http://blacksmythe.com/blog/2007/01/20/building-black-networks-from-the-ground-up/ The Future is Here Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:26:42 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://blacksmythe.com/blog/2007/01/20/building-black-networks-from-the-ground-up/comment-page-1/#comment-517 Networks, publishing, and the Reduction of Risk at Dr. Lester K. Spence Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:38:02 +0000 http://blacksmythe.com/blog/2007/01/20/building-black-networks-from-the-ground-up/#comment-517 [...] Yesterday I wrote about a new initiative from Mat Johnson.  While thinking more about the idea of open source culture, I ran across this story.  Like I said yesterday, book publishers are in a bind…no pun intended.  Profit margins are shrinking as consumers are spending their money on other forms of pop culture, or increasingly not spending money at all.  I can get the entire Wheels of Time series on pdf from Bittorrent if I wanted.  And classics like The Art of War have long been available in various electronic formats.  One of the most efficient ways to make more profit from the book publisher’s standpoint, is to reduce risk.  How do you reduce risk?  By publishing known quantities.  This is one of the many reasons for the success of urban fiction–at least at the outset, many of the writers in the genre had already made their names doing the equivalent of selling mixtapes out of the back of the van. [...] [...] Yesterday I wrote about a new initiative from Mat Johnson.  While thinking more about the idea of open source culture, I ran across this story.  Like I said yesterday, book publishers are in a bind…no pun intended.  Profit margins are shrinking as consumers are spending their money on other forms of pop culture, or increasingly not spending money at all.  I can get the entire Wheels of Time series on pdf from Bittorrent if I wanted.  And classics like The Art of War have long been available in various electronic formats.  One of the most efficient ways to make more profit from the book publisher’s standpoint, is to reduce risk.  How do you reduce risk?  By publishing known quantities.  This is one of the many reasons for the success of urban fiction–at least at the outset, many of the writers in the genre had already made their names doing the equivalent of selling mixtapes out of the back of the van. [...]

]]>