By Joshua Gans (Rotman School of Management).
The publishing industry is facing large changes as digitization continues to transform the industry. In this session, we will explore the economics of business models for publishing and will argue that these drive players towards models that embrace rather than repel sharing. Taking this perspective can enlarge the set of possible profitable paths for publishers.
Joshua is passionate about monetization of content, last year he wrote a book called “Information wants to be shared”. Brand says “information wants to be free”, which is a paradox as it is not free to produce.
The cost of producing information is not proportional to the number of the consumers. However, all the cost is ahead of time, with no guarantee of return.
KickStarter is an example of shared funding done right. Doing so enables you to pre-finance books. The mechanism is not easy to put in place, even Stephen King failed at it with the Plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plant).
Shared use has evolved from 1997 to 2009, where “do not redistribute” was the norm and now it is more about sharing.
In this way, a private collection of books is a non-sense.
The intent is to read stuff and you get this from publishers, media and friends. The latter being more and more with the social environment of 2013. However, friends will do that if it is easy for you to procure the book.
Schema of a pool to handle a digital library
One of Joshua’s idea would be to create a pool to distribute the revenues based on usage from readers. This idea is already used with other media.
