Scott Timberg has the customary ‘look back at 2007 piece in the Los Angeles Times. The tag line is “Publishing has become a high-stakes game amid store closings, declines in sales, profits, book review sections — even literacy.”
“The delivery of the content of a book in different forms and formats is making people nervous…So we’re trying to publish in a lot of different formats because we don’t know where the readers are going to be. A lot of us in the publishing industry started out when we still used carbon paper and manual typewriters.”
“The uncertainty around technological change is responsible for both hopes and fears within the industry”
Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
“The traditional review media aren’t drawing the readers the way they used to.”-
“It’s written into the DNA of publishers and writers to whine, to think the golden age was the day before yesterday, that publishing is in a kind of crisis,” Steve Wasserman, a literary agent and former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor
Overall, as the publishing world looks back on 2007, it’s hard to reconcile the unease people feel about the business with the excitement they feel about the books themselves.