”There was a brief, shiny moment sometime in the early 90s when Barnes & Nobles and Borders were opening on every corner, and at the same time the bubbling dot-coms were luring editorial talent away from print and into digital publishing. Those two factors converged to make life as a Publisher or Acquisitions editor pretty lush for a few years — salaries in the industry went up by over 30% and the enormous competition to sign talent to fill the shelves of all those miles of shelves in those new stores (and that mysterious new thing called Amazon.com too) made way for expense accounts and advance budgets that were unprecedented. That crazy growth, however, was totally unsustainable. Once the dot-com bubble burst, and new stores were no longer coming online, we were left with no new growth, a significant erosion of independent bookstores, consumer trained to expect cheap prices on books, and a overabundance of new “B-level” titles.

Julie Trelstad, commenting on this blog post about the continuing downturn in publishing. As the dot-com bubble and the resulting credit bubble continue to work their ways out of our economic system, hopefully traditional media enterprises (like book publishing) can find a way to regain their equilibrium. (via fluffynotes)