My thanks to Rex for pointing me to this interesting article posted by Tim O’Reilly. There is much to digest here as we move forward towards a digital information distribution system. And clearly we won’t go far until we conceive and devise a profitable, working business model. Tim is right – the way is to charge less and make more.

I have become a big ebook reader in the last few months. I am reading on a two-year-old Palm TX. It is, at least for me, a fabulous and rewarding experience. It is always in my pocket, so I am reading books everywhere I go. Just yesterday I was on the train sitting next to a guy, who was reading, I don’t know, some huge tome of untold pages. My trip was two-hours during which it took him two hands and much exercise to hold up his mammoth volume, while I had literally half a dozen books in the palm of my hand. There I sat flipping pages with ease and grace with one hand on the book and, truth be told, a Fosters beer in the other. The author I’m currently reading has a vocabulary as large as Mount Everest, but my palm has a dictionary. When I get to a word I am unfamiliar with I just have to highlight it and bamo, presto! I have the definition and derivatives displayed, grab the author’s meaning and with a flip of the thumb, back to the book.

These ebooks are exactly the same transportation devices as paper books. It’s the words that make the mental teleportation possible, not the substrate. So, let’s get over the substrate trauma and begin to devise a business models that will empower our growth and prosperity.