I’ve been off filling my brain at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the past two weeks, so I haven’t been able to post much. I have nevertheless managed to keep my Tweetstream going so, if you’re not already following me on Twitter, you may wish to consider doing so because I am changing my sharing pattern to include more Tweets based upon the realization that bit.ly makes it very easy to do so and that I only blog on somewhere between 5% and 25% of the topics that I throw on my to-blog list.
On digging through the deluge of RSS articles I found on my return, I located two particularly interesting posts on disruption of the media industry.
The first is a post by Michael Nielsen, a quantum information theorist and seemingly very smart fellow, entitled Is Scientific Publishing About To Be Disrupted, which includes links to some great posts about the challenges facing newspapers, and provides not only a great general discussion of how industry disruption happens, but also specific look at media overall and scientific publishing in particular. I’d never heard of Nielsen before, but I’ve already subscribed to his blog because he strikes me as a real Renaissance individual working on fascinating projects like a book on The Future of Science, a series of posts on Google’s Technology Stack, along with the odd post on things like Why The World Needs Quantum Mechanics.
The second is a post on the ReadWriteWeb entitled Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business Part 1 and Part 2. These posts focus on three waves rocking the publishing industry (Google Book Search, e-Books, and print on demand) and their consequences on various participants in the book publishing value chain. In the end they predict that future book revenues end up getting split 33/33/33 among the author, the (web) publisher, and the e-book or print-on-demand deliverer.
Excerpt:
Here is a bookstore owner’s nightmare. Customer walks in; browses around; has grand old time in this temple of knowledge; peruses a book that costs $27; takes out Kindle and orders it for $17, right there in front of your nose, using your wi-fi connection. Aaagh!
You wake up sweating at 3:00 in the morning
Both posts are well worth reading, but save some time to do so and be sure to hit lots of the links embedded in the Nielsen post.
