This doesn’t mean that people do no value content anymore; they just don’t always value having it delivered to their front door anymore because of the availability of digital distribution.

In the past, the value of distribution and the value of content have always been intertwined, which is why people who sell printed content are having such a hard time adjusting to their separation caused by the digital age.

People are still willing to pay for certain content, like eBooks, but they are not willing to pay for the distribution. They know that it costs less to produce a book on the Web than it does to physically print it, and that is why consumers are not willing to pay as much for things like eBooks, as they would for a printed book.

To find the right price to charge for content on the Web, publishers must figure out what the content is worth.

Print distribution will not be dead in the near future, because there are people who still value it, although as the digital generation grows up, print publishing will see a long and slow decline, forcing print publishers to reevaluate their operations.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 says that they can reevaluate through this question: “what if the number of people who value my print distribution dropped by 50%?” And follow up with these questions: How could I make the economics work? Could we produce the print product for less? Could we charge the remaining subscribers more because they clearly value it more?

Derek Powazek is attempting to answer these questions as he turns his online personal story telling site, Fray, into a quarterly print publication. He is making a move similar to that of Radiohead, by asking subscribers consumers to pay what they want based on how much they value the product.

Derek explains that his is an experiment in the valuation of print content because now it is possible for people to create content and sell it directly to consumers, allowing for a community that can support its own content creation.

Karp comes up with another strategy for making print distribution more valued, through an idea he got from John Wilpers of BostonNow, a free newspaper that incorporates traditional and citizen journalism. Wilpers said that citizen journalists most valued getting published in the print newspaper.

Therefore, Karp says, “What if a local newspaper used its web presence to give everyone in a locality the opportunity to be published in print, even just once? Just a short piece of reporting, perhaps partnering with a professional journalist. Imagine if even 1% of the people in a local market got something published in the print paper across a year or two. How might that change how people in that market value the print newspaper? Would they be willing to pay a bit more for a subscription? Would they be more inclined to consider the print paper for their classifieds?”

He goes onto say print publishing and the paid for model are not dead, they just need to be reevaluated for the digital age.

Source: Publishing 2.0 through Ifra Executive News Service