10.27.2009

No such thing as an eBook

Richard Nash:

Over the course of the Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences” and it is clear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as opposed to personal license) rights.

Bought and sold? I guess. But more like: relationships.

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