By now the world has heard about Black Wednesday: the largest number of layoffs in book publishing announced in a single day, with Simon & Schuster and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt cutting hundreds of jobs, and the Doubleday group being cut up and divided among other houses within RH. It’s never a good week to be a writer — and it’s never been a worse week to work in publishing.
So does this mean the industry is destined for collapse? Will book publishing cease to exist? Will the teeming illiterate hordes soon storm our gates?

Meh. I’m trying to be Buddhist about it. Here’s Gawker’s take.

Every few weeks it seems there’s another article about the pending implosion of the industry — in the Observer and New York most recently — and I think by and large this stuff is only being written to attract attention. Headlines warning of imminent disaster sell more newspapers. It’s like a damaged oral history that none of us dare to question as it’s handed down. Yes, the publishing industry is a dinosaur. It still takes a year to put out a single book. And it kills trees. Books, like TV and magazines, are losing a chunk of their market share to the internets. (Why buy a cookbook or a gardening manual when you can get information online for free? And think of all the worthy blogs you can read instead of buying books at all.) And then there’s the issue of piracy — will e-books, like MP3s before them, become pirated so frequently that readers quit bothering to pay for books at all? I sure hope not.
So here’s my magical dharma answer: shit happens. Nothing lasts forever. You can never count on things staying the same.
I love my job, and I know most everyone working in publishing is there because they love their jobs, too. But there’s no guarantee that any of us will stay in it forever. So, we can’t stay too attached. Our identities must be bigger than our job descriptions. The economy is rough, and no matter how things go it’s likely the book world will continue to shrink, even if just a little. The luckiest and most devoted agents and editors will ride it out. (I know my boss is going to be fine, and I don’t plan on leaving any time soon…)
As long as there are people, there will be narratives. More of them may appear digitally than on the printed page as thing get worse, and many won’t get published at all. But even in this crap economy, people are still looking for good books. An editor told me over drinks on Wednesday about the novels she’s still dying to acquire. The industry is not going to collapse. And it will be a very very long time before books — and the people who make them — disappear for good.