Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry (via 26th Story)
Read: The 26th Story: Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry. Just ran across this blog post and though I should share some of Seth's comments as they apply very nicely to the Future of Content and Media. Here are the best snippets - and I won't comment this time, as there is nothing left to say! You can download TRIBES (Seth's latest book), for free, here, btw
"The huge opportunity for book publishers is to get unstuck. You're not in the printing business...You're in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here's the news flash: that's not what authors care about. Authors don't care about units sold. They care about ideas spread. If you can help them do that, we're delighted to share our profits with you. But one (broken) sales channel--bookstores--and one broken model (guaranteed sale of slow-to-market
books) is not the way to get there. If you free yourself up enough to throw that out, you'll figure out dozens of ways to leverage and spread and profit from ideas worth spreading..."
"...Generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side
effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas"
"The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there's even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books. So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers) and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15 because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers) will just walk away. Or, you could say, "if books on the Kindle were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and don't pirate stuff cause it's convenient and cheap..."
