The acquisition of Lexcycle by Amazon sure got all the digerati’s creative juices flowing. What is becoming increasingly clear is that general trade publishers have a card to play here that the niche publishers can only join in on: creating a collectively-owned ebook “store” that can provide an economic baseline for the emerging ebook marketplace. […]
Where the Web Is Taking Us: The Inevitable Future and the Publisher’s Role In It
The basic premise under which we’re operating here, I’ll summarize for those of you have never heard or read my work before, is that horizontal, format-specific media entities are oh, so 20th century, and won’t work very deep into the 21st. The reason for that is the web, which almost forces vertical organization. Horizontal presentations across subject matter — like CBS, Random House, or The New York Times — were the products of a capital-intensive, limited-distribution universe
The Digital State of Play in the US
…in the 21st century, the net is flipping this on us. The net tends to self-organize us by subject niche, so the eyeballs and human bandwidth are linked to the niches, which are vertical, not horizontal. And because web interaction is about file exchanges, format specificity is meaningless. The file can hold text, art or photographs or other graphics, animation, moving images, sound, games, or code that helps us combine, sort, or tag things
End of General Trade Publishing Houses (Completely Retold)
I am not predicting that everybody will read on screens. You probably know that I’m a fan of the Kindle and perhaps you know that I’ve been an avid ebook reader on a Palm for almost 10 years. But I’ve learned that other people’s attachment to paper is greater than mine. And anyway, it would be a good thing for general trade publishers if there were more screen takeup; it would mean keeping the readers for their content and not necessarily any loss in margin