More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible th...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
IMMEDIACY Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released—or even better, produced—by its creators is a generative asset.
PERSONALIZATION A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound acoustically perfect in your particular living room—as if it were being performed in your room—you may be willing to pay a lot.
Personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan,
Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset and will be reluctant to switch and start over. You can’t cut and paste this kind of depth.
“Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke.
support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits,
Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and, in the case of digital material, backed up.
EMBODIMENT At its core the digital copy is without a body.
The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive. Live concert tours, live TED talks, live radio shows, pop-up food tours all speak to the power and value of a paid ephemeral embodiment of something you could download for free.
Deep down, avid audiences and fans want to pay creators.
tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect with people they admire. But they will pay only under four conditions that are not often met: 1) It must be extremely easy to do; 2) The amount must be reasonable; 3) There’s clear benefit to them for paying; and 4) It’s clear the money will directly benefit the creators.
They discovered they made about $2.26 per download of their 2007 In Rainbows album,
DISCOVERABILITY The previous generatives resided within creative works. Discoverability, however, is an asset that applies to an aggregate of many works.
They use critics, reviewers, brands (of publishers, labels, and studios), and increasingly they rely on other fans and friends to recommend the good stuff.
Amazon’s greatest asset is not its Prime delivery service but the millions of reader reviews it has accumulated over decades. Readers will pay for Amazon’s all-you-can-read ebook service, Kindle Unlimited, even though they will be able to find ebooks for free elsewhere, because Amazon’s reviews will guide them to books they want to read. Ditto for Netflix. Movie fans will pay Netflix because their recommendation engine finds gems they would not otherwise discover.
Success in this new realm requires mastering the new liquidity.
Once something, like music, is digitized, it becomes a liquid that can be flexed and linked.
The superconductivity of digitalization had unshackled music from its narrow
confines on a vinyl disk and thin oxide tape.
unbundle a song from its four-minute package, filter it, bend it, archive it, rearran...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What counts are not the number of copies but the number of ways a copy can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, and enlivened by other media.
What counts is how well the work flows.
Postdigital, music is seeping into the rest of our lives, attempting to occupy our entire waking life.
A renaissance of thousands of documentaries per year demands a soundtrack for each one them.
The latest fashionable media is a podcast, a sort of audible documentary.
Our entire life is getting a musical soundtrack.
Custom music—that is, music that users generate—will become the norm, and indeed it will become the bulk of all music created each year. As music streams, it expands.
Today they teach kerning in grammar school,
Again, the audience pyramid flipped. We are all filmmakers now.
Fluidity of growth—The book’s material can be corrected or improved incrementally. The never-done-ness of an ebook (at least in the ideal) resembles an animated creature more than a dead stone, and this living fluidity animates us as creators and readers.
We currently see these two sets of traits—fixity versus fluidity—as opposites, driven by the dominant technology of the era.
Tractors will become fast computers outfitted with treads, land will become a substrate for a network of sensors, and medicines will become molecular information capsules flowing from patient to doctor and back.
These are the Four Stages of Flowing: 1. Fixed. Rare. The starting norm is precious products that take much expertise to create. Each is an artisan work, complete and able to stand alone, sold in high-quality reproductions to compensate the creators.
2. Free. Ubiquitous. The first disruption is promiscuous copying of the product, duplicated so relentlessly that it becomes a commodity. Cheap, perfect copies are spent freely, dispersed anywhere there is demand. This extravagan...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Flowing. S...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own ne...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Opening. Becoming. The third disruption is enabled by the previous two. Streams of powerful services and ready pieces, conveniently grabbed at little cost, enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products.
All genres will exhibit some fluidity. Yet fixity is not over. Most of the good fixed things in our civilization (roads, skyscrapers) are not going anywhere. We will continue to manufacture analog objects (chairs, plates, shoes), but they will acquire a digital essence as well, with embedded chips.
The efflorescent blossoming of liquid streams is an additive process, rather than subtractive. The old media forms endure; the new are layered on top of them.
The move from stocks to flows, from fixity to fluidity, is not about leaving behind stability. It is about harnessing a wide-open frontier where so many additional options based on mutability are possible. We are exploring all the ways to make things out of ceaseless change and shape-shifting processes. Here is what a day in the near
To continue its flow. To maximize the flowing.
The steady titanic tilt toward dematerialization and decentralization means that further flows are inevitable.
soft will trump the hard. Knowledge will rule atoms. Generative intangibles will rise above the free. Think of the world flowing.
We were People of the Word. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology.
Mass-produced books changed the way people thought. The technology of printing expanded the number of words available, from about 50,000 words in Old English to a million today. More word choices enlarged what could be communicated. More media choices broadened what was written about.
But today more than 5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives.
That’s nearly one new screen each year for every human on earth.
watchable screens on any flat surface.
clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen.
