From Mike Shatzkin‘s sobering reality check about the business model of book publishing:
Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn’t scarce because people didn’t create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That’s no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That’s just one reason — among many — why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years.
When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way, money flows to scarcity. And content is anything but scarce. That, in a nutshell, is the inexorable problem publishers face. And every day it gets worse. More backlist and out of print and public domain and orphan books get digitized and made available. More bloggers blog. More commercial operations put content online to satisfy their own stakeholders. More videos are uploaded to YouTube and more documents are uploaded to Scribd. All of it is processed and made discoverable by Google and other search engines. And the cumulative effect of all this content being created as something other than new publications for sale is cutting into the market for content that is being created with the expectation of sale.
What is the new scarce item that will attract the dollars if IP is so common that it becomes hard to sell? The answer is the attention of people: eyeballs. And the winning trick for publishers will be to use the content they control — which today does have value — as “bait” to attract the attention of people and then to keep that attention and build a business around it.
Easier said than done. Read the full post for Shatzkin’s formula to success. Another hint:
Publishers have always focused primarily on the content. Survival in the future will require focusing on the market.
Via Jay Rosen, Sober, smart.