There are a lot of really good articles that talk about what the future might hold for publishing (Amazon and the Kindle 2 feature prominently)-
- Steven Johnson’s ‘How the E-Book will change the way we read and write’. This one is getting a lot of buzz, and everyone (except for me, it seems) totally relates with the aaha moment Mr. J. talks about.
- Even though he’s totally wrong that people in the new model of publishing can’t make money, the article is good – Clay Shirky’s ‘Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing’.
- TechFlash has an article describing how UW Press is dabbling with the Kindle and Amazon’s Print on Demand.
- for.the love of books talks about how the future of books is being decided now.
- Video of a talk comparing various e-readers, the Kindle and Plastic Logic amongst others.
- Neil Budde has an excellent article on how to get people to pay for content. His recommended “content product” makes sense (and sounds remarkably like a Kindle subscription) -
Better that they look at TiVo and see that convenience, control and functionality can make “content” feel personal and therefore valuable. That is the kind of product news organizations need to offer.
It’s interesting to see the Kindle take such a central role in most discussions. And even more interesting how publishers are completely oblivious to just how powerful Google will become if the Google Book Search settlement goes through.
Amazon with their websites and the Kindle, and Google with Google Book Search and its scanned books, are on the verge of totally taking over publishing. And publishers, instead of seeing reality as it is, are focused solely on saving their current business models and preserving their current ways of doing things.
The first jump was when Amazon came in and destroyed physical bookstores by leveraging the long tail and eliminating costs like retail space, store workers, etc.
Now we are in the midst of the second jump -
- Amazon eliminating even more costs by doing away with physical books completely.
- Google trying to pull off the even longer tail of out of print books, and creating a huge revenue stream based off of orphan books.
Filed under: publishing, thoughts Tagged: | kindle thoughts
