Eat, Pray, Upload: Meet the New Media Moguls
Amazon.com reported in July of this year that sales of e-books have, for the first time, outnumbered the sales of hardbound copies. This rise in consumption of e-books is attributed mainly to the growing popularity of e-readers like the Kindle.
Along with the increased use of digital gadgets, however, an even more exciting phenomenon is happening in the world of publishing today: everybody can do it by a click of a mouse. Any written work can be sold as an e-book on Kindle or as a just-in-time print copy along with other popular titles on Amazon and other outlets.
The consequences of this change in the publishing ecosystem are enormous. I am beginning to imagine the possibility of seeing the most productive educators and scholars earning as much money as any popular celebrity.
More than a year ago, I did a little experiment with publishing my own scholarly work on Amazon.com’s Kindle store. I uploaded two research papers on the site and I set the price at $1.25 per download. With no membership or ‘convenience’ fees, Amazon’s only rule is that they get to keep 65% of the sales while the author pockets the rest. At first, I thought the papers were so esoteric that no one would bother to buy them. But when I checked my account a few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that quite a few people bought a copy of my papers for the past year.
This got me thinking: what if an engineering professor decides to upload a research paper priced at 99 cents on Amazon.com and one million engineering students in China and India purchased it? That’s more than 300-thousand dollars in additional income to the professor, which is enough to cause some nervousness on the part of mainstream publishers. I must admit though that it will be a rare occurrence when a research paper reaches a Justin Bieber-like download status. And so the old media publishing houses can still rest assured.
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