observations

observations / reading — 2 Comments
31
Dec 08

The Different Unbundling – On "The Big Switch"

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.

observations — No Comments
15
Nov 08

Reading in the electronic era

I’ve tried to imagine how we would read and write in the future as the development of information technologies. With the development of technologies such as E-ink (Amazon Kindle, for example) and flexible LCD (Readius, for example), as well as the multi-touch technologies, we can expect that printed books would fade out in the not-so-distant future when people can read and write on a thin screen as naturally as on papers. I am interested in these new devices. However, what attracts my attention more is how this paper-to-screen transform process will affect the publishing industry. In other words, how the consumption of knowledge contents would be affected by the changing of distribution channels.

Each time there was a big change in the communication methods, there will be huge change in the business world. There will be a lot of interesting research questions. Let’s start from our observations.

Amazon Kindle has gained some success since it launched in November 2007. The ad words say "This is the future of book reading". Sure, I believe that the future belongs to electronic devices. Amazon Kindle Store now has tens of thousands of books, newspapers and magazines online. And the amount of contents is still increasing. The price of these contents is much lower than their printed versions, which makes them powerful competitors of the offline content. With my research experience on UGC, several questions come to my mind:

  • How should the price be set to make the biggest benefit?
  • What’s the effect of UGC (such as customer reviews) on the sales of these contents?

There surely would be competitors when this business grows big. Internet giants (Google, Yahoo, MS, etc) and traditional publish corporations would be competitors in this market. But they may choose different paths in this competition. Free contents with advertisement and charged contents could be two options. It’s too early to say who will win in this game. The business model may become clear in five to ten years as the e-reading becomes more and more popular.

What I want to write here is some observations and thinking about paid content. Traditional publish companies always worry about the decline of profit while transformation into e-publishing. I think people are willing to pay for good content. I’ve been a fan of online fictions since 2005, when I charged some money into my account and became a VIP on Qidian.com. What I observed there shows that paid content online has its market. Readers pay to read the on-going fictions on the website, and they can vote to evaluate the fictions. There are fierce competitions between the authors because the votes and clicks are directly linked to their incomes. I searched about similar sites in the English world, but with no matched results. It seems that people still doubt about reading fiction online. But as I know, it has been a big business in China, Japan and Korea. People not only read them on laptops, but also on mobile devices. With my experience of reading on Qidian, I am curious about what factors will affect the success of fictions.

As I see, when the electronic reading era comes, websites like Qidian would become leading competitors as content distribution channels.

To be continued…