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Anyone who has read about the explosion in digital publishing and who despairs that the printed word is in imminent danger of disappearing might take heart from two blogs from Thomas Nelson.
In his "Sanity Check for Publishers," vice president for editorial and acquisitions, non-fiction books Joel Miller dismisses the doom-and-gloom predictions as "nonsense."
He maintains that "readers want books—sustained discussions and stories that immerse their hearts and minds in ways that only books can. Fragmented texts with splotches of audiovisual enhancement may make headway in the marketplace, but they will never replace books..."
He also challenges the notion that publishers should look at themselves as being in the "content," not book, business. "I recognize that statements like this come from the need to make sense of the tremendous change happening around us, but this language is unhelpful in the extreme," he writes. "It generalizes our efforts.
Content is generic. Books are specific. Content is meaningless. Books have meaning. Content is data. Books are prose and poetry."
Miller's CEO, Michael Hyatt, echoes similar concerns and others in his "In Defense of Books."
"Despite what many pundits are saying today, reading is not dead, nor are books," he contends. "Certainly, big changes are underway, especially in the way books are delivered to readers. But reading itself is alive if not altogether well. It is not going away. At least, not any time soon."
By books, he says, he is talking about "long-form, text-based content, regardless of how it is delivered." These have more transformative power in them than most magazines, blogs, movies and TV shows, he goes on.
"Most serious readers I know see other (multimedia) elements as distractions or fluff, primarily designed to seduce non-readers into doing something they would otherwise not do-read a book. While I am all for expanding the market and bringing more non-readers into the fold, I don't believe we do that by adding multimedia elements to most books."
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Writing about encounters with people whose lives have been touched by his best-selling novel, The Shack, William P. Young tells of a grieving couple's real-life "shack" experience.
