Major entertainment media remains, shall we say, smug in the knowledge that the edge they retain over independent producers of content is distribution (also marketing, but that’s another post). It’s a well-earned smugness, make no doubt about it. When it comes to theatrical distribution, until the universe goes digital, it’s a tough thing to get thousands of prints into theaters. For music, well, even as digital downloads grow, physical CDs are still the top sellers.
And books? Well, we all know that physical books remain very popular. And most physical books seem happiest being printed up in mass quantities and shipped to bookstores (or, rather, shipped to warehouses for shipping to bookstores). Economies of scale and all that. The more you print, the theory goes, the cheaper the product.
[Read more…] about Changing The Economics of Publishing: The SharedBook Model