When I decided to write this post about disintermediation, I decided to look it up in the Oxford English Dictonary. It listed an economic definition which was not quite the way we are using it in our class. I then went to the Merriam Webster dictionary . The second definition "the elimination of an intermediary in a transaction between two parties" was broader in scope and seems a better fit for the way we are using it.
There are many varied ways that disintermediation shows up in our increasingly digital world. Many musicians sell their music (both digital and physical formats) directly to their fans on their websites. This eliminates the intermediary of a brick and motar store, an online store (which would earn a percentage from the sales) such as Amazon or iTunes, and sometimes even circumvents the need to find a record label such as Interscope or Sony.
Like musicians, many writers are circumventing traditional means of selling their products. A writer can sell digital or physical copies of his novels on a blog. Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame and self-professed geek has self-published and promoted his books using his blog, his Twitter account, his Google+ account, and his podcast. While he uses intermediaries such as Amazon.com and Lulu to handle the actual sales of his books, he has eliminated the intermediary of a publisher, and to some extent, the need of a book pulicist.
There are many varied ways that disintermediation shows up in our increasingly digital world. Many musicians sell their music (both digital and physical formats) directly to their fans on their websites. This eliminates the intermediary of a brick and motar store, an online store (which would earn a percentage from the sales) such as Amazon or iTunes, and sometimes even circumvents the need to find a record label such as Interscope or Sony.
Like musicians, many writers are circumventing traditional means of selling their products. A writer can sell digital or physical copies of his novels on a blog. Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame and self-professed geek has self-published and promoted his books using his blog, his Twitter account, his Google+ account, and his podcast. While he uses intermediaries such as Amazon.com and Lulu to handle the actual sales of his books, he has eliminated the intermediary of a publisher, and to some extent, the need of a book pulicist.
Self publishing is not a new idea, so called vanity press or vanity publishers have been around since at least the nineteenth century. The linked Wikipedia article lists some well-known writers who have paid to print their works as either a means to control the content, to increase their profits, or both.
There are, of course, other reasons to self publish. Some writers cannot find a publisher who is interested in their work because the genre is simply not selling at the moment (they are writing about leprechauns and faeries when vampires are all the rage), they are writing for a niche market (a book about cooking for red haired vegans), or perhaps their writing is simply not very good. These writers can choose to self publish, self publicize, and even self distribute or sell their works. If a writer wants to maximize his profits, he can offer his work in a digital format on his blog, using a Paypal account to collect the revenue generated, and publicize his work using social media.
This is all possible in our current digital culture. I am left with many questions. Will this new approach, which is gaining acceptance in literary circles, threaten the more traditional approach to becoming a published author? Will traditional publishers and book publicists become obsolete as writers take over these roles themselves? Will digital copies of books become the standard and physical books become as passé as 8 track cassettes? These answers will only be evident as time passes and the changes do, or do not, take place. I really do hope that physical books stick around for a long time. I love the feel of a good book in my hands.
This is all possible in our current digital culture. I am left with many questions. Will this new approach, which is gaining acceptance in literary circles, threaten the more traditional approach to becoming a published author? Will traditional publishers and book publicists become obsolete as writers take over these roles themselves? Will digital copies of books become the standard and physical books become as passé as 8 track cassettes? These answers will only be evident as time passes and the changes do, or do not, take place. I really do hope that physical books stick around for a long time. I love the feel of a good book in my hands.
