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Originally Posted by carpetmojo
Above all - what is "dis-intermediation", anyone ?  |
Business-speak.
Disintermediation is the process of by-passing a previously important/indispensable intermediary (middleman) in the supply chain of a product.
http://www.marketingterms.com/dictio...ntermediation/
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Intermediaries survive by adding value. If changes in the marketplace renders an intermediary’s role less valuable, then the intermediary must adapt. If not, the old intermediary will often be replaced by a new, more valuable intermediary.
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In getting a pbook from author to reader there is a whole chain of steps: author to agent to publisher to printer to warehouse to distributor to retailer.
In getting an ebook from author to reader the process can be as short as: author to PubIt to Nook store to reader. Everybody who didn't get their pound of flesh is being disintermediated. And not enjoying it.
As the definition says, if you don't add *visible* value you don't survive.
And, about the "more valuable intermediary": for all that we talk and approve of direct publishing by authors, the biggest threat to the BPHs isn't self-publishing. It is New Publishing, the new ebook-first publishing houses that are popping up all over; these houses provide all the added-value of the traditionalists (and often more) and do it better, for less (read: bigger royalties for authors).
In the pre-ebook era, small publishers had a harder time getting product onto retailer shelves and were often crowded out of many retail channels. In the ebook era, not only are "shelves" infinite, the smaller publishers have lower overhead and risk less on every book they take on than the BPHs so they can take on projects with narrower but deeper appeal. Which is one reason the genres have exploded in the ebook era.
The BPHs and their apologists are obsessed with Amazon becoming the "more valuable intermediary" when the real threat to their high-overhead traditionalist model is all around us in the form of small, agile, low-overhead ebook-first publishers.
(Expect to see lots more cases like 50 Shades of Gray...)