Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen his press would have this effect

This blog has written on many occassions about the changing business models for content.

Forgive me therefore for pointing you in the direction of a piece that sums up what has happened in publishing.

It comes from Jason Epstein who writes in the current New York review of books

“The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.”

Ht-Stephen Abram

The tablet-is it the new I-pod for publishing?

Could the tablet be the salvation of the written word.

That's what Ian Burrell believes writing in the Independent this morning.

Ahead of next week's eagerly anticipated launch of Apple's new baby the publishing industry is hoping that it does for writing what the I-Pod did for music

converted millions to the idea of paying to download songs and, to a degree, has revived the music industry, becoming the world's largest music retailer in the process.

In reality he argues

Apple needs the publishers – and their journalism – as much as they need it. Taiwanese company Micro-Star launched a tablet two years ago which failed partly because it carried insufficient access to content. Jobs and his team are in talks with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the New York Times Co. and magazine publishers such as Conde Nast and television networks including CBS and Disney.

The engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist.

An interesting take on the problem of news (Ht-Martin Belam)

News consumers are mainly interested in news coverage, not content. Coverage is a service that promises to keep its users "in the loop" about what is relevant to them and their peer groups. It is delivered by selecting content on readers' behalf – i.e. through aggregation and curation – and while it relies on content it is more than that. Because it is an ongoing, day-to-day service, coverage is all about loyalty: once consumers find a provider they like, they come back to it. And because of hyperlinks, in the web coverage providers need not be content providers (and vice-versa). This means that media brands' power – including their pricing power – will increasingly be a matter of how well they aggregate content – whatever its source – and not just how good their content is.

Nico Flores writes on his blog On Demand media

His description of the example of the technology and the car is a great read and for journalism

the engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist

and adds that

Tim Berners Lee's invention of the hyperlink created the perfect frictionless interface between two formerly integrated industries: publishing and aggregation. It does not matter that this did not come about in the gradual way that Christensen describes (i.e. through a slow process of industry evolution) but as a quantum leap, before the industry was ready

The future of reading

Ever wanted to know why people want to read?

Tom Peters tries to answer that question in this post as he looks at the future of reading as we stand on the cusp of the ebook revolution

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading.

ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

The blogging parodox

I do like this Venn diagram



via Andrew Sullivan

What the Kindle is really doing to the publishing industry

I have written about the advance of the electronic reader the Kindle before on this blog.
Is it a threat to the publishing industry,will it kill the centuries old tradition of book reader,will libraries be reduced to empty warehouses?

Maybe all three but its arrival has coincided with structural changes in the publishing world as this article by Marion Maneker suggests

The cutbacks that are happening in the publishing industry are not related to its entry

book chains are falling victim to the same disease that killed the independent bookstore. High-margin sales—big best-sellers that come in the back of the store in a shipping box and leave through the front with a customer in the space of a few hours or days—have migrated to other outlets.

However it arrival will coincide with a gap in the market by these structural changes.

The collapse of bookstores almost ensures that the Kindle will thrive.