More about ebooks and publishing

I think that the "agency model" itself --- Making Light: The "agency model" as I understand it --- has gone long away but there is an ongoing stimulating discussion and I've put in my own two cts.

PNH writes: "I wonder about that "extra content" stuff too. But I also think that normal books, without "extra" bells and whistles, will continue to have a robust audience. When I want to read a novel, I want to read a novel, not get distracted by the moral equivalent of DVD extras." 

That could go for non-fiction as well. Embedded video, links, 'out-takes' (versions of photos), real-time revised editing might be useful. 

But if I think I understand his very good point, such 'extra content' might have a centrifugal tendency especially for non-fiction. The writer attempts to create a narrative or thesis, but the reader gets distracted by glamorous "extra content" and eventually loses the writer's point. That could well happen. No one knows and we'll just see what happens as imagination and new technology gets together. 

Though I think it has been repeated at length, one thing I do doubt is that "a book is a book," that the way publishing has been done in the past and recent now is the proper and appropriate way to do things and that publishers and editors should just know better and others should shut up. I have a suspicion that it won't work out like that. 

If nothing else, I suspect that major publishers are going to get demolished in size because whole divisions of people will get fired -- less of buying printing and arranging for warehouses and keeping track of orders shipped and books pulped. It's a massive institutional change.  Maybe one of the reasons which publishers are so slow to adapt the ebook is because the internal politics are at war: editors and marketers versus print buyers and shippers and bookstore salesmen and so forth. Some staff  may be worried, but others are terrified and know that their whole function may barely exist and so the publishing companies are, I surmise, as an organization undergoing enormous internal stress how to downsize.