One of the recurring themes of the Book Net Tech Forum was that publishers need to learn through frequent experimentation, or as BNC CEO Michael Tamblyn put it: “place lots of little bets quickly.”
Mark Bertils has just posted this great interview with O’Reilly Media’s Andrew Savikas recorded at the BNC Tech Forum last week on exactly this topic (and Andrew — sorry about making fun of your PowerPoint slides on Twitter):
And, all this ties in quite nicely with Clay Shirky’s recent — must read — essay on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable :
“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows… it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it… We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…
“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments…