Throughout its history, the publishing industry has always needed a boogeyman to represent new developments threatening the good old way of doing things. “Barnes & Noble was that for a while because it was a chain and because they had centralized bookselling,” says Boris Kachka, author of Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House. “Then Amazon became the big bad guy, and Barnes & Noble looked old-school all of a sudden.”
Source: Is AI the Bitter End—or the Lucrative Future—of Book Publishing?