It won’t save anybody. Mass Market no longer includes print. King is a fairly successful writer and 1 movie made him more money then all his books combined. And movies are on the way out.
The big money today is interactive media (computer games). A blockbuster movie might pull down 75 million. A clunker computer game does 150 mill. What will a best seller do? 5 mill? 10?
Publishers aren’t helping. A novel is a novel. It doesn’t matter if you turn a page or touch an icon or scroll. When a publisher (Tor) gives up the traditional form of a novel for a long, never ending list of characters and reams of their development, then the readers will give up on reading. Worse, no new readers will be attracted to reading. If there is no story there, why read it?
The top of the food chain in any entertainment industry are those being entertained. In the publishing industry Readers sit at the summit, with publishers, then editors, then writers, printers, etc,
A computer game is nothing more then an interactive book that can be ‘read’ over and over, with a different outcome. That outcome is based on choices made by the reader/player.
That beats the holy bill-bob ‘ell out of a book that never ends. Never ending stories are good for the publishers. They kill everybody else. Without that everybody else, the publishers will die too.