Dang’s Weblog

My friend the reporter (who still has a job this week…) was visiting today, and we were talking about the newspaper industry, and how reporters everywhere are getting laid off.  In fact, my “home town” newspaper (the Ann Arbor News)  recently folded, fired their reporters, and became some kind of online monstrosity (named after my city with “dot com” on the end; I won’t give them Google Juice by listing the name) that does nothing interesting with news, and dumps printed ads (not news or content, mind you, just ads) on my lawn all the time.  They’re basically paper spammers… Anyway, we were talking, and it occurred to me that there is probably a fairly large set of out-of-work writers at the moment.  People with lots of skill, and love of writing.  What we need is a business model to take advantage of that to make everyone involved a bit of money.  What model should this be,  I wonder?Here’s my idea: iTunes for ebooks, but done right.

See, ebook readers are becoming good right about now, and Kindle has shown that they can even become popular.  And people are buying iPhone and Android apps for a buck or two right and left.  What if we could come up with a way to get these writers to be able to write good content, and get that content to consumers, all at low enough overhead that you could charge a buck?  What I want is two things:  A community and a ratings system.  It works like this.

There’s a community for writers, where they can collaborate on, edit, comment on, rate, and so on each other’s work.  The community provides appropriate licenses (in collaboration with Creative Commons, probably), and hosting, and forums, and mailing lists, and all the snazzy web 2.0 things that fan-fic sites have.   The community also provides, and here’s the important part, a store.

The store would support Kindle, Sony’s reader, Plastic Logic’s reader, at least one decent iPhone app, at least one decent Android app, at least one decent Pre app, and at least one decent blackberry app.  Probably a Windows Mobile app too, but that’s a pain.  Buyers would be able to rate things, tag things, and link things.  Each book would link to the authors community page, so that people could follow and interact with their favorite authors.  Authors, subjects, tags, and so on, should have feeds that you can follow: blog-like, twitter like, and so on.  Integration with other services (such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and so on) would be a plus.Prices should be low; $.50 – $1.

The idea is to encourage people to buy.  Overhead should be low: 5-10%, maybe.  Some works could (and probably would) be given away, as teasers or other incentives.  There should be no DRM; it wouldn’t help, and isn’t really necessary.The point of the store/community should be convenience: get things for your device easily and cheaply, support people providing your content, and get good content our the deal.

The point of this whole thing is to make an opportunity out of the failure of the newspaper industry: we have a surplus of talented, professional, skilled writers, who need money.  We also have the beginnings of devices that make reading ebooks a good experience.  Let’s put them together, and allow the fans to help pay for the works of the writers.

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