It's curious to watch the way in which the Goliaths of old media have lined up their pieces in preparation for the battle of free media. Is it just me, or is the iPad looking increasingly like the output from a series of brainstorming sessions entitled “how do we do an iTunes for print?”.
The was a salient short letter in The Guardian this weekend (where 'Comment is Free', but according to tittle tattle I heard recently, where 'Editorial should be Charged' in the view of some of the increasingly beleaguered staff). The letter asked a simple question… with all these e-books being spoken about of late, would the letter writer still be able to go into a secondhand bookshop and buy old ones for 50p?
Mulling on this as I browsed the bookshelves in the Malvern Amnesty International secondhand bookshop on Saturday, I realised that for all the talk of paywalls and tablets, I hadn't made the connection on the two meanings of free that are being challenged in all of this: free as in gratis, without charge, and free as in at liberty, without shackles.
Despite the huge advances in printing and image scanning in recent years, books and magazines are still extremely costly to duplicate at small scale. It's cheaper in time and money to go and buy the thing rather than ripping and erm, printing. Digital distribution poses the same threat (or worse) to the print media world as MP3 posed to the music world. Ebooks, Kindles, iPads and their brethren give absolute control to the copyright holder. Even beyond the first sale (no more secondhand bookshops).
The thing is, written content can be so much more useful when broken free from it's publishing container. In recent months I have taken to consuming most of my news through an RSS reader. Mostly this is because I now mostly travel on trains too busy to unfurl even a Berliner format newspaper, sometimes even open a book, but where I can hold my phone in one hand. Put that content behind paywalls and I… Well, I will look for similar free content elsewhere, thank you very much.
There's an article about some of this in Wired UK this month. For the first time, I really wondered about the editorial independence of an article in that magazine…
mmitII 