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Tech publishing tycoon Tim O'Reilly comments on last Sunday's NY Times Mag article Scan This Book. I half agree with him. His fundamental point is spot on:
Publishing is not a role that will be undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandated by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers cannot find one another without one or more middlemen who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market into more manageable pieces. , , , The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.
But I think he underestimates the importance of property rights and DRM in creating these new institutional structures. A fundamental problem of the Net is that the business models it is spawning are too much based on the question "how can we free ride on value created by others?" rather than "how can we create value and get paid for it?"
Certainly the industry is ripe for revolution. A friend of mine comments that the term "disgruntled author" is a redundancy because there is no such thing as an author who is not disgruntled with his publisher.
posted by James DeLong @ 2:27 PM | Books
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