The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry. Today's creative writers could bypass the industry altogether. The opportunity is already there to a degree, via a number of self-publishing programs, but Apple's iBookstore would give them a power partner with a unique technology and powerful distribution.
via pcmag.com
Yes, exactly.
Instead of asking, "How are we going to maintain the price of a book when Amazon.com sells ebooks for $9.99?" publishers should be asking, "In a world where anyone and everyone can distribute engaging content to millions of readers, what aspects of our business model need to be abandoned in order to remain competitive?"
I think a good rebuttal to the death of the book publishers meme is in http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/563086.html.
“Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?
And writers would line up at their door”
Even in a purely digital market like Apple’s App Store, while the democratization of creators directly selling to the consumer is great, the sellers now have a problem of how to be noticed amid so much stuff of varying quality. So application publishers come in and help the developers get showcased and build up a reputation as a publisher for quality product.
And Amazon’s price of $9.99 is not consistent, it’s only for “popular” books. Amazon is of the Wal-Mart model, with loss-leaders and business model that cares only about sales, not supporting variety.
Susan Piver has an interesting article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-piver/the-macmillan-vs-amazon-t_b_444879.html. She looks at the issue from not only an author’s perspective, but as someone who used to be a music exec. As she points out, a problem occurs when an industry goes from a regional focused market to a national focused market resulting in less choice for the consumer at the benefit of low price. What’s the point of being able to get cheap content if the diversity of the marketplace plummets because of it.