Chapter 1
Everything you know about publishing is wrong

It’s an information overloaded world
Welcome to information overload. Get used to it, because it’s going to get a lot worse. In an Industrial Economy we face issues of scarcity. Oil is scarce, prices go up. In a digital economy, we face issues of glut. Things digital have a close-to-zero cost to reproduce, therefore they get endlessly reproduced.

Consider the following:

• Every issue of the New York Times contains more information than a 17th century individual would have read in a lifetime
• There is enough scientific information written every year to keep a person busy reading day and night for 460 years
• In the last 30 years we have produced more information than in the previous 5,000
• The amount of recorded scientific knowledge is doubling approximately every fifteen to twenty years
• Over 1,000 books are published around the world every day
• Every day there are 7 million new documents published on the Web, where there are already over 550 billion
• The world produces between one and two exabytes of unique content per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth

The Web is the Trojan Horse of information overload. It promised information nirvana and delivered overload hell. Someone once said that searching for information on the Web was like drinking water from a fire hose. Not surprisingly, a 2000 survey by Roper Starch Worldwide found that 71% of people using the Internet get frustrated when searching.

Traditional publishing sucks
Walk into a newsagent and be stunned by the amount of magazines and newspapers on offer. There used to be an ad for a ‘serious’ newspaper that said, miss reading this paper and you miss an important part of the day. The joke that went around was that if you fully read this particular paper you would miss the entire day. Walk into a bookstore and be overawed by the massive selection of books available. Remember, even the biggest bookstore in the world can only display a tiny fraction of the books currently in print.

Traditional publishing sucks. Publishing is the art and science of moving content from the creator (author) to the consumer (reader). But it doesn’t work very well. It’s haphazard, slow, and wildly inefficient. Who are the publishers and editors who decide what gets published when? What do they know? Aren’t they overpaid middlemen who always miss the really good stuff? Why should we trust their judgment? Why should we wait for their opinion on what we should and shouldn’t read?

And why is it that so many books and magazines are published? Think of the 1,000-plus books published around the world every day. Can you believe that? If you read two books every week, you would only be reading three ten-thousandths of what’s published. And even if you had time to read more books, how would you even find out which were worth reading? In the US alone, nearly 5,000 different magazines are published. Of all copies printed, more than half are returned to the publishers unsold.

The whole publishing industry charges too much for its services as well. Libraries around the world, particularly those attached to universities, are in crisis. Prices for academic journals have spiraled out of control. The very content that is the fuel that universities run on is simply getting too expensive.

There has to be an alternative, right?


Next: Part 3: Organizations are awful at publishing content
Previous: Part 1: The secret of Web success

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• Augustana College, United States
• Drury University, United States
• Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
• Indiana University, United States
• Monash University, Australia
• University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• University of Regina, Canada
• University of Teesside, UK

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