Here’s a nice little anecdote on publishin and disruption I thought of when I put together my praising of Craig Mod’s recent article on publishing.

Recently, a guy held a talk here at Trinity about so-called ‘fanslations’ of mangas. He talked about how it’s hard for publishers to translate mangas and how fanslations make it harder to make money of ‘proper’ translations and that fanslations would jeopardize the whole manga export business. Or something along those lines.

His advise was: Buy more mangas so that publishers are incentivised to modernise publishing, maybe cooperate with fanslation groups, or change something at all. Like in ’Oh, we make so much money right now with our outdated model, let’s change something!’

This statement obviously falls apart once you even think of applying ‘disruption’ to it. Like Clayton Christensen (I stole this link from Craig’s article) illustrates, it doesn’t work that way.

The two sad things were that I didn’t have this thought through that well when he asked if there were any questions, and that he was probably younger than 24.

P.S.: I’m not fond of Christensen’s referring to god at the end of his talk, but the disruption part is quite nice.