Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence

Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance:

Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing industry fought off the paperback and was skeptical of the book club -- which was effectively a technology-driven invention that used the new science of direct marketing and the mail to change the business. Now there are innovations like Amazon and Audible [Note: Amazon acquired Audible in January '08]

Effectively, from my perspective, these disruptions -- along with Superstores -- changed a relatively aristocratic product into a mass market product. A lot of these disruptions have allowed increasingly middle class and lower middle class people to have access to books, which were traditionally for rich people.

(Via Reading 2.0 list)

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