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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky (found via fred-wilson) There’s huge opportunity here for those who can figure out how to capitalize on the change here. Amazon’s got the right idea with it’s self-publish product but it hasn’t taken off yet; the volume of good content isn’t enough to make the radar for the Times’ best seller list or for the shelves in Barnes & Noble. In fact, if B&N et al wanted to get really forward thinking, they would: • setup their own self-publish services; To limit risk for a particular title, B&N could produce the book and Borders could sell it, with some kind of rev-share/risk-share agreement. Sounds quite a bit like the movie production biz today; not sure if that’s a good thing, but there’s SOMETHING here. |
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
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