Disruption and change in publishing

Please note that this post is from 2009. Evaluate with care and in light of later events.

Michael Nielsen wrote a stellar piece dealing with disruptive changes that doom old business models – specifically, newspapers and science publishers, to mention his examples. He does a particularly good job at explaining how this could happen even without anyone doing anything wrong or stupid.

The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture – like firing your photographers – don’t make your situation better, they make it worse. So you’re stuck gazing over at TechCrunch, who is at an even better local optimum, a local optimum that could not have existed twenty years ago

via Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?

He goes on to describe the impact he sees ahead for scientific publishers, a group fighting against new trends like open access that is ultimately doomed by new economic and business realities enabled by the Internet and other disruptive technologies.

Highly recommended.

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