Very nice!
I don't think there can be any doubt now about the long-term
trajectory of the book publishing industry. The writing is on the
digital walls. The book, journal, and newspaper industries are,
at least in the conventional sense, becoming obsolete and are
being replaced with digital copies available to read or
download on websites. This doesn't mean, though, that all
digital book and periodical production will cease to take
the commodity form since many of these sites will either sell
their digital products directly to consumers or financially
benefit from the sale of advertising at their sites as well as
possibly the sale of databases to other firms. It does raise the
question, though, of what determines the exchange-value of reproduced
digital copies? And it does raise the issue of what happens when there
is competition between commodity-producing sites on the web and
open source and other 'free' sites which make available similar or
identical products. And it raises the question of whether states
will intervene in the process and, if so, how. Of course, the full
diffusion of these technologies will take time so the book publishing
industry in the conventional sense is not dead, but it does have
a terminal disease and is slowly dying, imo.
In solidarity, Jerry
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Received on Fri Apr 23 08:26:07 2010
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