In an age of increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion, objects become more valu­able. And that value is the rea­son print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My pre­dic­tion for print media, there­fore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local edi­tions of hard­bound books and quick, cheap paper­backs. Cou­ple this with our new atti­tudes on the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of con­tent online and you are going to find quite a num­ber of peo­ple self-publishing books. In fact, there are num­ber of folks doing inter­est­ing things already:

Snark­mar­ket, ear­lier this year, pub­lished 200 paper­backs of New Lib­eral Arts which drew from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent thinkers online:

It’s 2009. A gen­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal natives is careen­ing towards col­lege. The econ­omy is reboot­ing itself weekly. We have new respon­si­bil­i­ties now—as employ­ees, cit­i­zens, and friends—and we have new capa­bil­i­ties, too. The new lib­eral arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?

The best part about their self-publishing model is that after the 200 paper­backs were sold, the released the pdf for free.

Now, in light of that suc­cess, Robin Sloan has raised money through Kick­starter to write his lat­est novel:

The basic setup is: Imag­ine a Sher­lock Holmes for the 21st cen­tury. All the­re­ally good cases are on the inter­net. And Holmes is a woman, and Wat­son is an A.I., and San Fran­cisco… oh, poor San Francisco…

Why are these ven­tures impor­tant? Well, with the cost of print small runs is com­ing down, you are going to see more inter­est­ing thinkers out­side the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing cir­cles writ­ing and sell­ing books online. And you will find self-publishing will be increas­ingly legit­imized* because as Diana Kim­ball noted about Robin Sloan’s cur­rent project:

Kick­starter forces pro­mo­tion, plan­ning, and urgency to the begin­ning, right when affir­ma­tion is most pre­cious. By cre­at­ing a pub­lic con­tract, Kick­starter takes the van­ity out of self-publishing. It’s not you pub­lish­ing it, not really; it’s all the peo­ple who trusted in your work enough to bet on its success.

“The money” Robin con­fided, “is noth­ing, com­pared to just knowing.”

*This makes me won­der whether or not this would mean a de-legitimization of the more tra­di­tional model.