So we’re used to it, right? We know what is, and what to expect from, a “NY Times Bestseller” (which is not the same as the NY Times bestseller lists).

A rock critic in my ill-spent youth (East Village Other to NY Times), I am now grooving on the spate of new books about rock icons like Dylan, Clapton, and even Patty Boyd, a beautiful young Brit, born of a dysfunctional family, who grew up to be a model and wife of George Harrison and then Eric Clapton. Wonderful Tonight by Ms. Boyd, is actually a whole lot better than Clapton’s Eric, which is an interminable set of acknowledgments of all the cool people he knew. (hence my title.) However, at a crucial point in Patty’s account of her break-up with George she describes the tension as being the same as “a chop stick about to come apart. Something had to give,” she writes.

Help! Did an editor ever read this? Not that Patty should be treated like Raymond Carver, but shouldn’t someone have asked for a better metaphor?

Of course, it is completely unfair to tar all editors with this brush. And I recommend, if you can, being a fly on the wall at an editorial meeting. It’s a fascinating dynamic to watch.

But, it does beg the question: what is a publisher? A few years ago, Peter Jovanovich, scion of Jovanich Publishers, told me that a publishing house is “a bank with an editorial department attached.” After all publishers haven’t printed, manufactured, distributed or sold books for nigh on to a long time. And if they are no longer really editing them, then what are they? Just a bank?

Enter the Internet, which is changing the equation quite fundamentally. As other publishing blogs have been feverishly discussing, and as I will attempt to demonstrate at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference next month in NYC, bringing content to customers is essentially a “service” in which an increasingly customized and customizable product (often self-published by the author) is embedded.

Two examples of the dawn of this service function are author sites, for example:
http://www.harpercollins.com/author/index.aspx?authorID=17367 and http://www.oreilly.com/authors/

But then Tim O’Reilly foresaw this direction in a 1995 paper.  

Which just goes to show that things that appear to be suddenly “right on the brink of change,” were probably there for a while. They were just hard to see.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg