I read an interesting article a few weeks ago that explained the economics behind the decisions to not immediately issue some new releases in digital format – Sarah Palin’s book was the example. It sounded so short-sighted and really read like an obituary for print publishing.

I had a publishing contract with the old Prentice Hall and send them both hard copy and the manuscript on two! 5-1/4 disks… they called and asked what they were supposed to do with them. Traditional publishing has been slow to pick up digital – and as semi-Luddites pretended for a long while that there’s was the superior positron.

Publishing of any stripe can be grand or godawful and everything in between.

And I suspect that the negativity associated with digital publishing originated when the earliest companies were simply not quality publishers. To this day, some of the biggest names in print-on-demand offer third rate services designed mostly to con wanna-be authors out of money. Not to say there hasn’t been and aren’t still vanity publishers in print, but in the old days, the high cost of a minimum publishing run eliminated 99% of the wanna-bes. Today, it costs nothing to get a Library of Congress number for your self-gratifying manifesto, so you can claim to be “published,” and every wanna-be out there is doing it.

So no, there is no difference between digital and print publishing, but there are huge differences between a reputable, professional publisher, who has “skin in the game” for every title in their catalog, and a digital publisher with essentially nothing but web marketing skills and whose only investment in the title is a few MBs of storage and the cost of signing a contract.

One could also claim that “Yugos are cars too,” and equate them with Rolls Royces in their ability to transport a person down a road.

Hard to get away from the ol’ Freudian Slip….