Atomic Unit

Why was the Internet so destructive to the music and newspaper industry but not to books? (While bookstores have indeed got hit, books haven’t).

Evan Hughes points out the difference between those industries in his article titled Books Don't Want to Be Free, a shot at the Internet mantra of “Information Wants to Be Free”:

“Part of the problem for journalism, music, and television is that they are vulnerable to disaggregation. Their products are made up of songs and articles and shows that have long been consumed in those individual units. Once the Internet made it possible to ignore the unwanted material, overall value slipped.”

But books are different:

“It would make little sense to break novels or biographies into pieces, and they’re not dependent on the advertising that has kept journalism and television artificially inexpensive and that deceives the consumer into thinking the content is inexpensive to make.”

To put it differently, the Internet showed us that the atomic unit of music isn’t the CD, it’s a song; and that the atomic unit of news isn’t the newspaper, it’s an article.

And it may only get worse for the news industry, say Jeff Jarvis. Thanks to voice services like Siri and Ok Google, even the page (article) may no longer be the atomic unit of news:

“Voice disintermediates the page…Now, when you want to know the score of the Jets game — if you dare — you don’t need to go to ESPN and find the page, you just say, “OK, Google. What’s the Jets score?” And the nice lady will tell you the bad news.”

Pretty soon, Jarvis says we might be wondering, “Page? Content? What’s that?”

Even if Siri and Ok Google aren’t perfect yet, Jarvis has no doubt that this is the future because, after all:

“Star Trek didn’t navigate the universe through pages.”