The Newest Market

Publishers everywhere are trying to figure out how to ‘get into’ the new media market. E books, blogs, etc. are attracting new generations of readers and in some cases replacing the role books used to play in our society. The best example is probably sites like dictionary.com – who used to go to college without a dictionary? Now students just hop online; who needs the physical book

It’s like Alexandra Erin, who maintains Pagesunbound.com said, “it’s a very simple equation: if money is being lost to free content, then that’s where the money is.”

Today on Booksquare there is a great article. It states that contrary to the panic-position that less people are reading, the newer generations may actually be reading more. Included in the article are some ways that publishers are seriously behind – markets that are being run by fans and fanatics, rather then being exploited by publishers.

The position she doesn’t consider is that from a publisher’s view point, as long as the sites exist they are free advertising. The moment publishers create similar sites they are suddenly paying someone to run the site and adding to their own workload, and the sites are rarely create a direct form of income. Production departments across the board are looking at these sites and trying to generate buzz about their work on them; at least the major publishers are, so they are aware that those markets exist. But I think that their lack of direct involvement in the creation of such sites shows that they don’t believe that running the sites themselves (or similar sites) would actually generate more profit.

That’s is the biggest problem with the internet from a big business viewpoint – how do you use it to make money? The web requires giving away the content that you traditionally generated revenue from.

When that dilemma is  solved, I think we will see an immediate surge of publishing companies jumping feet first into the virtual world.

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Tags: e-magazines, e-media, magazines, publishing companies, publishing company, self publishing

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