The Web revolutionized publishing by giving everyone the power to do it. This is me, taking a look at what does this change/shift mean to books and their future.

Books will NOT die. They will live. But, the book publishing industry and it’s economy will be so radically changed that there won’t be any real resemblance between the current book publishing economy and the one in the future.

There will be new type of companies. Though not exactly the same, the new companies will be sort of similar to services like Blurb, Lulu, CreateSpace and a couple more. Those new companies will serve as the publishing platform to authors. Before talking about the new platform let me tell you something about the present book publishing industry.

You come up with unique content, meet publishing houses and if they’re interested, enters into an agreement where you’ll be paid either a lump sum amount or periodic royalty dividends. The agreement will be dealing with the rights of your work. You may sell all rights to the publisher, or for a certain period or reserve the right with yourself. It depends on other clauses in the agreement.

Back to the future. The new companies, which serves as the platform for authors will be working in a somewhat similar way. The author will enter into a contract with the company of his choice (similar to the type of agreements, we’ve got now) and provides the company, a digital master copy. From there, people could either download the electronic version (*points at* Amazon Kindle and similar things) or order prints. This is where something more interesting kicks in – there could be multiple versions of the same book. Like age-group based illustrations and quality of the language used. There will be multiple covers from which you can select the one of your liking when you order a print.

The essence is – right now, ‘books’ means ‘printed material’ whereas in the future ‘printed’ will be just another version of a literary creation called ‘book’.

Going a little technical. Undoubtedly, there will be a lot of companies doing basically the same thing. But this should not cause inconvenience to readers. This is where yet another type of companies will rise. The aggregators. Every publishing company will be having an API (somethat that enables development of external tools that can access and modify the main database) which will be used by the aggregators to provide a one-stop access to books published by all publishers.

This means, there will be both publishing companies and selling outlets. Also there could be giant companies doing both these actions. Thus, in whole, we see that the basics of publishing,marketing and economy doesn’t change (at the basic level) but the nature of it evolves to something more open and better. Something that will be loved by the new humanity – the Web.