name recognition is generated, perhaps going the shareware route that John Scalzi is doing with his book. http://www.scalzi.com/agent/ will be viable.

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