America doomed has detailed how the book publishing industry is doomed.  And, today, another has chimed in with similar predictions of the demise of book publishing as we know it.   As this industry implodes there will be many jobs lost — editors, press operators, typesetters, etc. etc.  They will all be gone.

In addition, the economics of writing books will evaporate for many.  In fact, self publishing is already in full swine and anybody can write a book and self publish it on Amazon with little difference from traditional books.  Then, of course, you have all the e-book readers like Kindle — one device among many others — and, of course, Apple’s new iPad.

What is interesting is that this is another example of how technology is permanently eliminating jobs and diminishing the economic incentives of publishing.   Sure, there will still be people that make some money but it will be harder and harder to do and less and less money will be available.

Publishing, like all American corporate entities, is a corrupt business.  They love ripping off the public and wielding their power whenever they can.  Textbooks are an excellent example where books frequently cost more than $100 and the cost rises very fast.  A typical community college student will pay more for books than tuition.  Textbooks are constantly revised to force students away from the used book market.  Now, they publishers include web site access that costs almost as much as the book.  This is simply greed.  There is no reason that an Introduction to Spanish book has to be revised each year or why the Calculus book I used in college is not good enough any more.   More and more students are having to opt out of buying books because the cost is high — and the only reason the cost is high is because of greedy profit-seeking corporations.

Also, textbooks are embroiled in politics as the Texas Board of Education is showing with their crazy religious nuts inserting crap about religion in the upcoming books that will be adopted in many other states.  But that is for another blog post.

It is always interesting to look at the implosion of another industry in America.  It will continue.   I guess there will always be manual labor jobs of repairing roads and picking up trash but people will have a harder and harder time making a living doing these jobs.   Meanwhile, more and more people will lose their jobs and not just be unemployed — they will be not be employable.

America will eventually have to embrace a completely new economic model where people can sustain themselves but this will take a long time because there are still too many people that think that the old systems work.  It is funny that there are always true believers right up until they are laid off in a job they never thought would go away.   Everybody will eventually figure this out and someday there will be a revolution to write the  explanation point on the news.

America is doomed.