For a long time, Hollywood behaved as if streaming were a minor irritation. Netflix was treated as a curious outsider – a former DVD-rental service pretending to be a studio, an intruder with no pedigree, no star system, no “legitimate” place in the cultural hierarchy. The major studios comforted themselves with familiar mantras from the past: people will always go to movie theaters; theatrical windows are sacred; the economics of filmmaking cannot be rewritten by algorithms.

Like all gigantic mistakes, this one also seemed perfectly logical. Until it wasn’t.

What looked like a duel between two entertainment models turned out not to be a duel at all. It was a structural mismatch – a clash between an old business that sells individual units and a new ecosystem that sells access. One side relied on opening-weekend revenues, linear marketing campaigns, and star mythology. The other on subscriber retention, predictive analytics, global distribution, and the patience of long-term amortization. The core difference was not in the content, but in the economic logic.

Today, fifteen or twenty years later, everything is painfully clear: the king is dead, long live the king. The clearest illustration came with the two major film releases at the end of 2025 – Frankenstein and One Battle After Another. Both were ambitious, heavily promoted, conceived as global spectacles. Both were genuinely strong films. And yet only one of them was publicly branded a “flop.”

Why? Because Frankenstein belonged to the streaming economy: a global same-day release, costs spread over years, success measured not in tickets sold but in subscriber retention and hours viewed. One Battle After Another, by contrast, existed inside the old model: a massive dependence on weekend #1, a huge risk of insufficient return (even though it ultimately earned more than $200 million), an explosion of marketing costs, and harsh visibility of every hesitation. Their fate was not determined by quality but by the structure of the markets in which they lived.

But let’s talk about the future. If we are sober realists, it is hard to claim that movie theaters will disappear and that we will all turn into proverbial couch potatoes. Far more likely is that theaters will survive as a kind of curated, museum-like space – cultural rituals, boutique experiences. But the economic engine that once sustained them – the model of mass theatrical attendance – is already gone. Streaming will not kill cinema; it will simply reshape the economic logic that has underpinned it from its birth until today.

And now to the real subject of this reflection: today the publishing industry stands exactly where Hollywood stood fifteen years ago.

It repeats the same consoling stories. We hear them constantly: books are timeless; people love the smell of paper; reading cannot be measured; subscription models are dangerous; quality literature always finds its audience. None of this is strategy. These are defensive incantations – the last spells of an industry trying to postpone the inevitable.

And the truth is simple: publishing is entering the same trap, only with far weaker defenses.

Unlike Hollywood, it has no billion-dollar franchises, no theme parks, no merchandising machines, no global releases that can generate hundreds of millions in a matter of days. It has thin margins, an aging readership, a retail system dependent on physical bookstores, and a chronic resistance to technological change. And while films remain expensive and complex to produce, books are cheap – which means that once digital acceleration truly begins, it will be fast and unforgiving.

The subscription model for books already exists, though in fragmented and partial form. Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, Storytel, Kobo Plus – these are early prototypes. None has achieved dominance comparable to Netflix because none can force publishers to participate. Major publishers refuse to place new titles in subscription catalogs. They fear – rightly – that unlimited access will crush the per-unit sales model that has sustained them since the nineteenth century. In these companies, the word “subscription” carries the same anxiety that “streaming” once provoked in Hollywood.

But defensive instincts cannot change the trajectory.

Readers already live in a subscription world. They pay monthly for everything: films, music, games, news, cloud storage, software. And in return they expect immediacy, abundance, frictionless access. And the youngest readers – the very audience publishers claim to be courting – already consume fiction inside ecosystems that operate on streaming logic: Wattpad, Webtoon, AO3, serialized reading apps. They read the way people watch series: in a continuous flow, not as a carefully curated sequence of standalone objects.

Meanwhile, structural pressures on publishing continue to intensify. Amazon dictates pricing and distribution. Bookstores struggle with rents and reduced foot traffic. Authors watch advances shrink, while the midlist – once the backbone of literature – disappears. Readers face paralysis in the face of overwhelming choice. And the entire production pipeline – writing, editing, translation, design – is being reorganized by AI. What once required months will take weeks; what once required teams will require one or two people; what once relied on scarcity will rely on speed and engagement.

In such an environment, the subscription model is not a threat. It is a kind of physical law slowly entering into force – gravity transformed by the approach of a huge, still barely visible star.

Look again at Hollywood. The studios didn’t lose ground because Netflix made better films. They lost because Netflix had a better model: global distribution, stable recurring revenue, high release frequency, and a direct relationship with the audience. The theatrical film became a boutique product. Streaming became the industry itself.

The same realignment is coming to books.

Print will not die, just as cinema didn’t die. But the printed book will retreat to the periphery – to special editions, beautiful objects, carefully curated artifacts. The mass market will move to digital ecosystems where readers pay once a month and read without limits. The economics are too strong, and the habits too deeply ingrained, to expect anything else.

What will this brave new world look like?

In ten to fifteen years, a handful of global subscription giants will control most of the book market. Amazon is the obvious candidate, but Apple or a Chinese platform could just as easily take the lead. These giants will fund “originals” in the Netflix style: large advances calculated according to retention forecasts, simultaneous multilingual releases, rapid translation, algorithmic commissioning, data-driven editorial decisions. Publishers will survive, but in different roles – more like curators and rights brokers than production centers. Bookstores will become cultural salons. Authors will either adapt to the new rhythms or be forgotten, because the system will reward consistency, engagement, and audience-building rather than slowly accumulated prestige or “pure” literary authority.

Is this good or bad? The question is almost irrelevant.

The deeper truth is that the traditional publishing model – the one that shaped literary life over the past century – is no longer structurally compatible with contemporary patterns of cultural consumption. Hollywood learned this lesson the hard way. The publishing world still has a chance to learn it the intelligent way: by accepting that its future will not be shaped by nostalgia or romantic ideas about reading, but by the same forces that have redrawn every other cultural industry – scale, platforms, algorithms, technological acceleration.

The world of books can enter this future voluntarily – or be dragged into it late and unprepared. The result will be the same.

The only open question is whether the transition will be made with dignity – or with denial.