Commenting on one of his recent posts on whether self-publishing changes all the rules, Tim O'Reilly's noted that the middlemen never go away; technology just changes the middlemen. His observation certainly rings true and it’s really not a problem because we need the middlemen. As someone capable of producing content that the market might want, I have been wondering how I could get paid for at least some of my content in the new world of tagged content. It seems easy for authors to become online content creator/provider, but we need intermediaries to get content to the paying customers, deliver the content in a format that the customer wants, collect the payment, and apportion the payments among various content creators/providers. Here’s a simplified diagram illustrating the new content intermediary:
The content still stays under each author’s control, but I am envisioning an automated process where the intermediary’s systems can gather relevant pieces of content from different providers based on what a customer needs. The intermediary enables customers to search the content, browse catalogs, view rankings based on third-party reviews or sales rankings, and mix and match to create a custom set of chunks of content. Perhaps the customer can even decide in what format she wants the content—print or any one of several eBook formats—and all these are generated on the fly from the tagged content. (Print version could be done by the intermediary’s print-on-demand system.) The intermediary takes care of accepting payment from the customer and keeping track of sales for all content providers, and making payments to the providers. Nothing that revolutionary in the concept except that we probably need some tags for providing pricing information for content. Do we also need any standard taxonomy for the tags or could the intermediary discover these through online indexing of the content? These are some of the details that a prospective content intermediary needs to work out.
Who could be these new content intermediaries? Well, you know the potential players already—Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. and perhaps some of the current book publishers would become the new intermediaries (publishers could also be content aggregators that feed the content intermediary that sells to the public). The new twist is that we’d have a new way of selling smaller chunks of content instead of today’s model of one bookful at a time.
Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books content intermediary trends
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Posted by: ernest | July 02, 2007 at 04:14 PM