Via William Hutton:
“Cheryll Barron has written a new OII Internet Issue Brief (No. 4), entitled ‘The Keiretsu-Cooperative: a Model for post-Gutenberg Publishing’, which is available online at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1532173 It is an imaginative proposal for a new business model to support publishing in the digital age.”
I asked for some reactions on the p2p research list. Below is a reaction from Alex Rollin, and in the comments field, from Sam Rose.
Alex Rollin:
“In this paper the author goes over a number of facts about the decline of what might be called ‘centralized’ publishing. Newspapers, book publishers, and magazine publishers are looking for new ways of building an maintaining audiences while turning their attention to the possibilities the internet has to offer. On the other side, in this paper, are the ‘bloggers’ and ‘twitterers’ who are publishing.
The proposed cooperative publishing effort serves to provide a centralized site where ‘bloggers’ can be published to the largest audience and receive more notoriety as well as a potential income if there is money to be had.
This paper doesn’t go into the ethics of content ownership in any meaningful way, and it also doesn’t really deal with the simple idea that large centralized sites aren’t important because Google search works really well.
The author spends a great deal of words explaining the environment and the challenges to publishers, and uses a lot of bold type to enumerate the potential gains to authors. While those gains are probably enough to invite folks into a publishing cooperative, I believe that the issues she doesn’t deal with, like content ownership, are at the very least a deciding factor for participants in some way.”
Sam Rose:
I had to quote your whole email because it was worth reading again.
Paul Hartzog and Richard Adler covered much of this in their approach
around “social publishing”. They presented this at the 2007 Political
Economies of Peer Production conference in Nottingham, UK.
Worth reading in this context is:
http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/02/social_publishing.php both
Paul and Rick collaborated on this thinking. Much of the basics of
this are now central to Forward Foundation approaches, so credit goes
to them for challenging assumptions about this.
I bring this up because I think it resonates with what you are talking
about here. You can’t do things that purport to be something new, but
still shore up the collapsing old model (unless you have a really good
reason to do that).
A cooperative could be a great model for a publishing initiative. But
cooperative model is not enough. You also need an adaptive way to
address the what is now emerging, which is an exponentially growing
system where people exercise choice in what they engage with. When
we’re listening to what people are asking for, and mapping them and
ourselves into the larger system, then we’ll see how it is possible
for us to be flexible enough as publishers, to anyone/anything else,
to address emerging needs that cannot be addressed with boilerplate
solutions.