The world's most perfect product, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Recently over in the sweltering, surreal wasteland that is Las Vegas did I participate in a curious and fascinating event, one that did not at all involve strippers, donkeys or hallucinogenic unicorns on the moon. Well, mostly.

The gathering was mounted by a big San Francisco ad agency and one of its clever leaders, a sort of boot camp/team building thing they put on a few times a year so new employees can test their mettle, strain their brainstems and come up with radically new ideas for a particular, usually imaginary product, as they stay up all night, drink too much Red Bull and discover their thresholds for being crammed together into smallish hotel rooms for four days straight without showering.

I was there to present myself, my new book "The Daring Spectacle," my recent adventure in self-publishing. I was there, along with a lovely young marketing whiz named Amy from Simon & Shuster in New York, to talk up the state of the printed book in the age of iPad/Kindle/eBook, to mourn the collapse of the traditional publishing business, to give my independent-author side of what is increasingly being called the tragic collapse of the publishing world overall.

I was there, in other words, because not only did I recently shun traditional publishing and put out a printed book on my own, but I also started my own little corporation (called Rapture Machine) to do it. And my story was perhaps helpful, because for this particular event, these ad teams were tasked with one of most challenging questions facing modern media today, one that's near and dear to my heart, my medium and my livelihood: How to save/reinvent book publishing. And they had about 72 hours to do it. ...

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(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/08/11/notes081110.DTL&nl=fix)

[AngryAmish]

1. I bet a lot of people loved their horses too

Problem is they shit too much, cost too much, ate too much and were too slow.

[geckosfeet]

2. I bought his book a few weeks back. Interesting compilation of his work.

But to the general issue of traditional publishing - it is indeed slow and awkward compared to electronic publishing. And as people who love holding a book and turning it's pages slowly diminish, so will the industry. But electronic publishing will flourish in its place. Publishing will re-invent itself, and provide new advantages to readers and writers alike.