Print vs. Digital

In fact, I think that the ability to sell books online more easily means that publishers must become platform agnostic. We should be publishings books, not formats! The publisher should market all possible formats on the author’s behalf, and those formats should be offered to readers in a wide variety of prices and combinations. If I want to read White Tiger on “durable paper,” fine. But if I want both the paper and the electronic versions, I should be able to pay almost nothing extra for the second version. That’s what readers will want–and if we divide the publishing world into paper versus bytes, we’ll set up a dangerous competition in which paper will lose, and the result will be that publishers and authors–and ultimately, therefore, readers–will lose as well.