Disruption and change in publishing

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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