Post date: Jul 09, 2010 5:54:17 AM
This is the first posting so I need a catchy 1-liner to kick things off. I haven't ever seen a newspaper catalog so I guess there aren't too many of them around. We don't have catalogs for newspapers because when we look up catalogs, we have a pretty good idea of what we want to find. Newspapers on the other hand, print a wide variety of content. Sometimes we like that content, sometimes we don't. But most of us only read a few and settle for the same old paper. Generally for newspapers, the delivery channel is more important than the content. People do buy newspapers because of something they want to read about, but the vast majority of newspapers sold are to people who browse through it for nothing in particular. This is in exact opposite to books. People buy books because they are interested in a specific something about the content. In a nutshell, the value of books lies in its content. The value of newspapers lies in the delivery of the content. Magazines lie in-between; half content driven, half content delivery driven.
One more thing that shows the relationship. Valuable content is kept and even preserved. If books are at one end of this scale where they are kept as long as there is perceived value in their content, then newspapers are at the other. They are not kept at all because the content varies hence there is no perceived value in static newspaper content :-) Again, magazines are in between.
Audio and Video are just different forms of content and the same applies. For some of these, there is value in the content. Yet for others, there is value in the delivery of the content. Radio and TV news is the analog of newspapers. LPs and DVDs are the analogs of books.
Digital convergence is on everybody's mind these days, When digital technology reached a certain level, it became feasible to produce digital copies of the things that carried the content. We hear plenty about Apple, the Nokia Music Store etc.. and their success stringing together services that would allow people to download MP3 files of their favourite songs. There is also word about the great potential of digital video companies like NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube. All these, are the Internet equivalent of books, not newspapers! So to this day, the major successes on the Internet has been due to the digitization of the equivalent of books, LPs and VHS tapes. What happened to newspapers, radio news and live TV shows?
My opinion is that the easy things got done first. The Internet is primarily a technology for content delivery. In those cases where content delivery is NOT important, the internet has already affected such great change that whole fortunes have been made and whole fortunes lost. In those cases where delivery is vitally important, the Internet will have an even more significant and profound influence.