There’s an interesting blog post over at The Economist today. The author is thinking aloud about the fact that music retailing has become increasingly flattened, with no one act achieving the same superstar status of people like The Beatles, David Bowie or Michael Jackson, whereas book retailing has gone in the opposite direction, with JK Rowling being only the latest superstar author and every publisher looking for the next big name.

I suspect that the reason for this may be quite simple: music is now predominantly sold online, whereas books are still predominantly sold in shops. The business model of the bookstore works best when you have a small number of titles to sell (especially as the most popular books are often sold through outlets other than specialist bookstores). As I said to David Barnett recently, the SF industry is well aware of independent publishers and is happy to promote them. However, it is still too hard for people to buy the books.