Publishing in the FREE world

If nothing else, Chris Anderson's book is certainly stirring up some interesting thinking.  (By the way, you can read Free!  The Future of a Radical Price for free.)

In his New Yorker article ("Priced to Sell; Is Free the future?", July 6, 2009) Malcolm Gladwell is right.  Information doesn't actually want to be free, and in fact can't be.  He cites a number of examples:.  He notes the Dallas Morning News' concern about Amazon/Kindle claiming 70% of the subscription fee, not leaving enough for the content.  He then goes on to say electric power can't be free because of the cost of the transmission lines.  He notes that free TV is suffering but cable TV is doing well.  But Gladwell fails to note an important point – these are all examples of the distributor reaping the value, not the content provider.  His example of YouTube having to license commercial video to drive revenue is one example in favor of the content provider, but only one. 

The implications of the iPhone, iPhone apps, and iTunes are still unclear to me – I'm not sure whether they indicate power to the distribution network or just the power of fads and cool technology. What is clear to me about the Apple experience is that many content providers are finding a way to make iStore work for them, even if it isn't their first choice, and it isn't as profitable as it used to be.

The other piece I read recently on this subject is an article from InfoCommerce Group.  It included the following paragraph:

To thrive in the digital economy, publishers need to rethink how their users value the information they provide. What do these users do with the content? What can you do to help these users become more productive or work more efficiently? This is the essence of infocommerce, and many publishers still have not harnessed its full potential. Some are still stuck in the old mindset that they produce "textbooks" or "newspapers" or "journals". Instead, they should be thinking about how their content can be integrated with software to offer decision-support systems, or how their content could be used by an online marketer to shorten the sales cycle.

Free will be part of the mix but finding a way to create value-added, premium content, is going to be the challenge of the early 21^st century for publishers.  This is where my attention is focused.