Crackerjack book-industry reporter Hillel Italie writes today about the depressed publishing business.

I find this interesting for a number of reasons, not least of them the fact that I'd hate to see evidence that the world is abandoning book readership en masse. But I also think it relates directly to the continued claims from the music industry that its woes can be blamed solely on the scourge of Internet file sharing. After all, the book business has fallen on similarly tough times, and (Harlan Ellison's lawsuit notwithstanding) it can't point to any organized grassroots movement to copy and distribute book-length texts, for free, over the Internet. So instead, the publishers blame the economy, the dot-com crash, the 9/11 hijackings -- anything but the publishers themselves.

That's fair enough, I suppose. It is a tough economic climate, and the book business has always had a hard time with salesmanship. I remember when, maybe five years ago, late-night TV used to be punctuated by actual advertisements for books, which were almost comical in the way they breathlessly tried to sex up variously with heavy-breathing testimony to the suspense and thrills contained within. The level of sophistication rivaled that of movie trailers from, say, the 1950s or radio ads from the 1970s.

Those ads were a relic of brighter days in book publishing -- the times when the massive, unprecedented expansion of chain book "superstores" nationwide made publishers giddy with pleasure. Finally, they could deal in significant numbers of books with just a handful of book buyers instead of the rag-tag agglomeration of idiosyncratic mavens that was the independent bookstore market. (Indie bookstore trade group the American Booksellers Association, where I worked during those troubled times, filed price-discrimination lawsuits against first the publishers and next the chains themselves, with varying degrees of success.) The market was "expanding," to hear the chains tell the tale, and no wonder -- consumers were pleased with the hefty discounts offered when the chains came to town. Later on, of course, once much of the competition was out of business, most of those discounts disappeared.

I don't get to read as much these days as I should, or as I'd like to. The last book I read was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, which was a wonderful experience. But though the mind is willing, the brain is weak. My pleasure centers are more readily stimulated by movies, for sure. Even when I sit down and say, "OK, tonight I'm going to watch that tape of Le Corbeau," the lure of the Xbox and two hours of Knights of the Old Republic is awfully strong.

Which leads to my point: the competition for old media, like books and CDs, is new media. To some degree, I suppose that includes Internet distribution of pirated music files. But more to the point, new media is videogames and DVDs, Weblogs and online discussion groups. Even television, the ultimate passive entertainment, is taking a hit as couch potatoes vegetate in front of their 17-inch flat-panel LCD monitors instead of the Trinitron.

I'm pretty confident that I know what the beleaguered music industry needs to do to save its ass: lower prices across the board, revitalize an affordable but profitable distribution mechanism for the single (the ideal sampler for album sales), and loosen its iron grip enough to create an e-distribution system that allows consumers to make unfettered use of high-quality digital files while offering remuneration to the artists (remember, guys: there is no such thing as "copy protection"). The path for the publishing industry is murkier, especially since it's unclear that anyone, anywhere, wants to read book-length texts on any kind of video display. Having been burned once by over-investing in CD-ROM projects, the book industry may be gun-shy about working up similar intelligent, interactive products on DVD, but it might still be worth a look.

Better yet, see what Amazon is trying to do to enhance the value of book content -- woefully underrepresented on the Internet as compared to magazine content, scholarly dissertations, etc. The BBC reports that the main problem is getting skittish publishers to agree to the plan to make material from thousands of books available in a searchable database as a tool to promote sales. But can they really afford to be so suspicious of new ideas? As consumer tastes in mass media change dramatically the only sane strategy seems to be leveraging technology to enhance your business model, rather than letting it erode your business's value and appeal.

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