Throw that into the mix as well then.
Really, my thing here is about looking at how these emerging markets take off and exploiting them as opposed to shying away from them and becoming marginalized.
Look at digital music.
That APPLE is the leader in this space at at least 3 glances seems completely nuts, let alone first glance. But if you look at the history of the market, you see the failings of the music and CE industry before apple.
Its funny. A tech company actually came up with a product that actually, for awhile, had the 'digerati' buying CDs again instead of pulling music off napster and instead of the music industry looking at this data and scooping them up, they utterly crushed them...
and I'm not talking about Napster and the file-sharing.
Michael Richardson of mp3.com fame saw a problem. People were not buying cds...they were illegally downloading music.
He also noticed that people were buying cds and ripping them to play on an emerging class of portable players, like the nomad and the rio and such.
Michael asked the *right question* for the market and the music companies (at the time) which was this:
"How do you get people to buy Cds instead of downloading them?"
He came up with an idea that was brilliant...but ultimately flawed...and was a two-pronged attack. People liked to rip cds, but in those days, re-encoding them into mp3 was a bit pokey.
He devised a service that basically killed two birds with one stone. One was a service where in you signed up, inserted a cd that you owned into your computer which ws scanned, and were given instant access to the music on it in mp3 format. No need to rip, it was already done for you, saving precious time and cycles. Just download them.
The other tho, attacked the music sales problem. mp3.com partnered with resellers that if you bought the cd from them, they would transmit this info to mp3.com. You could then download the music right then and start listening before your cd turned up in the mail a few days later.
The record industry had a FIT. The model was good. It served customers that either had physical product in hand, or that were confirmed to have purchased, and as such, owned the cd in question.
No one could argue this. What they COULD argue tho, was that mp3.com did not have redistribution rights. It was "fair use" for the owner of the CD to rip it themselves but a copyright violation for a 3rd party to distro ripped music. This won them the case but opened up a can of worms that they did not foresee or expect...
Instead of taking this proven winning strategy for SALES (mp3.com was making a nice bit of change off this deal for the service and a small piece off the B&M sales tie-in) of CDs while satisifying the needs of the emerging DAP market and controlling it...what did they do?
They became obsessed with stamping out "file sharing"...killed, then bought Napster ("the value was in the Napster 'brand'"...as opposed to what Napster provided. Morons. Worms fill the gap...in spades.) and produced products that no one wanted in the form of Musicnet and Napster 2.0.
So some "fruit company" in California that wasn't at all interested in preserving their old business model in music (Sony by this time had absorbed much of Sony Pictures nee Columbia execs into its CE ranks...suckers so became hamstringed by the content people's interests crippling CE products that people actually
wanted to buy...a problem that plagues them to this day) but embracing a new one, had the foresight to buy a piece of MP3 player software from a small-to-midsized software company and made it as the jukebox for their new DAP thing called an "iPod".
And what THAT thing did was allow you to easily convert your CDs and get them into the player. They THEN had the nerve and good sense to play up this value-added feature ('Rip. Mix. Burn.) and the wisdom to get *musicians*...you know, the people customers and fans identify with, to back it up.
The publishing biz could really, REALLY benefit by looking at how this all went down and why it worked.
It didn't start with DRM...it started with market acceptance and penetration of a "walkman alternative" so that there would be a market for the damned content
Sorry about the tangent.
But yeah, ok, authors and top-tier editors.
