Are There Technical Solutions to Problems in the Printing Industry?

Debate on how technology will impact the role of the literary agent is taking place at the annual GigaOM Pro Bunker Series. Particularly interesting from a rights and royalties perspective is the potential for disintermediation in publishing.

“We publish a lot of….dreck. I’m actually really proud of that because it should not be the publisher’s job to determine what should be published and what shouldn’t. The publisher is making decisions from a narrow myopic prism of potential. The power of curation is going to shift from the publisher to the crowd.”

-Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, which has published 18,000 e-books.

Literary agent Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown (and his popular blog) agreed. “I think people underestimate the extent to which the era of dreck is already here,” he said.

“Dreck is in the eye of the beholder,” replied author Simon Wood.  He said to expect the rise of powerful established bloggers who readers trust for book recommendations. His advice to Amazon was to create an online review magazine to replace the traditional ones that are fading away. John Warren, marketing director at RAND Corporation Publications said that he looks at social web apps like Goodreads and LibraryThing as another emerging, cheap way to get the word out.

Although there is potential for a streamlining of the pen to bookstore process, any changes to that process will of course require recalculation of existing rights and royalties frameworks.