Jason Epstein Quotes

#1. What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.

Jason Epstein

#2. Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.

Jason Epstein

#3. Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes.

Jason Epstein

#4. The revolutionary process by which all books, old and new, in all languages, will soon be available digitally, at practically no cost for storage and delivery, to a radically decentralized world-wide market at the click of a mouse, is irreversible.

Jason Epstein

#5. Editors and their authors seldom form deep friendships for the same reason that psychiatrists and their patients keep their distance: The relationship requires candor that mixes poorly with intimacy.

Jason Epstein

#6. A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

Jason Epstein

#7. The primary goal of publishing general fiction and non-fiction was never profit - though profit was essential to stay in the game. Publishing is a vocation in which the work is its own reward, an insufficient goal for today's conglomerates.

Jason Epstein

#8. By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers.

Jason Epstein

#9. Authors, I would soon learn, sometimes bite when their egos are underfed.

Jason Epstein