Charging for content

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it.

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?

A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper.

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

(via Post-Medium Publishing by Paul Graham)

I like this, but it also makes me a little sad when I wonder if a lot of the problems we have today with copyright, content distribution, etc. are the fault of people who were just trying to figure out how to charge money for what they were making and went about it the wrong way. I don’t think anyone in their case would have decided to do it differently, so what can you do?