Anders Bylund, a blogger for multimedia financial-services company The Motley Fool, has written a series of articles on the decline of “dinosaur-like” business models. Old-fashioned record labels and traditional book publishing houses are both industries affected by the Internet and related technologies. In a recent blog post, Bylund directly compares the publishing industry to the music industry and offers a list of reasons why the former will outlast the latter.

As Bylund writes, “If the music industry is going down in a flaming digital holocaust like the dinosaurs, I think that its book-publishing cousin represents the crocodiles and feathered lizards that carried the torch through the dark times, and are still with us today.”

He lists reasons that print media should be more doomed than the music industry: the printed book format is centuries old and therefore “antediluvian,” and books are much easier to pirate. Bylund then lists the reasons why the print medium just might make it, including the uniqueness of the reading experience of ink on a page and the fact that large publishers are recognizing and embracing tools of the digital age as an integral part of their businesses.

Despite the obstacles it currently faces, Bylund thinks the publishing industry will survive. “Give me a call,” he writes, “when someone starts selling an e-book reader that smells like ink on paper, folds like a paperback, and gives me an occasional paper cut.”

If publishers and authors aren’t afraid to move forward with technology instead of fighting or fearing it, everything will be fine. Authors, what obstacles have you faced adapting to new technology? How did you overcome them and embrace the new tools?

SOURCE: “This Endangered Business Model Will Survive,” 12/26/08
Photo courtesy of livinginmonrovia on Flickr, used under its Creative Commons license.