The AI hype train is reaching predictably ridiculous extremes in a desperate attempt to force acceptance of its “inevitable” narrative, and it’s partly because credulous journalists who should absolutely know better by now happily platform the worst of this nonsense.
I don't usually buy into "blame the user" for most problems, but our collective addiction to vanity metrics ruined everything, and even those who didn't buy into them have suffered the consequences. The problem exists between keyboard and chair.
It's truly amazing how publishers who routinely claim, "We love libraries!" every summer at ALA Annual — the conference many of them hope will replace their own failed Book Expo America — find it so much easier to fight those same libraries in court, on multiple fronts, rather than figuring out how to come to the table and negotiate in good faith with such a critical partner.
Shatner’s on Twitter, too, which is a “micro-blogging” platform. It’s like a blog on training wheels, for bloggers too stupid or boring to put together a compelling paragraph or three, and social media gurus who don’t like dealing with people all that much. Ev and Biz clearly had no idea the monster they were creating.
Anyone who’s worked in media in the 21st century—particularly “traditional” magazine media and its various digital counterparts and competitors—has at some point lived through the ups and downs of expense cuts and surprise layoffs, questionable pivots and their inordinate investments. I’ve been through variations of it a few times in my career, but my second time around with F+W was absolutely the worst, particularly because I realized, belatedly, that the writing was on the wall pretty early on. Here’s four things I learned which might be strong signs your company is heading in the wrong direction.
Another notable factor that publishers seem to have trouble acknowledging is that books—especially ebooks—don't exist in a vacuum, competing only with other books published that month, but they fight for attention and discretionary income with every other immersive media format, too. Movies, TV, and gaming have all seen their own versions of digital disruption—not to mention other areas of publishing itself—so the idea that the one compelling villain to blame a decline in consumer ebook sales on is public libraries would be laughable if it wasn't so short-sighted and suicidal.
There are three types of people who survive in media: hard workers, sycophants, and the serial failures they both work for who somehow manage to continually find employment despite a reasonably public record of the wreckage they've left behind. Too harsh? Maybe, a bit—some sycophants are arguably hard workers too, and serial failure might not be as easy as the eternally mediocre make it look—but after my own 25+ years surviving in media (and currently in the final throes of a demoralizing corporate bankruptcy), I'm feeling a little cynical.