The Ideas Report For Serious Investors

Over the past three decades, videogame distribution and target markets have changed dramatically.  In the 1980s, videogame arcades were extremely popular among teenagers and young adults but over time the popularity of home videogame consoles ruined the economics of arcades and broadened the target market significantly.  Newer videogame consoles have made the arcade games of the 1980s seem antiquated in comparison.  Now home console videogames may be facing the same future as arcades as online based games gain popularity.

A sustained shift to online gaming would have serious implications for manufacturers of consoles and computer based games.  According to The Wall Street Journal, videogame software sales fell 11 percent to $10.5 billion in 2009 and continued to decline in the first quarter of 2010.  At the same time, online social games such as Zynga’s very popular FarmVille game, have been rising rapidly.  FarmVille has attracted 78 million active monthly users who play the game on Facebook.  The game is surprisingly low tech in appearance and functionality, yet has captured the imagination of millions of users.

Zynga recently announced the private placement of preferred shares that imply a market valuation of $4 billion.  The company was founded in 2007 and claims to be profitable.  FarmVille is a free game but “virtual products” are sold online.  Users earn virtual currency from farming activities but can accelerate the development of their farms using “cash” purchased from Zynga.  This provides Zynga with a revenue stream.  According to The Wall Street Journal, industry-wide sales of such virtual goods is expected to rise to $2.1 billion in 2012 from an estimated $336 million in 2009.

Virtual Goods:  A Crazy Idea?

While the idea of purchasing “virtual goods” may seem absurd, it is not that different from purchasing other forms of cheap entertainment such as a movie ticket.  Furthermore, the fact that the price of entry is free and the game has social aspects can lead to competition among players that can induce players to part with real cash in exchange for virtual currency.

The Wall Street Journal article cited previously highlights the problem for traditional videogame makers. While a social videogame like FarmVille may cost a firm like Zynga $500,000 to $1 million to develop, firms like Activision may spend more than $20 million to develop traditional console games that sell for $60 through retailers like GameStop.

Just like arcades did not disappear overnight when early consoles made home based play possible, online social games like FarmVille will not displace console games entirely and a transition will not occur overnight.  However, the addictive and competitive nature of cheap social videogames combined with increasing affordability of high bandwidth internet connections make the economics compelling and add a level of risk to the traditional gaming industry.  In Asia, online videogames are already extremely popular with games such as Ragnarok Online developed  and run by South Korean developer Gravity.

FarmVille as a Lesson in Economics

The game actually represents an interesting lesson in economics.  Players must purchase seeds, trees, and other assets which generate FarmVille “income” after a waiting period of a few hours to a few days.  Such income can then be reinvested in additional income producing assets, buildings, and other improvements.

Most videogames are probably corrosive to the minds of younger people but FarmVille might actually help provide some education on economics.  For example, a simple economics problem involves optimization of crop selection based on seed cost, fuel cost, expected yield, and the time value of money.  The game can also be played in just a few minutes per day, although hours can be spent on it if you get overly enthusiastic or if you have friends who interact with you regularly.

Total “startup capital” invested for the author’s farm was $20 — not too bad at approximately the cost of two movie tickets.  The farm is now self sustaining.  The illustration below is a depiction of the author’s FarmVille farm (click to enlarge).

 The author of this post is a private investor and writer focused on applying value investing techniques to find securities trading well below intrinsic business value. He is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Rational Walk. 

Posted by manualofideas at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Read it here.

Once upon a time media personalities enjoyed ratings shares that are unheard of today: people like Ed Sullivan, Perry Como, and Johnny Carson in his prime could count on something like 1/3 of the country tuning in to see them every time they did a show. As media fragmented, many predicted that the age of the mega-celebrity would end, to be replaced by a long tail of niche celebrities.

It hasn't quite worked out that way. There are plenty of niche celebrities, but the mega-celebrity has not gone away. In his unassuming way, Ryan Seacrest is one of them. Through his various television, radio, and digital projects, he gets more regular face time with more Americans than any other person, with one possible exception.

And no one does a better job monetizing celebrity than Seacrest. Unlike many of his mass media peers, he recognizes that he is, at the end of the day, in the advertising business. His job is to generate advertising return on investment for marketers by aggregating audiences and associating his personal brand with the brands of others.

The author of this post is Nadav Manham, president of Elera Advisors LLC, an investment advisory company focused on value-oriented manager selection. Mr. Manham is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Investor's Consigliere.    

Posted by manualofideas at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Nadav Manham

This article about the sale of Net-a-Porter appeared in the back of Friday's WSJ Marketplace section.

What a new media success story. In 2000 Natalie Massenet was a fashion journalist with an idea to sell luxury clothing over the web. There were many doubters and haters. Fashion journalists were not supposed to do such things. They were supposed to be fashion journalists, which meant they were supposed to produce the words that went in between all those lucrative advertisements.

Fast forward to today. Those advertisements are not so lucrative any more. But well-executed online retailing in a specific niche is (see Amazon, Zappos, etc.). Once of Massenet's great insights was that she did not completely leave the journalism businesses, she just transferred it to a different platform. From the WSJ article:

Lately, however, the big luxury brands have made digital retailing a higher priority, having recognized that shoppers are increasingly willing to buy very expensive products on the Web. But selling $1,000 dresses online is different from hawking groceries or second-hand books: Customers want an editorial element, a guiding hand to replace the in-store salesperson and signal what's in style, which is where Net-a-Porter has carved out its niche.

The Web site, which says it has been profitable since 2004 and reported sales of about £120 million for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, has established itself as an interactive shopping fashion magazine, publishing 52 weeks of editorial content each year alongside its designer clothes sales operation.

"It's just as much a magazine as it is a store," said Ms. Massenet in an interview. "That really has served us well, because when you're online you lose the offline experience of walking into a store."

I doubt that Net-a-Porter is being studied in journalism schools, but it should be. I believe it represents one of the futures of the media business. The definition of "journalism" will become much more fluid, and the basic skillset of journalists, with a little adaptability, will continue to be in demand.

Update: Mrs. Massenet has been reading her Investor's Consigliere. Maybe. Here she is in today's Financial Times:

"I think there will be an increasing convergence between content and commerce . . ."

The author of this post is president of Elera Advisors LLC, an investment advisory company focused on value-oriented manager selection. Mr. Manham is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Investor's Consigliere.  

Posted by manualofideas at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Nadav Manham

This article about Hulu in yesterday's NY Times contained the following interesting excerpt:

Mr. Kilar [Jason Kilar, Hulu's CEO] points to his company’s new profitability as evidence of the success of Hulu’s business model — collecting various types of video in one place and making it free, supported by ads. Revenue topped $100 million in 2009 and could reach that number this year by early summer, he said.

“Aggregation works for consumers,” he said. “It makes it easier to find and discover and enjoy premium content, and it works for advertisers, because with that aggregation you get greater reach.” 

Once upon a time aggregators were called middlemen, and if they happened to be the wrong race or religion they often faced physical risk from those on either side of their middleman function. "We break our backs growing the crops but the grain wholesalers make all the money" and "Why, if that merchant doesn't make any of the goods he sells, does he make so much money?" were (and in some corners still are) common refrains.

The answer is in Kilar's succinct description of the double-barrelled economics of aggregators. A successful middleman aggregator offers consumers low searching costs to find a given product, be it food, dry goods, media, whatever. It correspondingly also offers suppliers the cheapest per-consumer exposure to their products, even if they have to share actual or "virtual" shelf space with other suppliers. As a middleman aggregator grows it benefits from economies of scale, which improve both barrels of the business model.

As the article notes, Viacom has taken its shows off Hulu. It's the equivalent of a fashion designer refusing to supply its clothing to a department store and opening a standalone boutique instead. It will be interesting to see whether Viacom sticks to this strategy or capitulates and returns its content to Hulu or another aggregator.

Some of the best moats in business, in media but elsewhere too, are middleman aggregators of one sort or another. Google is the ultimate in modern media, Wal-Mart is the ultimate in modern retail. Before Google it was monopoly newspapers, which aggregated news and ads for readers at low cost, and aggregated consumers for advertisers at lowest costs. Before Wal-Mart it was the urban department store.

Even buildings can be aggregator middlemen. The Chicago Merchandise Mart, the jewel in the crown of the Kennedy family's business interests for over half a century, aggregated wholesale goods buyers and suppliers from all over the country. The Brill Building in New York aggregated buyers and suppliers of music.

If you can spot a middleman aggregator moat in its early stages you can make a lot of money. The key is to look at Kilar's two metrics: low discovery costs for buyers and high reach for suppliers.

The author of this post is president of Elera Advisors LLC, an investment advisory company focused on value-oriented manager selection. Mr. Manham is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Investor's Consigliere. 

Posted by manualofideas at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Nadav Manham

I'm not sure this news got much notice, but one day we may look back on it as a turning point:

For the first time in 23 years, there will not be an advertisement for Pepsi during Super Bowl next weekend. Instead, PepsiCo, the soft drinks maker, which in previous years has wowed audiences with dazzling spots featuring Cindy Crawford and Britney Spears, is going online.

With a major digital campaign that features its own website and a heavy presence on Facebook, PepsiCo is betting that a more interactive approach will resonate with consumers in the always-on age of social networking sites.

I often fall into the trap of analyzing media companies from the point of view of a consumer of media.  I consume a lot of media, so that's how I naturally think.  But it is a trap: the truth is I'm not really a consumer of media.  The true "consumers" of media, the ones that pay most of the bills, are the advertisers.

At the end of the day, advertisers are investors.  They have scarce resources to spend on advertising and they want to maximize the return on what they spend.  If spending $20 million on carnival barkers promises the best return, that's what Pepsi will spend it on.  If spending $20 million on Super Bowl ads promises the best return, that's what Pepsi will spend it on.

In this case, Pepsi has decided, for the first time, that $20 million spent online promises the best returns, in terms of the number of people reached, their demographic attractiveness, and the likelihood of converting them into Pepsi drinkers.  It's potentially a very big deal: Super Bowl ads have historically enjoyed tremendous pricing power, and now at least one company thinks it can do better elsewhere.

So the thing to keep my eye on is advertisers, the true consumers of media.  The expected return on investment to an advertiser, relative to the alternatives available, is what will  ultimately determine the revenue of most media companies.  And then, if the cost structure required to deliver that advertising is low enough--an independent question--you have a good business.

The author of this post is president of Elera Advisors LLC, an investment advisory company focused on value-oriented manager selection. Mr. Manham is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Investor's Consigliere.

Posted by manualofideas at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the past few years, many obituaries of the newspaper business have been written.  The growing tsunami of instant information combined with increasing accessibility to this information has shaken the comfortable “moat-like” business model of newspapers to the core.  Few other case studies better define Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction”.

Steve Jobs has been a leading technology visionary for the past three decades and has already transformed the music industry.  Ten years ago, free music downloads threatened the very core of the music business.  Consumers began to view pirated music downloads as “normal” and traditional sales of CDs plummeted.  The iPod and the iTunes music store did not fully make up for the music industry’s lost revenues but a new economic model was born.  The latest issue of The Economist considers whether Steve Jobs may represent salvation for newspapers and magazines.  The iPad device has many attributes that could induce consumers to read newspapers electronically with a form factor that may be superior to traditional print.

The internet provides a great deal of free content from traditional newspapers as well as “new media” such as blogs and wikis.  While much of this free content is useful, the need for authoritative sources has not diminished.  This is particularly true for financial journalism which is why The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have already succeeded in charging for online content.  The business model is clearly broken for most other newspapers not offering much differentiated content.

From initial reviews of the iPad, it looks like readers may get a superior experience through the mix of written content, embedded videos, and an attractive “newspaper-like” form factor.  If Mr. Jobs can deliver a solution for newspapers similar to what he accomplished with music, the cover of this week’s Economist may end up being justified.

The video shown below provides some additional perspectives on the iPad device in a “Tea with the Economist” interview of Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at NYU and prominent authority on recent trends in “new media”.

The author of this post is a private investor and writer focused on applying value investing techniques to find securities trading well below intrinsic business value. He is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Rational Walk.

Posted by manualofideas at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Nadav Manham

The media business is very seductive and glamorous, and people and companies get involved in it for all kinds of non-economic reasons.  One of the lessons the Dream Team teaches is that if you're focused strictly on economics, you have to un-seduce yourself and deglamourize where you allocate your time and capital. 

Case in point: scientific publishing.  Not seductive, not glamorous, but in the first six months of 2009 Elsevier, which is the medical and scientific publishing division of Reed Elsevier, earned operating profits of 32%.  And many of the journals Elsevier publishes are very expensive (they may have gotten too expensive, but that's another story). If you can convince people to pay a lot of money for your product, and you get to keep 32% of what they pay you, then you have a good business.

This article by Michael Clarke of the Scholarly Kitchen explains why scientific publishing is such a good business, so good that it has not suffered the upheavals that other forms of publishing have.

The author of this post is president of Elera Advisors LLC, an investment advisory company focused on value-oriented manager selection. Mr. Manham is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Investor's Consigliere.

Posted by manualofideas at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Nadav Manham

I'm starting a new category, which I'm going to call "BMMT Capital Partners: the Economics of New Media Investing." 

1)  My New Year's resolution is to spend more time thinking about great investments than great investors.  I feel like I'm running out of things to say about what makes a great investor in terms of psychology and how he sets up his fund and the incentives he faces, etc.  I'm now at the point where I simply think "a great investor is someone who makes great investments."  Therefore I think my job is really to find and study great investments and then work backwards to the people who make them.

2)  Part of knowing what makes a great investment is knowing what the market tends to misprice.  It's not enough simply to understand what makes a great business, because often what makes a great business great is well-known to the market and therefore not mispriced.  To get from a great business to a great investment you have to figure out what about it is mispriced.

3)  I believe what the market tends to misprice is the long-term earnings power of a company two to five years out from the time of investment, especially for younger companies, companies in changing industries, and/or companies entering new business lines.  The market was pretty good at pricing Coca-Cola's Q3 2009 earnings back June 2009.  It was less good at pricing its 1991-2000 earnings back in 1988, when Buffett made his big bet (see future post) after correctly forecasting a fundamental change in the economics of Coke's business.

4)  Those investors (whether they are stockpickers, PE investors, venture capital investors, or operating within businesses) who develop an edge in this area can make a lot of money.  You could have made a little money correctly predicting Coke's Q3 09 earnings a few months in advance, but you would have made a lot of money correctly predicting Coke's 1991-2000 earnings power back in the fall of 1988.

5)  What most determines the long-term earnings power of a company two to five years out AND is undervalued by the market is the quality and durability of its moat.  When Buffett bought Coke in 1988 he did not have any unique insights about the general growth of the soft drink industry in the coming two decades--his estimate was probably as good as the market's.  Where he did have an insight was in forecasting correctly the percentage of the future growth of the soft drink industry that would be captured by Coke rather than its competitors, which was a function of its moat.  He also had an insight in correctly forecasting the percentage of that future growth that would be captured by Coke's shareholders rather than its employees, suppliers, construction contractors, distribution partners, etc.  That too was a function of its moat.

6)  Those investors who can correctly forecast the quality and durability of a company's moat two to five years ahead of time can make a lot of money. 

So I want to study moats and how to forecast them.  I've decided to focus my efforts on moats in the media industry, for several reasons:

a) It's a fun industry.

b) It's undergoing a lot of change.

c) Many investors have made a lot of money investing in media in the past few decades.  Many investors have lost a lot of money investing in media in the past few years.  So you'll get a lot of mileage out of studying media if your goal is to judge investors.

What does the name "BMMT Capital Partners" mean?  I imagine assembling a Dream Team of the greatest media investors of the modern era, those who've made money in the last decades and who have managed to keep it or even grow it in the upheavals of the past few years, and asking them to form an investment partnership to invest in new media companies in the next decade.  They can make investments in existing companies, private equity, venture capital, whatever.  The goal is to forecast the future of moats, which is where the real money is.  My Dream Team is:

Buffett, Warren

Malone, John

Murdoch, Rupert

Thomson Family.

So please stay tuned.  In this category I plan to look at the media industry and its moats, and underlying everything will be the question "What would the Dream Team do?"

First up: check out this article about the rise of Fox News.  Forget about the politics and focus on the fact that the channel went from nothing in 1996 to current run-rate operating profit of $700 million, which if you capitalize at 10x comprises about a fifth of the equity value of its parent company News Corporation, and which is more than the combined earnings of CNN, MSNBC, and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC, and CBS.  Rupert Murdoch's allocation of corporate capital to start Fox News has to rank among the best media investments of the past two decades, especially considering how poor the competition is.  Compare it to, say, the New York Times Company's decision to buy the Boston Globe, or to buy back its shares in the early years of the decade, and you'll see what I mean.  Now the New York Times can only write slightly snarky articles about media companies that make money, rather than being one itself. 

What was Dream Team Member Murdoch thinking when he made that bet back in the mid-1990s?  How to reverse engineer that great investment?  Here are my thoughts on what he did right:

1)  Murdoch is famous for ranting about how liberal the news media is.  I don't care about politics but in economics terms he happens to be right: In deciding to start a news operation with a conservative slant Murdoch was entering a field with almost no competition from traditional media conglomerates.  About half the company votes republican and in aggregate they spend the same money on cars, clothes, detergent, etc. as democrats do.  Advertisers don't care about politics either, they care about eyeballs and wallets.  So the decision to create a channel to connect advertisers to an underserved population of eyeballs and wallets was a great contrarian move.

2) Murdoch correctly forecast that cable channels would have the most durable and lucrative economics of all the various platforms for delivering news.  He did not start a newspaper with a conservative slant, or a magazine.  He did not start a broadcasting network with a conservative slant.  He did not start a website with a conservative slant.  He started a cable channel.  Another great move.  Interestingly, around this same time fellow Dream Team Member John Malone was reallocating his fortune away from cable systems and towards cable channels.

3)  Murdoch did the right thing by putting Roger Ailes in charge.  Ailes was the perfect person to execute Murdoch's strategy.

4)  Murdoch was patient.  Fox News did not make much money until 2003, but Murdoch had the ability and the willingness to continue to invest in it until it hit the tipping point of size and popularity that cable channels need to extract high carrying fees from cable systems.

The author of this post is president of Elera Advisors LLC, an investment advisory company focused on value-oriented manager selection. Mr. Manham is a Manual of Ideas contributor and editor of The Investor's Consigliere. 

Posted by manualofideas at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Ravi Nagarajan

The term “creative destruction” was used to promote countless business models of dubious value during the height of the dot com mania of the late 1990s.  In the ensuing collapse, many observers have grown weary of this term and attribute its use to exaggeration and hyperbole.  Nevertheless, the concept of creative destruction developed by Joseph Schumpeter nearly seven decades ago is impacting the newspaper publishing business like a category five hurricane.

In a nutshell, creative destruction refers to the process by which capitalism periodically replaces an established order through a disruptive change that redefines the competitive landscape.  Such a change is clearly taking place today for traditional news publishers.  This is true not only for print newspapers but for all traditional forms of news such as radio and television.  However, the most severe dislocations up to this point have impacted print media.

Print Newshounds:  The New Endangered Species

According to a very insightful article recently published by The Economist, the percentage of Americans who read traditional newspapers has dropped from 58% to 34% since 1994.  More people are now obtaining their news from cable and Internet sources, with the latter showing dramatic growth this decade.  However, some people are simply not getting news in any form and this is particularly true for younger people.  The Economist reports that the percentage of 18 to 24 year olds who did not get news in any form on a typical day rose from 25% to 34% over the past decade.

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett made a number of bearish statements about the newspaper industry and even went as far as to say that investors should steer clear of the sector and that from an economic perspective, Berkshire would have been better off selling The Buffalo News years ago.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are well known for being print newshounds reading five or more newspapers per day.  Personally, I read two newspapers on most days (HOW do they read five?) and prefer the concentrated focus of a physical newspaper to the distractions and eye strain associated with reading online.  I also read most magazines and investment publications in print form and I subscribe to the print edition of Value Line. This may be strange coming from someone who publishes a financial blog, but I simply do not like reading lots of content online.

I cannot imagine starting the day without reading a physical newspaper, but I believe that the days of print are drawing to a close.  What will replace the print newspaper?

Internet News Sources

On one hand, the Internet has dramatically reduced the barriers to entry for publishing and created a much more even playing field for writers.  However, this has also created major problems for traditional publishers who hope to capture readers online and to replicate the advertising revenue models that were the bread and butter of the print world for so many decades.  In many cases, there is simply too much information online and much of it is of dubious value.  Authoritative sources of information may get lost in the noise.  While financially oriented publishers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have been able to charge subscription fees directly to readers, most newspapers have not been able to develop such a revenue model.

While the Internet provides numerous advantages over print media in terms of being able to link to related sources and maintain up to the minute accuracy in coverage, it also suffers from serious limitations.  In my opinion, one of the most serious limitations is related to the act of reading online.  Reading short articles online is not a problem, but few readers would be eager to read long form investigative reporting or analysis on a computer screen.  The eye strain and form factor of a computer is not appropriate for such reading, and computers provide too many distractions that do not come with a cup of coffee and a copy of the print Wall Street Journal.

Can E Readers Substitute for Paper?

I do not own a Kindle at this time but I am considering the Kindle DX which will be released later this year.  I have also published this blog on the Kindle.  Sony has also developed a Digital Book Reader that competes with Kindle.  I came across an interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently and found his comments on the future of newspapers worth sharing here:

It seems like the new Kindle may deliver something similar to the experience of reading a traditional newspaper with the advantages of electronic delivery.  Electronic delivery could be very attractive for someone who travels frequently.  I will have to reserve judgment on whether the Kindle DX can deliver on this until I read some updated reviews on how newspapers are being delivered and formatted.  I may purchase a Kindle DX as a book reader but I’m probably too set in my ways to part with newsprint until it either becomes prohibitively expensive or discontinued entirely.  Fortunately for those resistant to change, that day will probably not come for some time and Schumpeter’s forces of creative destruction will continue to exert influence with improved e reader technology.

Who knows, perhaps a future e reader will even replicate the cherished experience of having newsprint residue on your hands after finishing the morning paper?

Posted by manualofideas at 01:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by manualofideas at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looking for a free copy of Ben Graham's classic The Intelligent Investor? Or free copies of other popular investment and business books, such as Porter's Competitive Strategy, Graham's Security Analysis, Soros's Alchemy of Finance, or Hagstrom's The Warren Buffett Way?

There's a website that apparently says, "No problem!" Take a look at the venture-backed startup Scribd.com and do some keyword searching. You'll be amazed at what you'll find. What's more, you won't have to read entire books on your screen -- the site lets you print and save documents in PDF and other formats.

To us, Scribd today feels like the early days of YouTube or Napster. While the site prohibits users from posting copyrighted material, there is apparently little in the way of proactive enforcement. Copyright owners can demand that certain content be removed from the site, but it appears most owners are way behind the curve in realizing that their content is even available without permission.

While it seems likely that Scribd will have to reign in some of the content on the site as owners wake up to the goings-on, this may be another example of traditional business models upended by disruptive technology.

Several years ago, Napster's free service was mostly shut down following legal action by the music industry, but music distribution and pricing models were changed forever. Similarly, while YouTube draws fewer infringement complaints from video content producers than in the past, owners now post much of their content on YouTube for free anyway -- to generate ad revenue, drive website traffic, or boost sales of higher-quality versions of the free videos.

For example, a YouTube search for "Michael Jackson Thriller" will take you to a free video posted by content owner Epic/Legacy Recordings and so far viewed more than 28 million times. A Charles Schwab ad was running at the bottom of the screen as we enjoyed another recent viewing of the video. Whether YouTube targeted the ad specifically to me based on our profile, or whether Thriller is popular with investors generally these days, we don't know.

The publishing industry simply does not seem to be getting a break. First, newspapers started losing classifieds revenue to sites like eBay. Then papers started losing readers to sites such as The Huffington Post and a sea of blogs, many written by individuals with the deadly combination of passion for a particular subject and little expectation of income from blogging. Now, sites such as Scribd may be on their way to pushing traditional book publishers into a new dilemma -- whether to try to put the genie of free electronic content back into the bottle, or to start preparing for new business models. We'll be watching.

Posted by manualofideas at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)