A new era in the book publishing industry

By Christy Montenegro

The book publishing industry has drastically changed over the past decade. The main reason for this change has been due to the Internet taking over the world, in my opinion. I was born in the late 80’s and have lived threw drastic improvements in technology that have affected our way of living. We no longer have the need of phonebooks because we carry around a device that has the ability to find pretty much anything on the internet. The same goes for books, we no longer need to pile book on top of book because they can all be stored in one single device, like a Kindle or iPad. Some might argue that this is taking away from the traditional way of reading a book, which I understand but I don’t completely agree with it. Decade after decade we experience different improvements around us and we have to learn to adapt to our evolving generation. If it wasn’t for all of these technological improvements, our generation would not be where it is now. I like to think of it as building a pyramid. You start with your base and build on top of it and continue building for as much and how high you want but you must follow a process. You can’t build the next layer if you skip one. This brings me to the next layer that follows ebooks, which is having the ability to self publish online as well. In my opinion, this is absolutely fantastic and one of the best things to happen in the book publishing industry. My reasoning for this is simple, everybody that is interested or ever considered writing a book, now has the ability to do so. I have recently became interested in writing a book in my near future but shied away from it due to the long expensive process. I wasn’t even aware that online publishing was a possibility until a few classes ago when we discussed Chapter 10 of our Media & Culture textbook. This was huge and exciting news to me. It made me realize that publishing my own book can now be a reality and for free, with the help of our beloved Amazon of course. I have attached a short video from the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing website for more information on how to get started. It is definitely an exciting time for the current book publishing industry and I am curious on what will follow next.