Old Business Not Catching Up with Old Technology

There is an aritcle today in the New York TimesReview of Books entitled "Waiting For It". It is about why it takes so long to publish a book. See here. The article blames marketing and distribution. Of course, the web provides an avenue around both of those issues. John Scalzi, award winning science fiction author of recent times. See John Scalzi - Wikipedia, couldn't get his book, Old Man's War, published. He started putting one chapter at a time on his blog and let people read it. He was able to get it published and won a Nebula award. He used the web to crate demand. Any author can self publish a book like Scalzi did. They can also sell it through there own web site, printing to order. I don't know if Amazon offers such a service, but they could easily do the distribution for an author. The other option is to not even publish the book, just push content to the web and let people read it. Advertising will compensate to a point. So, once again the Old Media is missing what the web can do for it.