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04 Apr 07

Shirky: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

shirky.com/...weblogs_publishing.html - Preview

abundance books economics pro-am proam scarcity

A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money
doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't.
By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs
ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will
make their money indirectly.
7 more annotations...
- Weblogs fix the inefficiencies
  traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in
  a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an
  activity worth paying for.
- Traditional publishing creates value in two ways. The first is
  intrinsic: it takes real work to publish anything in print, and more
  work to store, ship, and sell it. Because the up-front costs are
  large, and because each additional copy generates some additional
  cost, the number of potential publishers is limited to organizations
  prepared to support these costs. (These are barriers to entry.) And
  since it's most efficient to distribute those costs over the widest
  possible audience, big publishers will outperform little ones. (These
  are economies of scale.) The cost of print insures that there will be
  a small number of publishers, and of those, the big ones will have a
  disproportionately large market share.
- A book's physical presence says "Someone thought this was
  worth risking money on."
- Print publishing acts
  as a filter, weblogs do not.
- the paradox of oxygen
  and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because
  air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as
  air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for
  most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of
  us, most of the words we read cost us nothing.
- Webloggers waiting for micropayments and other forms of direct user
  fees have failed to understand the enormity of these changes. Weblogs
  aren't a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By
  removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing
  of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary.
- weblogs are becoming a
  vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not "the masses"
  but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This
  is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating
  in the conversation is its own reward.