"It’s important to understand the jobs entertainment is hired to do. Not because the creative process can be synthesized. It’s important because those creators need to learn how to allocate their own resources. A framework is needed to help dis-intermediate the resources allocators–the central planners, if you will.

In other words, learning how to create commercially valuable appreciable products should be a skill all creative people possess."

Harry Potter is the only publishing brand big enough (so far) to break all the rules about how e-bookstores work. Instead of being sold through the retailers and their devices, or even through the publishers, all sales are made through a site owned and branded by the author. Rowling and Pottermore convinced retailers to digitally support the books with device syncing, bookmarks, and all the trappings that usually are only provided for books sold through the retailers’ own sites.

“This is the first time Amazon and B&N have driven customers off their platform to another site, and then given the ability to push that content back to their device,” Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne told The Bookseller.

The only major holdout in the United States is Apple, which insists all titles sold through iBooks use the agency model in order to sell and support Rowling’s books. In the months to come, Redmayne still hopes to work out an agreement with Apple and other retailers, perhaps by the time the interactive Pottermore fan site finally launches. Right now, Pottermore is basically an e-bookstore with a zombie social wrapper.

The world of video game design is a mysterious one. What really happens behind the closed doors of a development studio is often unknown, unappreciated, or misunderstood. And the bigger the studio, the more tightly shut its door tends to be. With this project, we're taking that door off its hinges and inviting you into the world of Double Fine Productions, the first major studio to fully finance their next game with a Kickstarter campaign and develop it in the public eye.

the publishing industry "watched everything that happened to the music industry and they learned almost nothing"

Beyond disaggregation, personalization is ultimately the most powerful consumer value of digital media. My mother’s TV experience was to walk over to her TV set and turn a dial to select among three channels to satisfy her individuality. But in the next generation, no two people will receive the same recommendations from the millions of content choices available.

"We've already seen some signs of this on amazon.com (with prices on offer to different customers varying for the same product, presumably on the basis of the customer's willingness to pay more for goods in prior transactions)."

"I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood."

More "cutting out the middle man", a sign of things to come?

"For my part, I started Brain Pickings more than six years ago as what’s commonly referred to as a “passion project” (though I don’t like the fleeting noncommittal relationship this phrasing suggests) and didn’t have a business model — but I did have a crystal-clear editorial model, which remains the same today: get people interested in meaningful cross-disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were interested in, and in the process empower their networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity; break out of the filter bubble, if you will, though conceived long before we had the very vocabulary to articulate it. So when an aggregator like the Huffington Post, a business-model wolf wearing an editorial-authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-free) content and regurgitates it on its (ad-plastered) site, it lives up to the term “parasite” at the heart of Levine’s argument, derived from the Greek parasitos and used to describe “someone who ate at someone else’s table without providing anything in return.”"

By JAMES FLANIGAN
Published: August 16, 2007

Watch and wait (won't be like music industry) >>Amazon Rewrites the Rules of Book Publishing: #disintermediation

"Publishers are now in direct competition not just with the Kindle, but with Amazon itself."

By DAMON DARLIN
September 24, 2011

San Francisco-based Cater2.me, delivers food from carts and small
restaurants to businesses that aren’t big enough to afford their own
chefs. The Web was supposedly eliminating the need for the layers of
brokers, agents, wholesalers & even retailers that separate the
consumer from the producer.

That has happened in some instances, e.g. drastically reducing the role
of travel agents. But consumers still need help and the Web has provided
the tools & the environment for companies like cater2.me to
flourish. It has made it easier for middlemen to reach consumers and
made it remarkably easy and inexpensive for these middlemen to create
companies to do just that.

While there has been a lot of talk about how the technology industry
does not create jobs on the scale of traditional manufacturing — a
shrunken GM still employs more people than a thriving Google — the
Internet has made it a lot easier to create a broad array of new small
businesses.

I think far from destroying the music business, he put it on a path to redemption,” said Tom Freston, former head of Viacom and MTV. “With the iPod and iTunes, Steve not only created his own ecosystem, it turned out to be one that was contagious and created opportunities not only for his computer business, but for all the Apple products that came behind it.”

Mr. Jobs was initially pegged as a technologist who didn’t understand the media and entertainment businesses, but his track record as an operator is pretty enviable. In 1986, he bought the company which would become Pixar from George Lucas for $5 million and invested $5 million more.

'...energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain. Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel. Each new pocket of attention is harder to find...'