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Spend five minutes searching for opinions on the state of print media, its future, and the business models that will propel publishing forward and you’ll quickly reach two conclusions: night is falling on the age of print, and no one really knows what comes next.  Spend a further hour, or another week on the subject and I think you’ll still end up at the place Clay Shirky sums up very well in a brilliant recent post:

• In comparing print/digital dislocation to the same effect created when Gutenberg invented the printing press, “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.”
• ““If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might.”

So these make for interesting times.  But it is encouraging to see that people seem to be taking the “but everything might” approach. No throwing in the towel for publishers or consumers of content: it’s a rapidly opening market and one from which both big and small players stand to benefit.  Along those lines, on the G&M’s site this morning is Leah McLaren’s piece about the breakout of digital books and the emergence of new models, like Indigo’s Shortcovers.  We don’t know if the Shortcovers model will ultimately succeed but their focus on the dissemination of information — as espoused by CIO Mike Serbinis — over specific delivery technologies seems a wise move for both publishers and book sellers .  As Serbinis says, there is an “evolution in the way we understand and encounter the product we call a “book.”"

Drawing this back to the business of creating and selling content, the complexity of sales can be distilled down to offering more dollars of perceived value than the price.  If the buyer agrees that there is more dollar value in the good or service than the price being asked, there’s a good chance the buyer will take action and purchase (or subscribe, license, rent, etc.)  Sellers of content are therefore attempting to answer two fundamental questions:

• What value can we add to increase buyers’ willingness to actually buy?
• How can we manage our costs while finding sufficient ways to add that value?

Addressing these in detail is beyond the scope of this post (suffice to say we’re very confident in our own particular direction.)  But we can say value is something perceived by the buyer, and perceptions of value vary by market, as do the underlying costs needed to deliver that value.  Therein lie the risks, obviously: get the value proposition wrong for a given target market and watch costs exceed sales by a wide margin.  But get it right and green fields await.  (Or blue oceans, take your pick of attractive metaphors.)

I suppose there is a developing content market about which I am not bullish.  This is the business of printed textbook rentals, covered well in a Thursday article on WSJ.  Is there really enough value in a low cost, used, printed textbook which must be returned by a time-strapped student before a given date?  Miss the date and pay more, mark up the text (e.g., highlighting) during study and face the possibility of paying the replacement cost.  And these issues are superseded by the fact that the entire used textbook market is dependent upon publishers’ traditional new editions cycle, which isn’t something I’d bet on persisting in the medium term.

No, it’s the digital models that will ultimately prevail.  And it’s also safe to say that those who make fundamental the inherent interactive nature of web and mobile in their digital offerings will prevail over those who simply transpose traditional models — and their underlying price and cost factors — online.

So while Shirky says “nothing will work, but everything might” we actually have more clarity and direction than you might think: the industry already possesses a large, collective set of “knowns” about what works and what doesn’t. Big publishers and sellers — leveraged on traditional business models but understanding the need for managed change — address this by taking a portfolio approach to maximize the likelihood of being on the right model when the music stops.  Startups, meanwhile, emerge and evolve using creativity, agility and non-stop work to experiment, discover, and satisfy the emerging frontiers of consumers’ content requirements.