Looking for a New Market in 2008?
If we leave aside the problems of advertising for a while the world of digital printing is a much brighter place.
Consider book publishing. The book publishing process has three steps and two handoffs:
1. Gathering the Content (then handed off to) 2. Editing the Content (then handed off to) 3. Publishing the Content.
To a great hand-wringing by the traditional publishing industry, the Internet has made it technically easy to do number 1 and 2. That technology is spreading a wave of creative destruction through the publishing business that has not yet reached its crest. If your client is a publisher, their problem is your problem. Some digital printers have been doing a great job of working on small margins to solve publisher's problems.
This coming year could bring a solution to the hand off between step 2 and step 3. Anything that makes it easier to get to step 3 is good for digital printers.
My favorite, so far, is Blog2Print, a widget for Blogger. It was released in November by Shared Books. It is free. It took me five minutes to install at my blog. It creates a book formatted PDF file with one click of the mouse. I can order a printed book with a few more clicks. With Version 1.0, the book is a little too expensive and the layout options are a bit limited. But if the development of Google widgets is any guide that problem will be solved sooner rather than later.
Consider:
. . . as of August 2007, Technorati is tracking over 50 million blogs. The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
. . . not long ago making and editing a video was an expensive difficult process. But that changed and a new market was born.
. . . if 50 million people (doubling every 6 1/2 months) take the time and energy to write, edit and maintain a blog, how many of them do you think would like to have their content in a book format to share and keep and put on their mantle?
www.josefowiczassociates.com
My day job is project based team building.