Art & Creativity Quote by Bruce Jackson

Jackson’s line lands with the quiet authority of someone who’s watched institutions get dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the digital century. The phrasing is deliberately matter-of-fact: “has changed” appears twice, like a gavel. There’s no romance about books here, no lament for the smell of paper. It’s a public servant’s register: broad, policy-adjacent, and built to sound inevitable.

The key move is the leveling comparison: publishing isn’t special. By folding book culture into “everything else in the world of media,” Jackson punctures the industry’s long-running self-myth that books sit above the churn that remade music, film, and journalism. That’s the subtext: the old defenses (gatekeeping, prestige imprints, slow production cycles) don’t exempt publishing from platform logic, data-driven marketing, and distribution monopolies.

“Works” is doing real work. It points less to aesthetics than to systems: contracts, rights management, discoverability, pricing, and who gets paid. It’s an implicit reminder that technology doesn’t simply add e-books; it rearranges power. Authors can self-publish, retailers become kingmakers, algorithms replace some editorial intuition, and attention becomes the scarcer currency than paper.

Contextually, this reads as a nudge toward realism rather than panic. If technology has “changed everything else,” then resistance isn’t a strategy; adaptation is. The intent is to normalize upheaval, making the transformation sound not like a cultural tragedy but like a governance problem: how to manage the shift, protect public access, and keep the ecosystem from collapsing into a few private chokepoints.