Completed reading Nicholas Carr’s latest book "The Big Switch", I feel that it begins dramatically but the plot peters out before the end. M. McDonald has a detailed review which I agree a lot. Here I just want to discuss about the unbundling from chapter 8, "The Great Unbundling".
"For the publisher, the newspaper as a whole becomes far less important. What matters are the parts. Each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the marketplace. It lives or dies on its own economic merits."
I can not quite agree with this claim. Nicholas says:
"iTunes store has unbundled music, making it easy to buy by the song rather than the album. … TiVo … are unbundling television, separating the program from the network and its schedule. … YouTube goes even further, letting viewers watch brief clips rather than sitting through entire shows. Amazon.com has announced plans to unbundle books, selling them by the page. …"
It is true that these services have a unbundling power. However, the conclusion is just the current status without any further analysis. I think the unbundling is not the end. In fact, people depend on some channels to obtain high quality works. These channels save people the energy to search the wanted information. We could call it "brand" or something else. But the concept beyond single product does exist. So the "each story becomes a separate product standing naked in the marketplace" situation will never happen. It is just a reorganization of how business is running. I think this can be empirically proved with some existing data. Maybe the performance of qidian.com fantasy fictions could be a proof. That is to say, readers’ trust on the author, besides the quality the fiction itself, has a significant impact on the performance.
I think my unsatisfied expectation of the latter part of the book comes from this reason as well. Carr merely lists the phenomenon rather than providing in-depth analysis and insights about the "utility computing" or "World Wide Computer. I hope that his next book (The Shallows, which claims to examine the intellectual and social consequences of the Internet) would be a better one on this problem.