Publishing: 10 Years from Now

You’ve read everybody else’s predictions. You’ve heard from the experts. The insiders. The pundits. Well, goody for you. Those  prognosticators may have knowledge. They may have expertise. They may even have credibility. But what they don’t have…is a really good imagination.

So forget all those boring predictions and trust mine instead. They’re based on years of…okay, fine. They’re not based on anything at all.

I just made ’em up this morning.

In ten years…

• Those infinite monkeys with their ubiquitous typewriters will have successfully written Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and subsequently declared it “notably inferior to The Tempest.” Then they will throw feces at each other.
• 73 percent of people who own computers will have written a novel. The other 27 percent will have written two or more novels. 99.9 percent of all those novels will be crap.
• A group of recently-out-of-work literary agents will form a rock band and call themselves The Query-Spammers. They will be terribly ironic. And terrible.
• Apple will finally release its tablet computer. Steve Jobs will declare “the end of e-ink-induced headaches.” He will then reveal the two available configurations of the iTablet: Extra Strength and Sinus Congestion. Only Apple COO Tim Cook will laugh at his joke. Jobs’ famous “one more thing” will turn out to be the long-rumored, much maligned iTurtleneck. Promising to revolutionize corporate casual wear, the iTurtleneck will feature one less hole than traditional turtlenecks. It will come in black, and black.
• Oprah will start a new network television show dedicated solely to talking about books. Unfortunately, she’ll only talk about East of Eden, Love in the Time of Cholera and The Road.
• Hemp will replace wood pulp as the source of paper for traditional books. Traditional books will suddenly become popular with a new demographic: young people who think hemp is the part of the plant you smoke.
• Ray Kurzweil will introduce an e-reader device that beams content directly into your brain. Within days of its release, hackers will find a security hole and vanity presses will begin flooding the Kurzweil CorTex(t) with crappy self-pubbed books. A month after its release, millions of readers who thought they downloaded the latest Stephen King novel, Everything In the World Is Evil and I Mean Everything, will be more disappointed than usual with his increasingly verbose prose, completely unaware that they’re actually reading a rambling collection of spam headlines cobbled together by a bored hacker in St. Paul, MN.
• The racy novel, Hermione and Me, by David Gordon Rowling Murray will be released by Simon, Schuster, Hachette & Scholastic, LLC and sell out of the 10-million copy first run within seconds of its release. In an unrelated story, J. K. Rowling will purchase ten million copies of an unnamed book and bury them in a Montana landfill.
• President DeGeneres will declare December 9th as Read-a-Real-Book Day. Most people will choose something by Dr. Seuss.
• “Fiction” novels will still account for 100 percent of all novels.
• Guy Kawasaki will finally accept that his enduring popularity is due almost entirely to the fact that people think he invented the motorcycle.
• TwitterPrint, the book publishing arm of the Twitter Collective, will hit the top spot in the last print edition of the New York Times Best-Seller list with its first published work, Someday I’ll Wish I Hadn’t Said That, by millions of uncredited authors.
• I still won’t have a flying car.