Lately I’ve been thinking about self-publishing. At a Ryze mixer I was talking with Steve Breuhaut who was at SealedMedia. It seems that even as big, well funded companies (Sealedmedia, InterTrust) shrink, or disappear – when I was at InterTrust I used to track MediaDNA but they are gone.
A fair while ago, Fatbrain set up a digital self publishing system (greymatter as I remember), but then imploded. But now, self publishing seems to be getting some traction. It seems that as venture funding contracts, there is less support for inviable business models. Qtik seems to be an almost grassroots effort at subscription content. What’s interesting though is that the web allows people to publish more simply as it is a collaborative medium, either by helping small authors traditional publishing (getpublished.com) or to publish to more web type environments (blogs). This is whole different topic, but I want to comment on it soon.
But the interesting thing is that the meduim seems to be changing the process by which people actually publish.