Publishers have necessarily been focused on short-term changes in their market environment because they’ve been happening fast. EBook sales are rising more quickly than anything else. But Mike Shatzkin, Founder & CEO of Idea Logical Co, is thinking of much bigger changes than these.

He looks out a couple of decades and imagines a world more different than today’s than the world of 20 years ago is different from today’s. He challenges the most basic assumptions we have always accepted that a book is “finished” when an author turns it in, that audiences are mostly reached through intermediaries, even that publishing is about products, and paints a believable picture of a completely different media and content world which, he maintains, is coming whether publishers like it or not.

So they require attention, but they don’t amount to much yet in the way of sales. Individual title marketing, which worked through a bunch of “usual suspects” that hardly changed year to year, has become a game of Whack-a-mole, with new blogs and social networks popping up for every book between the time you get a manuscript and the time you print a book. And sales channels and how you reach them are shifting with new online accounts sprouting while many brick-and-mortar accounts are dying and catalogs, sales conferences, reps dedicated to bookstores, and even “publishing seasons” themselves are endangered species.