Moderator’s note: Peter Osnos is founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and executive director of the Caravan Project, funded by the MacArthur and Carnegie Foundations. – D.R.
A unifying fact has now emerged among the dizzying changes in the ways we access information and entertainment. It is increasingly provided on demand, delivered on a screen or digital device when you hit the key or push the button.
People have always chosen the time and place where they will read a newspaper or a book, watch a movie, or listen to music. But what is happening now—and it is a transforming development—is that the material you want is only produced when you select it, rather than being manufactured in large quantities and stacked somewhere waiting for a buyer.
Less guesswork
These days, once the music is recorded, the book written, the movie made, the news gathered, it is stored in digital warehouses where consumers can find it and demand it delivered to a receiver of their choosing to own or merely peruse. The trucks and trains that transport goods, the large factories of presses and assembly lines, the guesswork about what quantities to make and ship, become significantly less important in this emerging model.
There is, instead, a very competitive and expensive business in the equipment and software that deliver these on demand goods to us: computers, telephones, MP3 players, televisions, and after years of unfulfilled hype, reading machines. The digital retailers and search engines—Amazon, for example, and Google—have created industry behemoths that offer just about everything for sale and discovery. And their share of the marketplace—in time and commerce spent on their sites—is enormous.
For a good many people, the act of browsing in a bookstore, going to the movieplex for a 7:00 o’clock show, or waiting for the newspaper to arrive in the early morning remains the preferred experience. And to satisfy those audiences, inventory needs to be manufactured and shipped to all the traditional brick and mortar destinations. But a growing portion of the public expects that the material they want will be sent to them via the ether to be consumed where, when, and by whatever means they choose.
At the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference…
In New York last week there was a three-day event in a midtown hotel called the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, organized by O’Reilly Media, one of the leading digital information companies. These occasions have a particular rhythm of keynotes, breakouts, and networking designed to feature the new products of supporting vendors and panels or speakers evangelizing for their take on the next big thing. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, for example, and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell were seminal in defining the phenomena of media delivery and popular preference. For all the brouhaha around the digital revolution, I should add, both of these were read in very large numbers in printed books. In any case, the goal of Tools of Change and similar occasions is to find coherent ways to explain change in the media world and to supply the apparatus and services these systems make necessary.
The breakneck pace of development is inherently confusing and can be intimidating when your livelihood is at stake. Understanding and then, perhaps, controlling the change process is essential for everyone in the media spectrum—the creators, producers, publishers, and, ultimately, the consumers. That is why the notion that we are becoming an “On Demand” world strikes me as so helpful.
The big battles
Everything we read, watch, and hear begins with the people who create the material and flows through the compilers and providers to the public. Today’s big battles are over who will control the means by which all the information and entertainment reaches you and on what gizmos supported by sales volume, advertising, and subscriptions, or in the case of libraries, donations. For the purposes of this piece, set aside the reality of plunging print revenues, flat bookstore sales, and the sale of theater movie tickets. The ability to manage these business issues in the more traditional means of delivery will determine who will still be around to take full advantage of the new ones. In an on demand world, with information and entertainment of all types increasingly stored in vast digital warehouses and showrooms, the job of marketers is to bring the consumers to them. The public can buy or borrow whatever they want from home, office, or in transit, and the means they choose to do so will shape the media future.
The vendors at the Tools of Change conference want to facilitate and support those choices with a vast assortment of options that envisions, basically, three ways in which the creators and publishers will operate.
• They will learn how to do everything technology now permits. In books,for example, that means preparing digital files and audio for e-book, downloadable audio, and large print in a variety of on-demand formats.
• They will choose a middle man distributor to warehouse and ship and in some cases manufacture (print-on-demand, for instance) all these formats while also keeping track of the metadata that controls the availability of material to retailers.
• They will outsource the whole process to, say, Google, which conveniently does the digitizing process for you and makes the material available in the vast and growing number of ways Google reaches us. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and the other digital portals make a fortune for themselves selling advertising and other revenue catchers using the content delivery they now control.
Some combination of elements from these options is probably the solution for most publishers and content providers. But it is critical to remember that the overriding objective is to provide consumers whatever it is they want on demand and get revenue in return.
Appointment consumption—going to the store for a book, waiting expectantly for your favorite show to come on, reading the morning newspaper—remains the natural way of life for a great many of us. But the power and momentum of the shift to on-demand media is summarized by Woody Allen’s great aphorism that maintains, “Ninety percent of life is showing up,” and that, in today’s terms, means being always available.
(Reproduced by permission.)
