The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and Attachment Parenting Blog. Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

Leveraging the corpus of print publishers

A major computer and technical book publisher, Sybex nonetheless still holds on tightly to the power of the printed word, the importance of paper and the apparent belief that the book is more important than the content within the book. Joel and I talked at length over sandwiches about how publishers like Sybex have a gold mine of information, of content (I've talked in the past about the golden value of content for Web sites) that they're just not leveraging. A great example of how publishing companies don't realize where their true value lies is what happens to books that go out of print: they just ... vanish.

Yet imagine if all publishers just let obsolete, out of print books, books where they've already written off all possible future revenues, move into a public archive, a free online library? Further, from the perspective of an author, if my book's out of print, I'd definitely like to have the rights revert back to me, because even if it's seemingly obsolete material (say, a book on HTML 2.0), there's still value to the content and placing it online.

So that's a lot of what we talked about, ideas like having Sybex just open up its archive of obsolete, out of print material, and put them all up on the net as a huge library. But extend that idea further and imagine how you can actually leverage that material rather than just make it available. Now I envision a virtual Library of Alexandria (well, I know, the domain's taken already) where a publisher with a massive backlist could actually produce a 25,000+ page online technology history site, with advertising, with upsells to current books on their line, and even, perhaps, with paid subscription only discussions with the authors of the original material who could then share with a subpopulation how things have changed, what's improved, and what hasn't.

And so lunch was a pretty darn interesting conversation about a topic that I'm not only thinking about quite a bit, but also going to be speaking about at an entrepreneurs conference in Pittsburgh next month.

But there's no question that the value of a publishing company is in the words not the paper...

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