I think the tendency is always to become comfortable (and perhaps complacent) with one’s own life experience. You can tell people what a bad recession means, but if they haven’t experienced one there’s a disconnect between knowledge and understanding. By the same token, familiarity may breed contempt, but it also causes blindness to the need to adapt. (See also: The Innovator’s Dilemma.)

It doesn’t matter how good your market analysis is if you build your factory on a caldera that explodes. Publishing has been a closed circuit for decades, if not longer, but now the internet is shorting that circuit completely. As you note, there’s no point in resisting the change, but the industry is resisting anyway.