Not only books, the era of electronic articles, e-articles, will come.
We will be able to buy the content that interests us for just a few cents. This would open up a new market with new clients who could "compose" their own historical, narrative and documentary research starting from the articles deemed most interesting and useful. An informative puzzle made up of content of greatest personal interest. Stop buying entire newspapers and magazines to read just a few pages. And so much more…
Let's take a few examples together.
I am preparing a thesis. Rent and purchase books, acquire information on the internet, purchase reports, etc. Tomorrow, instead of whole books, I will be able to purchase only articles of interest. As always tomorrow instead of buying an entire electronic magazine I could select the articles that interest me and buy them. Or even as a Milan fan instead of putting up with the entire gazzetta dello sport, I could only buy what talks about Milan. And so on.
I think both writers and journalists and publishers would benefit from it. Advertising may be profiled and associated with items sold based on buyer and content. Perhaps blogs could find a new meaning and also become paid where the content is worthy. Or they could be the containers assigned to this new and imminent revolution. And maybe tomorrow the editorial mastheads will lose value in favor of the authors, famous or unknown but interesting young people. I see no limits now but only great opportunities thinking for example of scientific publishers, newspapers, magazines, monthlies, etc… And even their periodicity to which we are now accustomed, would no longer be a temporal recurrence but rather a possible custom or habit.
And the prices? Little, very little.
I think that the price of a generic item should be between 0,05 euros and 0,10 euros. It will be different for scientific, technical and high value-added publishers. After all, advertising could bear the costs of the system with greater right, discovering a new, more targeted and profiled medium. On the other hand, if I buy articles about Valentino Rossi, it's easy to guess my buyer profile and associate it with the most effective advertising messages. Not only that, if I sell eyewear and want to target my advertising here is a media to which you can entrust a budget and plan a profiled advertising campaign according to clear rules. And if I'm the customer why not give my data if I can derive a direct benefit from this exchange (discount, promo, etc...) and indirect benefit (enough with pages and pages of ads I'm not interested in or junk newsletters).
Long live the era to come of e-articles.
