The Price of Content

James pointed me at a fascinating article by Scott Karp speculating on the future of (and the future prices of) print and digital content. There are a number of excellent propositions in the piece. Here are two:

To find the right price for ebooks, publishers need to FORGET the value of distribution in the traditional print model. There’s only one question — what is the CONTENT worth? (Even the ability to search an entire library can’t be valued — Google has commoditized it.)…

Print publishing won’t be dead until the people who value print distribution are dead — and that’s going to take at least a generation. People will still pay for print publications when they DO value the print distribution, e.g. the newspaper on the doorstep, the book or magazine in your bag on the plane or at the beach.

Not the all-too-common doom and gloom, and thus required reading for anybody who publishes anything printed on dead trees.