Grim times for publishers

It was inevitable that the book industry would get all shook up by technology, in the way that music, film, and newspapers and magazines had done before it. Publishing hung on for longer for no reason other than it took a while longer for a delivery mechanism to come along that would rival the book as a technology.

The upside of this is that it is opening up new ways of experimenting with publishing -- Neal Stephenson's Mongoliad is a really interesting experiment. 

But just as Amazon made the bricks and mortar bookstore obsolete, the Kindle, Kobo, iPad and other such are making the book itself a quaint little objet de nostalgie.

I take no pleasure in this -- I write for a living, and writing is a very conservative business. But for that very reason, I'm worried that the publishing business is even worse situated to deal with the challenge than even the music and film bizes were. But I'm just guessing here, since I have no real experience on the inside. But someone who has worked in the biz, inside and out, is Megan Hustad. She has a great rundown of what the main problems are (with loads of good links as well), but her last point caught me by surprise:

All that said, however, there’s one blanketing sin that largely goes unmentioned. Any publisher that wants to exist let alone remain relevant in 2015 will have to figure out how to wriggle out from underneath it. The fundamental error, as I see it, is that the traditional publishing model privileges this formula:

• Underestimated costs + Overestimated benefits = Project approval.

In other words, before most publishers agree to publish anything, they run sales projections spun from a highly selective glance at the track records of “comparison titles” (as they’re called) that sold well. Comp titles that sold poorly are routinely ignored. Only projects for which all decision-makers have bought into best-case scenarios are pursued.

Now I'm dying to know what "comparison titles" my publishers looked at for the Authenticity Hoax.