The following is a highly edited and altered excerpt from an introduction to my new ebook, Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing, synthesized with excerpts and ideas from another introduction to the ebook by Forrester principal analyst James McQuivey, Ph.D.

Whatever happened to newspapers? They used to be an area of growth and a cash machine. Today, the industry is written about as a patient on life support. Magazines are in the neighboring hospital bed to newspapers. Television is suffering from the twin ailments of piracy and new competition from its streaming partners (Hulu, Netflix, etc.). The music industry? What music industry. It's half of what it was a decade ago.

All victims of digital disruption.

That doesn't mean that news, written discourse, television and music are any worse off. As Forrester's James McQuivey (Ph.D. and principal analyst) points out in the introduction to Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing: Interviews With 19 Innovative Business Leaders (my new book) in regards to the transition music has gone through:

Call it the decade in which music became more used, more beloved, and more interesting than it had been before. That’s what digital did to music. It annihilated analog constraints that sustained certain types of profit, freeing up innovation and leading to more consumer satisfaction. Companies of a certain shape and size didn’t like that. Leaders of a certain type didn’t like it. But what they liked didn’t really matter.

And now it's book publishing's turn. The book publishing industry is closer to the beginning of its transition and so far, it's going relatively smoothly for the established companies in the industry. Why? The people.

According to McQuivey, "The people managing the transition are business people who are ... believers in words and ideas. As believers, they approach the digitization of their industry with a zeal that is admirable even while that faith doesn’t hold them back from engaging in the disruptions necessary to preserve the business."

It’s true in every industry that a company’s best assets walk out through the front door every day at 5:00 PM; it’s much more true in media businesses, for the products we create are a manifestation of our personalities. That's why I wrote a book interviewing some of the most interesting, dynamic and successful executives in the business.

Let me explain with a little bit of history.

When I first joined Digital Book World in Oct. 2011, I knew very little about the book publishing industry and almost nothing about ebooks. In preparation for the job, I bought my first e-reader — a Kindle 3G e-ink reader with a keyboard and ads — and loaded it with books about the publishing industry, including the excellent Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future by Jason Epstein (W.W. Norton & Co.).

As good as Epstein’s book is, it didn’t give me the knowledge I would need to begin to do my job, which is to cover the ebook industry and provide its people with the information they need to run their businesses better and advance in their careers. It did teach me two important things, though:

-- The business is ever-changing and the future is nearly impossible to predict. Book Business is nearly a decade old and at the time one of the emerging technologies in the industry was the Espresso Machine, which, despite its misleading name, does not make coffee but prints books — a print-on-demand machine for bookshops. Epstein predicted that this machine would take the industry by storm and change the dynamics of back-list sales and distribution, among other things (needless to say, the Kindle was the device that would eventually do those things and not the Espresso Machine).

-- The book business is all about the people. From colorful tales about authors like W.H. Auden and Ted Geisel dragging themselves into the Random House offices in the old Villard mansion at Madison and 50th St. in New York to stories of great mergers between old publishing houses, people are at the center.

While I knew that I knew nothing on the day that I started, Epstein gave me a clue to learn what I would need to know. I started talking to people. I scheduled as many conversations as I could — over coffee, usually, but many on the phone, too. I spoke with heads of digital at major publishing houses as well as independent ebook production geeks. I met with agents, self-published authors, publishing consultants and book marketers. I talked with folks at Amazon and Kobo, Penguin and Hachette, Ingram and Constellation, Scholastic and Sourcebooks, Aptara and Innodata -- and so many others. I spent a lot of time talking to my colleagues at F+W Media, who live and breathe the industry.

I asked them about their careers, the industry, the companies at which they worked. I wanted to know what they knew about what was going on in publishing as well as what they didn’t know so I could go and find it out for them. And I told them my stories — where I came from, what I liked to read, what I hoped for Digital Book World and myself.

As I said earlier, in the media business, the products we produce are a manifestation of our personalities. I couldn’t have chosen a better way to learn about the industry. Unfortunately, almost everything I learned became irrelevant the minute I learned it. It’s a sensation many people in book publishing must be feeling these days. The industry is changing so quickly that one has to be a voracious consumer of information just to keep up.

Technologies and business conditions change and industries will change with them, but when it comes to executing that change, it’s all about the people. In the ebook (Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing), executives talk about training their people to do new things and hiring new kinds of people. Some of the interview subjects are c-level executives at major publishers and come from outside the industry — a deliberate move by management to change the direction of an organization. I think the career histories of successful business leaders, seeing how they overcame challenges and capitalized on opportunities, can be instructive as to how we should operate in business and in our own careers.

If you want to know where the publishing industry is going, you only need look to the people guiding it. Just ask them what’s coming and they’ll tell you.

Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing is available DRM-free at the DBW Store. It is also available at Amazon, Google, iBooks and Kobo
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremygreenfield/2013/02/11/how-the-people-saved-book-publishing/?ss=strategies-solutions
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