Publisher Tim O’Reilly has authored a provocative look at issues in digital distribution.
My favorite is “Lesson 5: File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.” Here’s an excerpt:
The music and film industries like to suggest that file sharing networks will destroy their industries.
Those who make this argument completely fail to understand the nature of publishing. Publishing is not a role that will be undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandated by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers cannot find one another without one or more middlemen who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market into more manageable pieces. In fact, there is usually a rich ecology of middlemen. Publishers aggregate authors for retailers. Retailers aggregate customers for publishers. Wholesalers aggregate small publishers for retailers and small retailers for publishers. Specialty distributors find ways into non-standard channels. […]
Check out the rest at OpenP2P.com…