But strong? Well, yes. Rumors of its demise seem to have greatly abated. But there’s still this big problem:

Now everyone is a publisher.

To publish something is to make it generally known. You don’t have to sell something in order to publish it, you just have to reproduce and distribute it. Tweets and texts and Facebook posts are publications. So the kid next door is a publisher. As is his mom. Along with just about anyone you see on the street today.

And of course so are all those hundreds of thousands of self-published authors now appearing every year. They can upload their [fill in the blank] to Kindle Direct Publishing or CreateSpace this afternoon and it’ll be in worldwide distribution within a few hours. It won’t cost them a dime.

Of course they won’t sell many — or any — copies because no one will have heard of their [fill in the blank]. But that’s not the point. The problem is the sheer volume of [fill in the blank] they and their cohorts will have pumped into the system.

Think of the traditional reading public as a concert hall full of music lovers. Back in the pre-self-publishing days, they would all sit attentively while a conductor (the traditional publisher) would blend and direct the individual talents of carefully selected musicians (authors) into a variety of artistic pieces. The result was pleasing but the selection was limited. Now fast-forward to the same hall today. The same conductor still leads the same talented artists in the same classic pieces, but now most of the audience around you is humming something else, singing off key, blowing badly on a harmonica, or simply yelling at someone three rows away. You can’t hear the good stuff. It’s drowned out and hard to find.

That’s publishing today. The traditional publishers are the concert promoters and, because they can’t gatekeep the hall anymore, they’ve got a big problem.

So do the rest of us. We’re going to have to be able to get at the good stories we need. The real ones, not just the noise. The ones that show us the world that we can’t otherwise understand.

We really have to. Find that new way. It’ll be an adventure, a journey. It’ll be — that’s right, you’ve got it — a story.