This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. I found this book the other day, The Book Industry in Transition; it was published in 1978. And I went to the Introduction and I saw some bullet points and I immediately just went to the bullet points.

And it says, “Management and control methods are generally inadequate, particularly in the publishing and distribution branches,” that is distributing books. “Hazards and wastes are necessarily high throughout industry.” Yes, a lot of waste. “No entirely new distribution system was possible, but the existing machinery under present conditions could not handle a reasonable volume profitably.” Hmm.

“The educational process which creates new readers was weak and a number of danger points. The methods for promoting reading and book buying were inadequately organized and planned.” Well, they all sounded pretty much like today, to some extent, and this was published in 1978.

And then I went on and read that those bullet points actually came from a report done in 1931. So, the same problems that existed in ’78 are the same problems that exist in 2011. It goes on to give a snapshot of the industry, the talk about technology, but what’s very interesting is that in 1978, the Xerox, DocuTech and the IBM 3800, which were the first major digital printers, typesetters and printers in one machine, were introduced in ’76 and ’77 and by ’78 we were all talking about them. Not a single mention in the book industry in transition. No prediction of where it might go. No discussion of on-demand printing. By the way, the super stores didn’t exist in ’78. Barnes and Noble was a very small chain at that point in time. Borders was one or two stores at that point in Michigan. You had Brentano’s and some of the other stores that were out that had been the traditional stores, but you didn’t have super stores. You did not have the internet; you did not have sales of books over the internet. No discussion or prediction, essentially, every time we do a study of an industry or the print industry or the magazine industry, it’s a snapshot of the world at that moment in time. And none of it tells you anything. What we need are people who are prognosticators and look into the future and try to… even if they’re wrong, they give us an idea of where the world is going.

So we can plan on investments. I mean, I saw that when I was at the old Linotype Company. And in the early ‘60’s, they were still predicting that we would have linotype machines after the year 2000. And of course, the last one was built in the United States in 1972.

So manufacturers kind of need some idea of where the world is going although they tend to help us invent the future. A lot of the things that they do are the future technologies that we use. And so it’s great to see this kind of material. It’s great for my library in terms of what the industry looked like in 1978, but it’s not very good for the industry in terms of where it’s going. And we need some way to do that in order to keep all of us on our toes because nothing ever stays the same.

And that’s my opinion.