The Digital Publishing Revolution Is in the Rearview Mirror
We have little reason to believe that the $100 million a month in e-book sales we're seeing right now is proof that revenues from digital downloads will replace revenue from print. Instead, what we're likely to see can be projected from the twin effects of a production revolution of the sort we've seen in books, combined with the consumption revolution we saw in music—via an ongoing increase in the creation of content and in the number of publisher-like intermediaries. These often will be operating on a labor-of-love, mom-and-pop, kitchen-table basis (publishing itself, as well as eBay, Etsy, etc.) to help orchestrate this creativity and far broader productions of artist-fan relationships, as we saw in music. They will be focused on cultivating attention, which is scarce, not on making and distributing copies, which are infinitely bountiful. BB