

Post-Medium Publishing - ivankirigin
http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html

======
smakz
I think pg has missed the ball on this one as well.

Publishing as an institution is not going anywhere. Publishers serve many
functions. For one they act like a content filter, whereby they screen artists
and select only the ones they deem talented enough to throw their weight
behind. People generally do not have the time to visit every lounge act or
download every yahoo's demo tape online. In this sense publishers are like a
brand, and while people's consensus of "the music industry" might not readily
distinguish between different labels currently, I bet that's where the music
publishing business is headed.

Another institution of publishing is the advertising/exposure angle.
Publishers will pay for the tv spots, radio commercials, etc. to get exposure
to the artist. They will distribute material to the radio stations, which in
turn have a vested interest in playing high quality content and also don't
have the time to download every yahoo's song off the internet. In this sense
radios are much more aware of the particular branding aspects of music labels.

Finally, another institution of publishing is mentoring and resources. If you
sign to a major label, you get access to choirs, instrumentals, singing
coaches, song writers, and various other industry veterans. You have high
quality sound studios to record, etc.

The main reason the music industry is feeling a tight squeeze is not so much
that people don't want to pay for content, it's that people are paying for
content differently. The music publishing business' backbone is record sales.
The industry was structured around having one or two hit songs on a record
being enough to sell a quarter of a million units. With itunes, you can
download just the hit songs for a fraction of the cost. All of a sudden your
profit margins just went through the floor for a sizable chunk of your
customer base.

That doesn't mean the institution of music publishing is going away, it just
means they will have to get operationally more efficient if they want to
maintain their profit margins.

The music publishing industry would truly feel threatened if online crowd
sourcing was a viable alternative to discovering new music talent, but even
then I believe their role would still be valuable. Also crowd sourcing on the
internet has largely been unsuccessful for discovering new artists, last.fm is
basically the billboard top 200 remixed.

Also the bit about publishers selling content and equating that with
information is way off. True, people will usually only buy information which
makes them money, but music is very different. People will buy it because it
makes them happy. Same with buying movies, books, etc. It's a completely
different metaphor, and in fact the marketing adige is people will only buy
things which make them healthier, happier, or richer.

Also, the bit about publishers selling formats, this is also slightly off
base. If anything publishers take advantage of formats due to perceived
convenience. CDs cost more then cassette tapes because for one thing the
format was developed by the music industry so they had complete control over
pricing. For another thing the format had a built in convenience factor which
customers simply were willing to pay for. With iTunes controlling the internet
distribution channel, publishers are not in control to set the prices like
they used to.

Also about books, I agree Kindle will of course be superseded, but is the
Kindle itself important or again is it the _content_? Notice Amazon also
releases a Kindle Reader for the iPhone with access to the same content. Do
you really think there will be a point where people can no longer be bothered
to pay for books? The book industry has largely been unscathed by the digital
era and I don't see a reason why that would change any time soon.

Newspapers is a whole other ball game. The industry is changing due in large
part to the speed that information spreads. People don't subscribe to papers
because all the news they need is online, available instantly. The main
audience for newspapers has traditionally been the informed customer, and
these people generally are having internet and know where to find information
online. That's why your friend doesn't want your New York Times, and why less
and less people are subscribing. The newspaper concept though is similar to
the content filter of music publishing, in that newspapers are brands which
have vested interest in maintaining their integrity. They also have access to
a wide network of trusted reporters from all over the world. Again this will
be a case of the evolution of a business model, but newspapers as a whole have
a much harder struggle due to the evolution of information on the web.
Newspapers should be discussed in an entirely different light from music IMO.

~~~
ilyak
last.fm has the very long and thick tail.

------
lsc
My book went to press yesterday. The publisher did a whole lot more than just
printing it, though. In fact, that might have been their easiest to replace
function.

I think publishers will be relevant at least as long as published data is
respected more than something I slap up on my website. Seriously, the
wikipedia page on me can now be written without getting deleted for non-
notability!

I never expected to make any money off this book (my co-author said
"Literally, thousands of dollars!" when asked how much he expected to make.)
so really, I chose to go through a publisher because editors and layout people
have real value, and because a 'real publisher' adds a lot of credibility,
which is my primary goal anyhow.

That is an interesting problem: without the publishers, who will function as
the givers of credibility, the gatekeepers? Who will wikipedia cite?

edit: This is an example of a business model where the content is created for
free and subsidized by it's side effects. I'm after a reputation, which I will
then monetize through my regular business activities. I'm happy to essentially
give away the time I spent writing this (hopefully useful) book.

In this case, my interests are mostly aligned with my readers; if the book
isn't generally considered to be useful, or at least correct, then I don't get
the reputation I wanted.

On the other hand, I could have done the same work, and hired editors out of
my own money, then put the result on line. I would perhaps have reached more
readers, but I would not have the added credibility of going through a
gatekeeper of quality. And would I have been able to hire editors of the same
quality? the clincher for me is the credibility, though. Until we have a
better gatekeeper, I imagine this will keep authors using the biggest-name
conventional publishers they can.

~~~
timwiseman
First, congratulations on your book.

Second, _That is an interesting problem: without the publishers, who will
function as the givers of credibility, the gatekeepers? Who will wikipedia
cite?_

This is an excellent question. But already some publishers are more respected
than others. O'Reilly is generally well known in the publishing world and
everything I have read from any of their author's has been of reasonably high
quality. While others are hacks that will publish anything almost anything at
all with almost no editing (and if the author is willing to pay, many will
publish absolutely anything at all with absolutely no editing.)

Maybe some evolution of publishers will continue primarily as fact-checkers
and editors of the information, and then make money through a combination of
advertising or convenience aggregating.

~~~
lsc
Thanks. I'm ridiculously excited.

Yes, that's very true, and probably the single largest reason why I went with
no-starch press rather than just distributing a pdf or the mediawiki. (well,
that and it was no-starch who approached me, not the other way around.) Heck
having copies printed probably wouldn't be that expensive, if I printed up a
few hundred at a time. (I have access to cheap labor, a machine shop, and
ebay. Tell me I couldn't bind a book myself.) They are a tier down from
O'Reilly, but worlds above self-publishing, in terms of credibility.

I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors (which
is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I mean,
there's nothing inherently expensive about doing it, you just need a person
with good sense, good ethics, and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter
at hand.

~~~
timwiseman
_I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors
(which is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I
mean, there's nothing inherently expensive about doing it, you just need a
person with good sense, good ethics, and a reasonable knowledge of the subject
matter at hand._

I somewhat doubt it. There are two problems: 1\. Even with authors, you can
only get certain types to do that. Many technology books are written by
professionals with a day job and they often are more worried about some
combination of contributing to the community, improving their resume, getting
personal recognition, etc than they are about money. This is not true about
professional authors.

2\. To be effective, gatekeepers need to already have credibility and
authority, so that is probably not the best of motivators for them. Also,
someone needs to do the grunt work of fact checking and grammatical editing.
Many people consider writing to be fun, but few consider fact checking fun and
fewer still consider grammatical editing fun.

~~~
lsc
Hm. See, well, at least in the technical publishing arena, this is the case
'cause we already get paid a lot more than all but the most famous authors.
Your average writer of non-technical books is probably going to make very
little money, and the bar to get a non-technical book published, I think, is
higher than a technical book, in terms of writing skill. (a technical book, if
technically correct, can

editors and fact-checkers, from what I understand, make less than half what a
competent computer janitor makes.

Both these facts would point at people willing to do editing, fact checking
and writing for less than what they could get doing other things. (assuming
that the attributes needed to be a good editor or author are not a lot more
common than the attributes required to be a SysAdmin.)

Now, there is a lot of difference between doing something you like for not
very much money, and doing it for free, so you might be correct that people
won't do it unless there is at least some money, but I see evidence that
people will do it for less money than they could get doing other things.

as for the 'chicken and egg' part of the credibility issue, you are certainly
correct if the same gateway/content producer relationship as we have now
continues, but there are other models, like the model hacker news and other
aggrigators use. If creators 'publish' content themselves to the 'net, then
the 'gateways' just link to the content they find credible.

Now, the question is "how does the aggrigator decide what links are worthy?"
there are many ways to do this, but I suspect the best may end up being
subject matter experts running small aggrigators that cover their own
interests.

------
netsp
There are two major effects going on that are hurting publishers.

1\. Consumers don't need companies to move content around for them so much
anymore. When companies were in charge of this job you could control them with
things like copyright laws. Now you can't.

2\. Advertising is being turned upside down. A lot of advertising is/was
probably really over inflated anyway, companies paying a lot for ads that
don't do much for them. The move online exposed publishers to more competition
& easier scrutiny. The online move may have made ads less valuable too. It's
complicated and opaque. Advertising always has been that way. When a business
model is built on advertising, you have two points of failure: People stop
reading, advertisers stop advertising. Either one kills the whole thing.

Since these two things happening at the same time but aren't really related, a
lot of people are going to understand things wrong. Lately a lot of
journalists that are normally smart when covering politics or wars are
covering 'The Fate of Publishing.' They are misreading a lot of things. Their
interest was sparked when cheques started bouncing and their articles are an
insight into the kind of mistakes smart people with a vested interest are
going to make.

~~~
bootload
_"... When a business model is built on advertising, you have two points of
failure: People stop reading, advertisers stop advertising. Either one kills
the whole thing. ..."_

Excellent point.

------
michael_nielsen
"Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts."

David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) has some very interesting remarks on the
difficulty of doing this here:
[http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/08/080809-edinburgh-so-
ho...](http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/08/080809-edinburgh-so-how-does-it-
work-on-the-bus.html)

Quote: "In the past, live shows were viewed as loss leaders to sell albums"

The article (like everything on Bryne's blog) is interesting throughout, and
well worth reading.

~~~
netsp
I think people misunderstand this recommendation a lot of the time. It doesn't
mean that concerts are actually more lucrative then records ever were. That
would imply that the record industry of the past 50 years was stupid because
concerts and t shirts were always available to them as a way to make money.
Concerts are a less good way of making money then records were but records are
a worse way of making money relative to the past. This is a trend. Records are
getting worse all the time. At some point, it makes sense to switch to the
second best thing, concerts.

One thing hasn't changed, this is a popularity business. That means that
giving away or subsidising some stuff to sell others is likely to stay part of
the game. One major difference between selling concert tickets and selling
albums is the margin. A concert can happily use up the whole ticket take or
more. Concerts that spend more can be better, so it's not like selling a zero
marginal cost product.

Marginal cost considerations are something that needs to be considered by this
new concert star crowd. That David Byrne post is elbow deep in that.

------
bdr
I'm guessing pg isn't _that_ into movies. For me, there's no comparison to the
theater experience.

Also, on "content" as undistinguished:
<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1743>

~~~
abstractbill
I'm into movies, and my home setup is way better than a theater.

~~~
greyman
What about screen size?

~~~
abstractbill
My screen is something like an 8-foot diagonal (I use a projector, and a
screen that pulls down from the ceiling). Our couch is maybe 6-feet away from
the screen. So yeah, it is big enough ;-)

------
mseebach
Excellent essay -- one comment though:

> Is software a counterexample?

No:

> There have always been people in the business of selling information,
> _(...)_ People will pay for information they think they can make money from.

Software, it seems to me, is information that people think they can make money
from. That's why Microsoft needs Windows on all new PCs (so it's a toll-booth
to consumers), and student/home use versions of Office are very cheap -- only
businesses will actually pay for it.

It's even more clearly seen in the graphical world -- I have yet to meet a
non-professional with a legal copy of PhotoShop or any of the other Adobe
flagship products.

~~~
ajscherer
You also get more than just the content (and the medium) when you purchase
software:

a) Peace of mind that the software won't harm your computer. There are
situations where it does harm your computer, but at least you have someone to
blame or try to seek redress from. You can never quite trust an executable
file you obtain from someone other than the publisher to the extent that you
can a legal copy.

b) Somebody to help you if you have problems with the software.

c) If you are really lucky, people working to make your software better even
after you've already paid for it.

These selling points may not be important to a lot of people here, but they do
add value for some users, and "media" types of information don't offer them.

~~~
netsp
Basically, legal software can be better then pirated.

------
dagw
_"Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news?"_

This line from the article shows a fundamental misunderstanding about the way
many people see the newspaper business. Despite the name most good newspapers
aren't so much about news (as in what happened) as they are about analysis
(why it happened and what it might mean). I don't buy the Financial Times
because I want a list of things that have happened the past 24 hours, but
because I want to read what smart, knowledgeable people think about a subset
of those things. That sort of analysis does not go stale over night. Going
further, taking a cursory look across the whole business it seems that the
relative health of various publications seems reasonably well correlated to
the amount of effort the place in quality analysis as opposed to just writing
down things that have happened.

In fact the reason I still buy (paper) newspapers and magazines is that they
still seem to be the only people doing good solid analysis.

~~~
philwelch
Anyone can produce "analysis". Watch the cable news sometime--it's 100%
"analysis" because only three facts have come out in the last hour, and they
have a dozen people on call to give "analysis" of this "breaking news".
Analysis is cheap. With more and more people offering this analysis for free,
you'd think it'd be easier in the long run to just filter all of this freely
available analysis and you'd end up with something just as good as if you paid
the Financial Times.

Facts, however, are in short supply. Discovering a surprising fact or two is
good journalism. "The CIA has secret prisons in Eastern Europe to imprison
suspected terrorists". "The Watergate Hotel break-in was orchestrated by
members of Nixon's re-election campaign". But facts like that are hard to get.
The only people who'd pay for those facts are the political opponents of
whoever they embarrass, which means if both parties are implicated you can
cover things up. Also, political opponents will pay just as much for a
convincing lie as they will for the truth.

"More data beats a better algorithm" is just as true for journalism. Yes, I'm
sure the Financial Times does a good job analyzing the same shallow set of
data we can all get for free. I'm sure they do a better job than most other
places do. But analysis is what most of the media does. They scrape press
releases and the like as hard as they can, never looking for more facts.

At some point, journalism is a public good. But, uniquely among public goods,
it cannot be provided by the government because journalism often operates in
opposition to the government.

~~~
pgebhard
I'm sure dagw would not agree with your description of cable news as analysis.
I think he/she is trying to say that newspaper analysis by respectable papers
is worth a lot, and it won't lose it's value overnight. People still value NYT
because it is respectable and offers great analysis.

------
JCThoughtscream
Content still matters for the very simple reason that the lack of decent
content means you don't have an audience to sell to advertisers - imagine if
the Economist's only rival was a website written by middle school geeks.

It is, effectively, the central overhead to the media industry - as high a
quality as cheap as possible to get as many eyes and ears (and fingers, for
braille readers) as you can. Online media's winning out because the "cheap as
possible" part of that equation is Very Cheap Indeed, without having to
sacrifice the slightest bit of quality.

But, yes. It's the quantity of audience that determines profitability, not
quality of content. So now we're stuck with the dilemma as to how to make
advertising presentation a high-quality content unto itself - a nontrivial
balancing act between advertiser and reader expectations.

------
krishna2
"I never watch movies in theaters anymore. The tipping point for me was the
ads they show first"

But some of the DVDs have this annoyance as well.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Not if you use VLC...

------
bootload
_"... What would a content site look like if you started from how to make
money? ..."_ ~ <http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html>

If you start from this statement and read the rest of the article I think it's
a good start to better understand the parameters of the article. Post-medium
publishing is an area I'm working on and I must say reading this article gives
me another way to think about the problem.

 _"... If free copies of your content are available online, then you're
competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's just as bad as
being a publisher ..."_

Instead of looking how to make money I was looking at _"solving a what users
want"_ and still exploring the _"and willing to pay for"_ bit. In this case
users want _"instructions"_ to build stuff but the cost of magazine producers
is pretty high and the alternatives are primitive. Not making the
"instructions" free or at least freeium-ish means a _"chicken and the egg
problem"_ ~ <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html>

So I'll have to explore these problems from a couple of different
perspectives. Having read the article though I can think of how to get users
to pay by letting others create, use or modify as well as access to tools and
low-rez _"instructions"_.

One example I can think of post-medium publishing is
<http://stackoverflow.com> but I didn't see the same emphasis on how to make
money. Just making SO the place to look for technical programming answers.

I do like the way you identify readers who pg has passed to read the article.
It's like looking at the names on papers circulated at post-grad level to see
who's read the latest ideas.

------
mrshoe
Is this pg giving more hints at a possible implementation of RFS 1?
(<http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html>)

That would imply that no one has approached him with a satisfactory solution.
This article seems to indicate that the solution is to simply give content
away and figure out a better way to make money off advertising. That's a
little more boring than I was hoping for, but sometimes boring ideas work.

I'm going to keep my mind churning on something more creative... just in case.

~~~
emfle
Here is what I think he might be getting at:

Advertisement is not a very effective form of marcomm because people tune it
out, and if they don't, they don't believe what the ads say anyway.

PR is much more effective. Part of the reason is that if you can make your
piece look like a regular article, that in itself makes it more believable.
But the other part is that sometimes PR pieces are genuinely useful for the
recipient.

If I were in the market for a new _x_ , I think I'd want to read the reviews
of _x_ s, even if some of them are paid for by manufacturers of _x_ s.

Fake Steve often makes fun of the Apple "flaks" and the "hacks" that print the
"flaks"s output, but I think many people in the market for Apple products
actually like reading the gushing stories about Apple.

If PR is the new advertising, then an obvious way to fix the newspapers is to
make the relationship with PR companies explicit and charge for it. It's not
deceptive if the readers want it and you don't try to hide what you are doing.
Charging to make product reviews is one possibility. Offering to write stories
about any topic for payment is another, which would make you a direct
competitor to PR companies.

There is a balance between making high-quality, independent content and making
for-pay content that must be carefully managed, but this is not really all
that different from today's print media that range from all-ads newspapers
with minimal and very crappy journalistic content, to media with high quality
journalistic content and almost no ads.

A company doing this should probably never offer a _positive_ review for cash,
and never offer a _positive_ spin on a topic. Only ever offer _a_ review or
_a_ story, with payment due regardless of whether the customer likes it or
not. In the end, this would be in the interest of the customers anyway, even
though they might not believe that at first.

~~~
pg
Very interesting idea, but not at all what I had in mind.

------
ankeshk
People pay more for "bootcamps" than they do for "seminars." So even pure
information product sellers like stock tip newsletter operators have always
known that packaging and format plays as big if not a bigger role than the
content itself.

Anyhow - lets look at the key elements that go into successful information /
content selling.

1.

Advertising.

Advertising has always been the chief device. Information product sellers like
Tony Robbins made their fortunes on top of aggressive advertising!

Google et al have covered this online ad model well. And companies like InMobi
are doing well to cover the ad model for the mobile market.

2.

Direct Distribution

What of folks who couldn't advertise? New comic book publishers had a hard
time selling their books . Until Phil Seuling came and developed a direct
market distribution system in 1970s for comics by connecting specialty shops.
And organizing Comic book Conventions.

Amazon - by getting kindle into the hands of millions - has created a direct
distribution device for books. iTunes has created a nice marketplace for
music.

But I see a huge opportunity over here for someone who can create an entire
ecosystem for direct distribution for other types of content. News. Blog
posts. Art work.

------
kenjackson
I must admit that I thought pg missed the ball on this one (he's usually spot
on). He is right, content is something I don't need, but I usually want.
Likewise, most things advertised alongside content is stuff I also don't need.

What makes content difficult to sell is that there is a business model around
giving it away. This is due to one large reason: the cost of distribution of
content on the internet approaches zero.

Now at this point pg may say, "exactly, because you were selling the paper
before". No, not exactly, you were selling the content and the cost of
distribution (which is a different thing). It's why I can't give away water
with advertising on it. The cost of physically distributing it will eat into
any profits I make on the advertising.

When you look at it from this position you see that nothing has really changed
from the pre-internet days. You simply have the cost of
production/distribution of a product versus its selling price + indirect
revenue (advertising and such).

~~~
bootload
_"... It's why I can't give away water with advertising on it. The cost of
physically distributing it will eat into any profits I make on the
advertising. ..."_

I can think of a lot of plastic bottled drinking water that invalidates this.

~~~
kenjackson
Really? Who is doing this and making money on it? If there are margins on it,
someone is doing it. Otherwise it's a shining billion dollar opportunity.

Of course the other problem is getting it in the channel. People who also sell
Pepsi/Coke will probably be discouraged from giving away your product. You
could target places like hospitals, parks, events, etc...

In any case, I'd love to see the companies who can do this.

~~~
lsc
<http://customwaterworkz.com/>

If I wasn't running out of server space faster than I could buy new servers
already, I'd have bought a bunch of those for the last opensourceworld
tradeshow.

~~~
kenjackson
Cool. I guess given that people carry 8-16oz bottles of water makes this
feasible (lots of advertising surface area for a small amount of water).
Better example, I can't give away dirt with advertising on it. There you
probably cross the line between cost of production+distribution versus
advertising revenue (note, these examples are heavy on the distribution side
to attempnt to mimic the apparently free cost of content generation).

~~~
lsc
yeah. and the water thing only works if you can target relatively high-value
customers. But at $0.50 or so a 'click' if you are at a tradeshow or some
other concentration of 'high value' customers, it's probably a better deal
than paying as much for adwords.

Adwords itself is an example of how some companies are willing to pay tens of
dollars per 'click' for advertising. Branded dirt won't usually work, but it
might at a nursery tradeshow.

But yeah, nothing but 'free content' is going to work if you are spamming the
masses with your advertising. But, I believe that many content creators are
willing to create content to advertise themselves. Especially in the technical
world, writing has almost no hope of paying the same as technical work, but
people still do it.

I suspect the problem will not be that nobody is willing to write content for
free, but that we need a new way of vetting the good, credible content from
the bad.

------
joez
I think one interesting dynamic is that publishers have visibility. I am
mostly thinking about books. There are book clubs and book reviewers. I wonder
how many people buys a book just because it's on Oprah's Book Club.
(apparently, a lot, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah_Book_Club>). And then
my next guess is that there are PR people at the publishers that push
reviewers and book clubs to endorse their book.

I think you can draw an analogy with content aggregators like Digg or Reddit.
There too many books for the average person to consume so they look to some
book club or reviewer to tell them what they should consume. I believe the
publishing dynamic may change if a book "content aggregator" received a wide
following.

Is there a digg (or reddit!) for books? If not, someone here want to create
one? :)

------
AmericanOP
I feel it's appropriate to mention our humble news/daily content start-up in a
meta-publishing thread. We're recruiting a team of people who enjoy writing
for a one-day proof-of-concept effort, and if the experiment works it's
angels, YC and beyond. If you are a news addict you'll probably have fun.
E-mail is in my profile.

~~~
brandnewlow
No it's not.

------
aristus
Has your opinion of the Kindle changed, pg? You used to think that in ten
years it would be a forgotten curiosity.

~~~
pg
Not really. I think they'll be superseded by whatever little device people
carry around to browse the web. E.g. the Apple tablet.

~~~
andymism
This is true for me. My Kindle2 has been gathering dust since I bought an
iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if others behaved the same way.

------
timwiseman
As usual, I agree wholly with pg, but I think he is ignoring a very
significant fringe group.

People are willing to pay for good information/entertainment/content on a tip
or tip-like basis, especially if the author(s) is a frequent publisher they
can maintain a long term relationship of some form with.

The online experiments of NiN is one example. Perhaps a more apropos one is
ArsTechnica. They sell advertising and also premium subscriptions. They do
reserve some content for the premium subscriptions and they turn on a few
extra features of the site, but I suspect the vast majority of their
subscribers think of it as a "tip-like" payment rather than thinking that
little bit extra is worth the subscription amount.

------
chipsy
In "Reinventing Comics," Scott McCloud talks about how digitized information
leads to result that all our content becomes "unpackaged" from their original
mediums - a comic, a piece of writing, a pop song, and a movie don't all have
to be treated in fundamentally different ways anymore.

I think that in turn, this opens the door to a lot of creative possibilities
for mix+match usage of media. It suggests an approach to publishing which is
equally unwedded to particular mediums.

------
ujjwalg
I agree with you PG completely. There was another blog post by Albert(USV)
[http://continuations.com/post/190217323/the-web-and-
educatio...](http://continuations.com/post/190217323/the-web-and-education-we-
need-scale) about missing scalability solution in education, where content is
extremely expensive. It is going to change very soon.

------
ilyak
As for "printed yesterday's news". I regularly spot things (mostly research
and interesting facts) on NH which I've read in Computerra about, half year
ago.

