This teaser comes from a February 5, 2013 article on NPR, entitled “Why Traditional Publishing is Really in ‘A Golden Age.'” To read the complete article, please visit http://www.npr.org/2013/02/05/171164095/why-traditional-publishing-is-really-in-a-golden-age?ft=1&f=1008

How healthy is the traditional publishing industry? Not very, says Mark Coker, founder of the self-published book distributor Smashwords. On Monday, Coker told NPR’s Audie Cornish that “over the next few years, traditional publishers are going to become more and more irrelevant.”

But Michael Pietsch, soon-to-be CEO of the traditional publisher Hachette Book Group, disagrees. “I think we’re in a golden age for books — reading, writing and publishing,” he tells Cornish. “And the ways that publishers can work to connect readers with writers now are the kinds of things that publishers have dreamt of doing since Gutenberg first put down a line of type.”

Pietsch joins Cornish to discuss how marketing sets a publishing deal apart from the self-publishing model.