Programmer and essayist Paul Graham offers a thoughtful rebuttal to any current publishers who think they are content providers. Says Graham: They’re not.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
In Graham’s view, newspapers, book publishers, record labels, and their brethren are framing their problem the wrong way. Most are defending their existing revenue structures — the places along the distribution channel where they’ve traditionally been paid. Will the old players be able to win at the new game? Graham isn’t so sure (”The optimal ways to make money from the written word probably require different words written by different people”). But he does offer a rubric to tell the winners from the losers in the coming marketplace:
When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.
“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
It’s a pretty old piece of wisdom. And it’s interesting to note that the wine is good for the wineskin as much as the container is good as a holder for the wine. (Is the physical book also good for the story, as well as being its container?) In any case, is now the time in Western culture when we sell really fancy wineskins to each other and forget about the wine? So there’s no content, nothing to taste, nothing to tell or to learn, and really, nothing to celebrate after all.