Continuations

My book World After Capital has been an ongoing project for a couple of years now. I am excited that as of this weekend I feel it includes all the ideas I want in there. Some of them, such as strategies for overcoming the dominance of nation states, are so far in a protozoic stage, but at least they are there. Others, such as the chapter on the sufficiency of “Capital“, are in need of a substantial rewrite because they have fallen out of sync with other parts (see the rewritten chapter on “Ne...

Tonight I am giving a brief talk at a Publishing Point event organized by Susan and Jenny. Here are some notes that I pulled together in preparation, written up as a blog post. At USV one of our big investment thesis is that the internet is resulting in massive unbundling of existing business models and value chains. Newspapers are a great example of this process with different sections, including crucially classifieds, now being unbundled across many different web sites with breaking news on...

Last week’s posting of a video to Youtube that resulted in violence and killings presents an interesting challenge for the open Internet. The whole incident illustrates that the design and capabilities of the Internet are fundamentally at odds with many existing social and cultural structures, such as the nation state and different religious sensibilities. This is not the first time though that we have encountered such a situation as print previously played a similar role. In fact, it almost ...

Had a great discussion at dinner last night about the future of publishing and the role of authors and agents. My believe is that agents have to start providing content capital. The idea behind content capital is pretty much the same as that behind venture capital. Content capital puts up the money, the author creates the work(s) and all proceeds are shared. These would be what the music world has started calling “360 deals,” where many different revenue streams are generated. In publishing, ...

So most people would not think of the sudden closing of Gourmet Magazine as a good day for Ruth Reichl, the magazine’s editor. I assume for the moment that is true for Ruth Reichl herself (the New York Times quotes her today as being sad about the loss of an institution). Yet I think she might find some time from now that this was a good day for her. A day that liberated her from the many constraints of print publishing and allowed her to start an independent online publication. Ruth Reichl h...

This weekend brought us both a big New York Times piece titled “The Internet is Broken: @ev​ Is Trying to Salvage It” and a Guardian article about Facebook’s guidelines for content moderators. Both speak to the question of who controls content on the Internet and how that control impacts our attention. Ev makes the point that extremes attract more attention compared to a more moderate or balance view. Therefore advertising based systems, which require attention which they then partially resel...

I was away last week and so am late to the party when it comes to commenting on the fight between Amazon and book publishers. Here are a couple of observations. First, I was surprised it took so long for this fight to start. It is a great example of what I call “fighting over the digital pie." What was most fascinating about it is that none of the publishers even made a mention of how much authors would receive. At present, this is all about trying to support the existing cost structure of pu...

The New York Times had a piece yesterday on ebook pricing, which I have written about before. Interestingly, the piece simply states and doesn’t question that an ebook retailer such as Apple should be entitled to a 30% fee. What will Apple provide? There would seem to be four separate functions: discovery, payment, delivery and DRM. Let’s start with payment. The fraud rate for ebooks is likely to be very low and the cost to process a payment at scale should be no more than 25 cents (and hopef...

Yesterday brought two announcements and one rumor that all relate to the pricing of digital content: the New York Times announced that it plans to add a paywall in 2011, Amazon announced that it will offer authors a 70% royalty rate, and book publishers are apparently trying to convince Apple to act as a distributor with prices set by the publishers. All three of these are interesting and important. Starting with the last. It appears from the Apple discussions (if the rumor is correct) that p...