Parallels.

Publishers Weekly, the industry standard magazine for reviews, recently made the shocking decision to cut freelancers' pay by exactly half - from $50 a piece to $25 - and newspapers across the country are cutting their book sections either drastically or entirely. To certain people this is a sign of the End Times, but it's really a kind of corrective measure. The book-reviewing community had allowed itself to shrink, lazily, into a boring, self-reflexive subindustry with little value to a general-interest reader. But good reviews, well-written ones, are published on blogs and websites and in other alternative news sources now more than ever.

These are places that, unlike newspaper book-review sections, actually treat book reviews like pieces of writing with value unto itself, more than just your standard buy-this/don't-buy-this gloss. Nevertheless, people in publishing point to what's happening in PW and major-market newspapers as yet another sign that the industry is about to disappear.

The passage comes from Paul Constant's very fine cover story in this week's Stranger, the one he's brought back from his trip to BookExpo America, which means there's another tie-in to the film world: BEA takes place in LA, so there are lots of celebrity cameos throughout. He's witness to more silliness as well (the IndieBound presentation will have you, if you'll pardon the expression, running for cover), but lo, the more numbers he sorts through, the more hardworking people who love their medium he meets, the more he does see light somewhere down the line:

This is the hour for these independent publishers to ascend. By fully embracing e-books, blogs, and a public that is dying to not be condescended to, any one of these independent presses could thrive in this year's market. The fact that bookstores are opening in huge numbers and that the independent bookselling industry appears healthy, especially in this economy, is a sign that everyone should be paying attention to. These small publishers should work with these new independent bookstores in ways that the arrogant major publishers never do, by promoting each other and by telling the world, in no uncertain terms, that books are alive and well and doing just fine, thank you very much.

The parallels to our own ecosystem - filmmakers, critics, fans - would be uncanny if it weren't for the fact that nearly identical forces are at work on both movies and publishing.

Posted by dwhudson at June 20, 2008 11:36 AM