Publishers should be proud of their legacy | Books | guardian.co.uk

The near-Orwellian debate about "publishers bad, Amazon good" or "Amazon bad, publishers good" strikes me as symptomatic of the degree of revolution taking place in reading. Two recent articles in the Guardian by Barry Eisler and Nick Harkaway offered interesting perspectives, but more than the argument it was the language in both pieces that was striking. In any revolution, language matters. One powerful word in the digital revolution is "legacy". There is a conscious attempt to employ the word pejoratively, to suggest that existing media businesses %u2013 publishers, in the case of books %u2013 are going to fail to make the leap to a new world.