Content is No Longer King
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 10:22PM Stephen Shapiro is a business writer who has earnt a living in the traditional manner associated with consultants. He has written two books to support his innovation consultancy. No difference to the norm here! However his blog "Content is No Longer King" is about his journey of discovery seeking to understand who makes profits from his writing now Amazon's Kindle threatens to revolutionise book publishing and distribution by taking his books on-line. Shapiro demonstrates clearly in this article that we are repeating the business models of old - business models stretching back to the turn of the 20th century to the Tin Pan Alley days when popular sheet music was first introduced to the masses. The profit takers in those days were the entrepreneur distributors who travelled door to door selling the sheet music - not the songwriters. The only difference now is the distribution method rather than being human is on-line and once it gets on-line there is almost no cost to the distributor!!