The publishing world changed in December of 2008.

Scribner, Random House, Houghton-Mifflin, HarperCollins, all went on firing sprees – shedding themselves of hundreds of editors, sub editors, herds of office employees and even a few publishers.

Book sales were in the dumper – flatter than a possum that had been run over by a semi – so the bigs cut staff to cut costs.

Colin Robinson, one of the first fired at Scribner, told Brooke Gladstone at NPR’s On the Media, there were and are just too many books out there.

“There is a huge overproduction of titles,” he said. “Writing books is incredibly easy, much, much easier than it used to be. You can get it edited electronically, you can typeset it yourself, you can easily get short-run printers to distribute it, or you can distribute it electronically. And so, I think it’s a really great time for writers and not such a good time for readers.”

With so many books in the stores and online, Robinson feels we readers are having a hard time picking the really good books to take home.

His answer? Create a company that publishes just a few really good books, then promote the heck out of them.

He and partner John Oakes have done that.

Last year, they’ve started OR Books with the aim of publishing a book a month that they sell directly to readers. Cut out the book wholesalers and the retail stores – even Amazon – and spend on book promotion the money the wholesalers and retailers would have gotten. . . . about $50,000 to $100,000 per book.

That’s a lot of money when you consider that most publishers spend nothing on promotion outside of their quarterly catalogs.

Are Robinson and Oakes elitists in wanting to publish only a few of the very best books?

Maybe.

But if they can bring it off – if they can gather a handful of the top writers under their umbrella – perhaps they will generate enough sales that they will make money for themselves and make very good money for their writers.

That, of course, doesn’t help the thousands of writers who aren’t in that handful – who aren’t Grishams or Pattersons or Kings. What of them?

The future of the book may be very good for them, too. That, tomorrow.

Tomorrow: The future of the book – Part 3