The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change
all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken
place in the last few months. Time Warner's iPublish
and MightyWords (partly owned by Barnes and Noble) were the
last in a string of resounding failures which cast in doubt
the business model underlying digital content. Everything
seemed to have gone wrong: the dot.coms dot bombed, venture
capital dried up, competing standards fractured an already
fragile marketplace, the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky
and awkward, the software unwieldy, the e-books badly written
or already in the public domain.
Terrified by the inexorable process of disintermediation (the
establishment of direct contact between author and readers,
excluding publishers and bookstores) and by the ease with
which digital content can be replicated - publishers resorted
to draconian copyright protection measures (euphemistically
known as "digital rights management"). This further alienated
the few potential readers left. The opposite model of "viral"
or "buzz" marketing (by encouraging the dissemination of free
copies of the promoted book) was only marginally more
successful.
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