image credit: Dave Bleasdale
Dear Colleague:
As a fellow member of the publishing industry, I’ve been struggling a bit lately to wrap my head around our emerging role on the internet, in the marketplace, and in society.
In that struggle, I hope to point to a few basic and critical issues at the heart of the debate. From what my research is telling me thus far, the primary issue for us—even beyond copyright considerations—is (and I don’t mean to be flip here) remembering the how the internet works.
First, on content
On the surface, the issue is that when paper goes away, so does how we’ve has been built to operate. When we’re selling books, newspapers, and magazines, we’re selling paper and an arrangement of ink blobs.
But “content” is not it’s container.
As John Perry Barlow writes in his forward to Cory Doctorow’s book Content (a book we should all read):
Information is not a thing. It isn’t an object. It isn’t something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn’t have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ˆ motorcycle, for which I’m presently in the market, and which seems — despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally based conditions like mileage and whether it’s been dropped —to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for sale on the Web.
So as we’ve watched print revenues decline, we’re stuck fighting over where to erect a paywall online. We’re still thinking that this “information” we have is, in Smith’s economic terms, a scarcity people are willing to pay for.
Yet, as Barlow goes on to suggest, an economy based on scarcity has trouble reconciling the fact that digital products, “information,” “content,” can be replicated and distributed freely and without cost.
And that’s the point of the internet.
As Doc Searls and David Weinberger clearly point out, the internet is simply a world of ends:
When Craig Burton describes the Net’s stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.
And what do we ends do? Anything that can be done by anyone who wants to move bits around.
Notice the pride in our voice when we say “anything” and “anyone”? That comes directly from the Internet’s simple, stupid technical architecture.
Because the Internet is an agreement, it doesn’t belong to any one person or group. Not the incumbent companies that provide the backbone. Not the ISPs that provide our connections. Not the hosting companies that rent us servers. Not the industry associations that believe their existence is threatened by what the rest of us do on the Net. Not any government, no matter how sincerely it believes that it’s just trying to keep its people secure and complacent.
To connect to the Internet is to agree to grow value on its edges. And then something really interesting happens. We are all connected equally. Distance doesn’t matter. The obstacles fall away and for the first time the human need to connect can be realized without artificial barriers.
The Internet gives us the means to become a world of ends for the first time.
The internet is a dumb protocol on purpose. It facilitates transfer of bits, of content, from point A to point B.
New companies get it
Marc Andreessen recently stuck a finger in the eye of old-school publishing (even as old-school companies are thinking about ebook and iPad releases) in an interview with Tech Crunch:
All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.
In fact, Andreessen recommended that some traditional content producers stop their print lines entirely:
“We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations.
Yipes. Maybe we don’t need to be that radical.
After all Tim O’Reilly reminds us, publishers will always exist to do those things that aren’t easily done by authors themselves (marketing, sales, distribution, gaining marketplace leverage, etc).
But it doesn’t mean that our business models will be the same (or even remotely similar) in the future.
And I fear that until we understand that publishing is not fundamentally about print we may be stuck in this downward spiral.
We must, as a matter of survival
…reconsider how the internet works before we get caught up in copyright conversations and before we consider charging for content or services (our fundamental understanding of the internet will drive these secondary conversations).
…reconsider the strengths of the web—the world of ends—and leverage those strengths rather than fight them.
…find ways to facilitate, rather than block, the open replication and distribution of content.
…give our customers a reason to prefer buying from us (hint: The answer is not simply that we have “better” content. There’s far too much free content online already that’s “good enough”).
…take heed to Searl’s and Weinberger’s words from way back in 2003:
Enough already. Let’s stop banging our heads against the facts of the Internet life.
We have nothing to lose but our stupidity.
Signed Respectfully Yours,
Andrew Swenson
Founder, wordpost.org
theword [at] wordpost [dot] org
Image credit: DaveBleasdale on Fickr; see original for copyright info
