Editor's Note: Rising From the Ashes 
of Retail Giants

While Brooks may specifically be addressing book production in the educational publishing sector, I think his point can be applied to other areas of the industry as well. So many of us—from editors to marketers to booksellers and beyond—have the skills and experience to bring ourselves and our businesses into the evolving future of this industry. Our success may simply lie in how we reconceive our roles.

In that Wall Street Journal article about B&N, Stewart suggests that the retailer's decline may be because it never really embraced the Internet or e-books. "As B&N focused on managing decline, a much more nimble Amazon could concentrate exclusively on the new world it was forming," Stewart writes.

If Stewart's summation is correct, and I believe it very well may be, even a giant like B&N can't survive by resisting the change happening around us. If we're going to have a place in it, it may be time to stop debating the future, and start embracing it.