Matthew Yglesias? William Deresiewicz? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: Predicting the technological future is extremely difficult. In 2007 Amazon corporation introduced the Kindle ebook reader, and ebooks grew rapidly in popularity during the following years. Commentators envisioned dramatic upheavals in the book world.
One influential pundit projected that publishers were going to be wiped out. This imminent development was depicted favorably. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: In November 2014 journalist Matthew Yglesias published a piece on the “Vox” website titled “Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers”. Yglesias noted that a long-running conflict between Amazon and the book publisher Hachette had been settled. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
This brings months of sniping to an end, but the structural conflict between publishers and the retail giant isn’t going away. And here’s a little real talk about the book publishing industry — it adds almost no value, it is going to be wiped off the face of the earth soon, and writers and readers will be better off for it.
The fundamental uselessness of book publishers is why I thought it was dumb of the Department of Justice to even bother prosecuting them for their flagrantly illegal cartel behavior a couple of years back …
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Also, in November 2014 “The Nation” magazine reprinted the remark of Yglesias and offered a counterpoint:2
“Here’s a little real talk about the book publishing industry,” Matthew Yglesias wrote in a recent Vox.com article, “it adds almost no value, it is going to be wiped off the face of the earth soon, and writers and readers will be better off for it.”
This special issue of The Nation features the kind of books that would have been impossible without publishing houses. Why? Apart from the crucial function of editing (which goes unmentioned in Yglesias’s piece), publishing houses offset risk.
In 2020 literary critic William Deresiewicz published “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech”. Deresiewicz highlighted the remark of Yglesias during a discussion of inaccurate predictions:3
In 2014, the blogger and journalist Matthew Yglesias announced that the publishing industry, thanks to Amazon, would soon “be wiped off the face of the earth.” In 2010, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, declared that the physical book would be dead, or at least obsolescent, within five years.
In conclusion, in 2014 Matthew Yglesias did make a provocative prediction about the demise of the book publishing industry which has not been fulfilled.
Image Notes: Illustration of books on shelves from Susan Q Yin at Unsplash. The image has been cropped. Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- Website: Vox, Article title: Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers, Article author: Matthew Yglesias, Timestamp on website: Updated Nov 13, 2014, 11:57am EST, Website description: Vox was founded in 2014 with a staff of over 100 journalists and subject-matter experts. (Accessed vox.com March 25, 2021) link ↩︎
- 2014 November 24, The Nation, Volume 299, Number 21, Book Issues, Quote Page 5, Column 3, Published by The Nation Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2020, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz, Chapter 3: Never-Been-A-Better-Time (The Techno-Utopian Narrative), Quote Page Unnumbered, Henry Holt and Company, New York. (Google Books Preview) ↩︎