Not so long ago, when you want to publish a book (e.g. a blog-bundle) an author has to sell their work to a publisher in return for an advance and future royalties. The book then goes through a copyeditor, compositor, printer, wholesalers, distributors and retailers before it arrives at the end-consumer. When going through all these different stages, each stage adds there profit margin to the book. For an (I)BA student, this elaboration of this self-regulated market exchange economy is probably not needed. In fact, every student learned it one of the first courses when the professor preached about Adam Smith and his book Wealth of Nations.
But what happens when a growing number of authors are writing books and making them available at a very small price, or even for free, bypassing all the stages as described before? Th cost of marketing and distributing each copy is dropping to (near) zero, since an e-book can be produced and distributed at zero marginal cost.
In his book “The Zero Marginal Cost society”, Jeremy Rifkin discusses how the near zero marginal cost phenomena is changing modern society and is retiring basic economy theories of Smith, Keynes and Lange. The “nature laws” of these dinosaurs in social behaviour studies are beginning to loose their power. Rifkin is explaining that a Third Industrial Revolution is happening where the Internet of Things is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them practically free and shareable resulting in drying corporate profits, property rights and an economic shift from scarcity to abundance.
Are you still thinking that future (I)BA student need to learn this ancient, fairy-tale theories about ‘invisble hands’, or should we leave it to the historians?
Rifkin, J. (2014). The zero marginal cost society: The internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
