Here’s NPR’s Morning Edition on eBooks and the perceived value of such, and publisher’s unwillingness or inability to move past old business models.
My favorite piece that I’ve read on this subject lately is TechCrunch’s interview with Marc Andreessen, Burn the Boats. Here’s the best bit, but go and read the whole thing…well worth it.
He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.”
There are lots of things about this tension that libraries will be forced to deal with in the next 5 years, from print vs digital to which of our own particular boats we need to burn.
