Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more popular, the opposite of analog regimes.
Clay makes a rather large mistake here, and that is he is forgetting the cost of publishing a web comic or any content on the web. You have to have a server, or space on a server. You have to have bandwidth to connect the server (and the more popular your content is, the more bandwidth you will need. Ever hear of the slashdot effect??)So, you do pay a penalty per user above a certain point.
free content is growing in both amount and quality -- is what's actually happening. Sure, it's growing in amount, but quantity does not necessarily mean quality. I needed to do some research on how feline vision worked. It took me 20 minutes to find the site that had the information I wanted, and it was on the second page of google's results.
In addition, he's obviously making references to people who are new to the idea of self publishing, not those who have been around, and have found that offering free content does not keep the server or IS bills paid for. Scott McCloud has been around for a while, and his work is very good. It's worth paying for. THere are several others (Bill Holbrook, Illiad, Pete Abrams, and many more that have found other ways to charge for their work, in order to keep a popular site running, but the base content is still free.
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I think he's gone off the right trail
Date: 2003-09-26 03:06 am (UTC)Clay makes a rather large mistake here, and that is he is forgetting the cost of publishing a web comic or any content on the web. You have to have a server, or space on a server. You have to have bandwidth to connect the server (and the more popular your content is, the more bandwidth you will need. Ever hear of the slashdot effect??)So, you do pay a penalty per user above a certain point.
free content is growing in both amount and quality -- is what's actually happening.
Sure, it's growing in amount, but quantity does not necessarily mean quality. I needed to do some research on how feline vision worked. It took me 20 minutes to find the site that had the information I wanted, and it was on the second page of google's results.
In addition, he's obviously making references to people who are new to the idea of self publishing, not those who have been around, and have found that offering free content does not keep the server or IS bills paid for. Scott McCloud has been around for a while, and his work is very good. It's worth paying for. THere are several others (Bill Holbrook, Illiad, Pete Abrams, and many more that have found other ways to charge for their work, in order to keep a popular site running, but the base content is still free.