[anigbrowl]

Fair enough, but the current problem is that it's hard to make money creating content without spending a lot of time learning to be a publisher. Sure, you can blog, but what if your thing is writing novels or paintings in some obscure artistic style?

The disruption of the old publishing ecosystem has created many new opportunities, but also undermined many specialized niche markets. In other cases, content has become more accessible in one context but unaffordable in others. The loss of income from recorded music is one factor in the increasingly high cost of concert tickets, so it's a lot more expensive to go see your favorite band than it used to be, and the higher revenue stream from established acts makes it more difficult for new ones to get in front of a larger audience.

[eru]

> Sure, you can blog, but what if your thing is writing novels or paintings in some obscure artistic style?

So what? The world doesn't owe you a living. It was there first.

[anigbrowl]

Way to miss the point...a lack of distribution channels means less consumer choice too.

[eru]

But wasn't the perceived problem that one distribution channel (the internet) is too cheap and plentiful?

If at all, one could argue about a lack of incentives to produce.

[anigbrowl]

Not exactly, but I guess I didn't explain it very well.

The thing is internet distribution is very high volume and low margin. That's a better deal for the consumer if they want something popular or amateur (in the sense of something created for love rather than profit). But as it's become the dominant model (and as it was preceded by big-box discount stores, particularly in the book trade), publishers focused on a smaller number of big selling authors, and there was correspondingly less cross-subsidizing of niche or starting authors that didn't have as much mass appeal, at least in the short term.

It's harder for a new or specialized writer to get into print than it used to be, because publishers can no longer afford to front the cost of keeping their books in print while waiting for them to gain traction based on an editor's instinct about literary quality. Not that I think there's anything wrong with publishing on the internet, or that making money is the only valid metric of an author's quality, but while some writers develop more slowly than others they still need to pay the bills. I like science fiction, for example, and over the last 30 years the variety and quantity of writers and subjects on the shelves has declined as publishers prefer their established moneymakers, or stories that can be marketed as trilogies, and so forth. Thanks to the success of that Twilight series, for example, my local Borders seems to have devoted a good quarter of the sci-fi/fantasy section to books about young vampires in love.

I'm just saying that a lot of niche-specific marketing and editorial infrastructure has fallen apart as the industry has shifted course, and made it more difficult for some producers and consumers to find each other. That publishing infrastructure looked superfluous from a business perspective and so many large publishers cut those departments to remain competitive, but business is notoriously focused on the short term. MBA logic would argue against committing resources to publishing, say, the first novel of a contemporary Burroughs or Joyce.

I don't mean this is a disaster of course - real talent will usually get noticed, and as mainstream publishers become more conservative (in the sense of preferring material with mass market potential) there are disruptive opportunities for small publishers and the book business in particular has been through such cycles before. Amazon is effectively the bookstore with infinite shelves so publications of minor interest aren't crowded out by flavor-of-the-month writers the way they are in bookstores. I have no wish to turn the clock back, I just don't think the disruption of the old paradigm an automatic win for consumers in every respect.