In the wake of Black Wednesday–where book publishers conducted massive firings and hiring freezes–both the New York Times and Salon.com have written a few persepectives on the demise of the traditional book industry.

Jason Boog of Salon.com is calling it “the end of days” for the book industry and questions if and how it will survive.

Thanks to conglomeration and corporate distribution models, some of publishing’s biggest houses were laid very low by the current stock market collapse. And scary holiday book sales figures compounded the industry’s woes, with recent news of a 20 percent drop in sales in October from last year’s book market. Even worse, Nielsen Book Scan reported a 6.6 percent drop in unit sales during early December. Not even the holiday season could bolster book sales.

Boog notes that many of the big booksellers refused to look at the market and new distribution models–failing to integrate the rise of online electronic media as well as resting on big selling books, rather than mid-level books that allow smaller publishing houses to be more nimble and creative. “As the corporate monoliths limp into 2009, a number of smaller, more independent houses could thrive during this recession. A few of those presses have structured themselves to avoid long-standing problems that got big publishing into this mess: high advances, long author lists and spiraling costs,” Boog writes.

In yesterday’s NY Times, David Streifeld details his own culpability in the industry’s fast fall–noting that the search for cheap books and the rise of online reselling cuts the author, the publisher and the book store out of the profits.

In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they’re lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.

They get their books from friends, yard sales, recycling centers, their own shelves. castoffs (I just bought a book from a guy whose online handle was Clif Is Emptying His Closet). Some list them for as little as a penny, although most aim for at least a buck. This growing market is achieving an aggregate mass that is starting to prove problematic for publishers, new bookstores and secondhand bookstores.

Yes–the death knell is ringing for the traditional media industry. And it’s going to be bumpy and scary. It’s going to damage a lot of individuals who are losing their jobs in the interim. But for the broader future–this is an opportunity to really understand how to repackage, redistribute, and rethink the kind of long form information and storytelling that makes up books. I’m not an expert on the book industry, but I can imagine if it’s anything similar to the magazine industry–rethinking how to print and distribute to reach audiences beyond the traditional means is a must. They will need to think about how to be competitive with the Streifeld’s of the world or fulfill a need that these amateurs can’t (maybe offer exclusive audio/video commentary from the author or help organizing online and offline conversation groups about the book).

From Kindle to accessing a book on your IPhone there are innovative new ways to distribute long-form information to the world and to potentially reach new audiences. (Maybe release an electronic chapter a day!)

I’d love to hear from the small innovative presses that are thinking about what the industry might look like 5 to 10 years from now–and what they are doing to be on the cutting edge of that change.

All I know is that while this might be the end of days for the traditional book industry, it is not the end of days for books. I’m on a working vacation in the Outer Banks right now. And in between blogging, writing, planning and phone calls–I’m staring longingly at the huge stack of fiction and non-fiction books I lugged along on the plane with me (I can’t help adding 20 pounds to my luggage.) And I just can’t wait to curl up with each one, dive into the first sentence and emerge with a sigh on the last. And then open another book.

Interesting pull quotes from the New York Observer’s “Where will Magazines be 10 Years From Now?”

Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter thinks in ten years we’ll be carting around a little, plastic electronic book where all our content will be beamed in.

Wired Editor Chris Anderson says no way and magazines are going to look about the same.

Although I believe that emphasizing the important tactile experience of magazines and the longer feature pieces as pros for print, I’m a little worried about how publishers could be playing the exclusive game in the future.

The point, then, is to capitalize the physical experience of reading magazines. If it’s all about textual and textural experience, then the more dear that experience becomes, the more of a luxury object it becomes.

“The correspondence between physical luxury as a subject and physical luxury as a thing,” Kurt Andersen, the former editor of New York, thought out loud. “As paper magazines become rarer, it might seem like they become a physical luxury and thereby gain. The affinity between thing and subject might be greater in 10 years.”

But there is always the tension of where you find your revenue–a continual question plaguing the progressive media. We don’t exist to “satisfy advertisers,” (see pull quote below) but to produce kick-ass journalism and media products, but must uncomfortably play the advertising game to support that work. Why uncomfortable? Because our very social mission and existence is often in antithesis to the corporate, consumerism model of the advertising world. But we must find the balance.

“If you look at recent magazines that are successful businesses, many exist to satisfy only advertisers,” said James Truman, the former editorial director of Condé Nast. “Any publisher has to look at those as successful business models and successful business models tend to be copied.

“Editors were protected a long time ago from thinking about their magazines like businesses, especially at Condé Nast, but that changed in the last 10 years,” he said. “Now editors are brand managers as much as they are editorial experts.”

Yes: In the world of the future, the editorial experts will be ad buyers and magazine buyers. And their world is becoming increasingly digitized, their expectations of time spent reading words diminishing, their capacity and taste for internalizing information in different ways—non-narrative, nonverbal—increasing. That is, the Internet won’t replace magazines, but it might replace their readers.