No One Promised Us Tomorrow

A very interesting article by Tim O'Reilly about the "piracy" of books, movies, and especially music. If you're interested in my views of how the publishing industries will change in the next few years because of the Internet and digital media, he just wrote the tutorial.

For the impatient, basically it boils down to this: the needs of the consumer are not being met by the current business practices of the music publishing industry. This is why so many people jumped onto the online musical bandwagon, including myself to a certain degree. However, the bloated and greedy music and Hollywood companies are unrealistic and unwilling to accept this change, and so they are not adapting to it. They will be overrun by smaller, nimbler competitors that will. In the end, it's all about making us, the consumers, happy. This is something those companies have long forgotten.

Many of you may not have heard of Tim O'Reilly while many of us (the computer geeks!) will probably be very familiar with him. Tim is the founder of O'Reilly and Associates, the best computer book company in the business. His company's books stand for quality and reliability, and I have many of them on my shelf at work and at home. He's one of my heroes, to be honest.