electronrun.com

In part 1 of this series I concentrated on why books and publications have in general not become the target of online piracy, at least nowhere near the levels we see for music or movies. In this second and final part, I will discuss what determines whether a publication will become the target of online distribution.

Not all publications are the same. Take for example newspapers. Would you bother to illegally distribute the contents of any newspaper online? Never of course! It would be an insane action for the following simple reasons:

1. It is already online: Most newspapers now put news on their web sites as standard. They might be shortened versions of the paper article, but you get most of the information required, plus free access to archives and related links!
2. No diachronic value: Yesterday’s paper is yesterday’s news. Nobody would bother online, in any case you have online archives as in (1) above.
3. Paper publication is cheap: Buying newspapers regularly is a small cost and is not going to change your financial life.

For the above reasons, newspapers are creeping ever more closely to online existences. Time limitations narrow the opportunity to read a paper to Sundays. To feed that habit -the last step before the complete disappearance of the newspaper buying activity I think- newspapers keep contact with readers via their web sites.

What applies to newspapers also applies to any small chunks of information that can be read independently of the total publication. Recipes, short stories, collections of advice -business, psychological, etc.- anything that does not contain a full story that has to be read as a complete piece belongs in the same category with newspapers. All these text forms can be easily tagged and catalogued, I am sure you have already thought most are already the essence of excellent web sites visited daily by millions. You want to find a Thai recipe, what do you do? Buy the book from Amazon or search it for free online? You want information on the latest Asus Eee PC, do you wait for next month’s magazine -without being certain that it will contain the info you are looking for- or look up the tech blogs?

There is already cases where paper and online versions complement each other. Take two very recent examples:

1. In the Star Wars Legacy of the Force series of nine books, the first book is offered online for free. Why? Because the majority of Star Wars fans are online and it is hoped that if they have free easy access to the start of the series they will go out and buy the other eight.
2. The Japanese do things the other way round. Cellphone novels written and read on mobile devices and web pages become such hits that they are eventually published in paper form.

Both of these examples are about long form story telling and if you think of the Amazon Kindle success it is evident that in the near future no publication will be able to escape the gravity of the web and e-paper.

So in my opinion for everything except novels and fiction all the rest has been quietly already been transferred or is being transferred to the web. The transfer of long-form story telling is the last part to complete the transition. Although the paperless business has never materialised, the reduction of paper publications is inevitable. And although I might be accused of being repetitive, I will one more time say that it is an absolute necessity to work out a model that rewards writers and publishers directly for their work because advertisements cannot in any way reflect the value of work.

The relentless progress of IT devices now makes e-paper a realistic product segment, an area which ElectronRun will closely follow in the future.

[ElectronRun - Is the Internet a threat to publications? - Part 1]