Posts tagged publishing
“ We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry — the copyright industry — has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important — to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.”
Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee | TorrentFreak
This is brilliant. Read it now.
NewsStand built into iOS 5
It’s a good day for the newspaper business.
“ Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that’s threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as “vanity” titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.”
Digital Self-Publishing Shakes Up Traditional Book Industry - WSJ.com
Or, how about a more accurate analogy: this is exactly what has been happening with the music industry over the last decade or so. Soon, there will be “indie” authors self-releasing their books in digital formats only, and book bloggers pointing the masses towards the hottest reads of the moment.
Let’s hope that writers learn from the errors of musicians and refrain from releasing their works for free - if they’d like to quit their day jobs one day, that is.
AppleInsider | Apple's iPad iBookstore offers low-cost e-book self publishing
My prediction: This will do for “independent” writers what Pro Tools, Ableton Live, and/or Garage Band did for independent musicians.
Unfortunately, that means a lot more crap will soon be out there, which will require quite a bit of curating (most likely via bloggers). Nonetheless, now all you need to be a published author is a good idea, talent, determination, and just a few bucks - instead of either massive amounts of luck, connections or cash as before.
“ ‘People make an error in conflating print and print businesses,’ [Russell Davies] says. ‘The business models that are attached to print may be broken, but that does not mean that print itself is. ‘It may not be the dominant technology in 10 years, but it will still be here. Television did not kill radio.’”
BBC News - Media tycoons wanted: Make your own newspaper
Russell Davies is rad. He’s a media/brand planner. Our paths overlapped briefly when I didn’t know what to do in college and signed up for this advertising club run out of the advertising department. He came in from London to visit the program. I think it ended with a collective internet surf and a presentation on how to be interesting.
Now he’s back in London starting a newspaper company.
Funny how this happened in the music industry a decade ago, when suddenly artists began to look at the label cost, which in this case is the “PUBLISHER IS PAID”, and realized that, hey, maybe we don’t really need those guys anyway…
“ We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.”
Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World
Agreed. People will always read - that’s not going to go away, no matter how much Twitter and the like annihilate our attention spans. What’s needed is a new model that takes out the middleman - in this case, the publisher/distributor - and gets words in the hands of the reader (either literally or figuratively) and the reader’s money in the hands of the writer.
