The End of Publishing
The industry most imminently in danger of extinction in the Information Age is publishing. Gatekeepers, printers, and distributors all simply have no place in a completely connected world.
Bookshops and physical books will always have a place, at the very least there will forever be a niche market. An inverse demand for physical community will grow in tandem with an increasingly cyber world, and covers, paper, binding, are themselves as a whole an appreciated art — people still buy albums.
For daily reading, books — especially with any significant number of pages — do not even compare to the practicality of an e-reader, which in the scope of history are essentially in their pre-infancy and already more enjoyable and usable in every regard.
Amazon knows this, and opened the floodgates of self-publishing to accomplish what they do best: completely owned the segment. Medium, my blogging platform of choice, rolled out voluntary subscription and pays writers based on metrics — a mixed bag for writers who’ve built the community based on a different premise. But the social network-based solution to compensating writers is an interesting and potentially very successful angle.
This century, we will see a complete decentralization of publishing. The transference is being witnessed in a million different ways across social media, message boards, blogs, as every individual is essentially their own publisher. Micro-payments will take this a step further, circumventing brokers and retailers altogether, consequently connecting authors to their audiences with higher earnings at lower cost. Why would anyone pay a third party if it’s just as easy or easier to go directly to the source?
We will not be paying for anyone to stock and shelve digital literature. The services that will transform and stay relevant, or emerge to replace the obsolete, will deal in discovery. With 8 billion publishers and growing, the value will be in serving to individuals what matters most to them, at the right time. Why do you think the world’s most powerful corporations are unscrupulously mining your data like blood diamonds?
