Tampa Bay Times Bill Maxwell laments "slow death of bookstores." I'm with him on that.

[napoleon_in_rags]

72. I think they're exploiting a DRM monopoly.

How do I read? I have a Kindle, and a Nook. The interfaces are set up to get books pretty much exclusively from Amazon/B&N respectively. I believe their frameworks encrypt the book in a key specific to your device, so when you buy a book you can't just go send copies of the files to friends. But the key point is, Kindle and Nook control the key devices people read on, and the encryption which protects the digital rights.

So the thing would be to have universal digital readers, each with its own built in encryption key. Then you want any site to be able to run the publishing software. You have to think of a way to do it to prevent piracy, without the advantage of a singular central server like Amazon has, but it could be done. Maybe its all about a universal accessible DRM system.

I think your journal post is basically right: But I would add a component: Aggregaters. Like what the Huffpo does for news, but for media. So you have content providers producing books/media, and aggregaters presenting people with interfaces to it, arranged by social groups and whatnot. (Huffpo mostly serves liberals)

This last thing is important, not just because of the sea of content that needs to be sorted out. I read a book by a record company guy, who proposed a psychosocial framework for pop music, based on the concept of cultural capital. He says youth listen to music other youth are listening to often out not out of personal preference, but because it gives them social capital within a group: relevance and the sense of identity, something to talk about and exchange information on. Its really a simple idea, but its important. For instance if we bumped into each other at a bar, we'd find we have mutual cultural capital on liberal news so we share enough of a world view to talk, and perhaps exchange other pieces of information from that sphere others hadn't heard. On the other hand with somebody who only reads conservative news would be in a different world, and we couldn't exchange currency with him.

So the importance of aggregaters, (This is why Huffpo sold for such a staggering amount) is that they define the shared cultural capital for groups of people. In the case of music, they define what music and media are being talked about at the office, what you need to have seen and heard for social relevancy within a certain group. That's very, very important.