Digital Future is Confusing and Inspirational

This is a very interesting commentary on the impact of the Google settlement on digital publishing:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6636986.html

"How these rights will be secured and exploited by Google or someone else should keep the lawyers and the visionaries busy for some time. In fact, Rosenblatt says that it will probably take as long as two years just to get the BRR up and running to service the initial business models, let alone the aspirational ones. Rosenblatt and Kreisa say the future business model will require publishers to restructure their content in ways most of them don’t do at present. How do you secure and define the rights to set up a custom-publishing service that combines content from different publishers? What about textbooks with a multiplicityof content—photos, text, art and charts? Dealing with multiple publishers can be difficult enough, but what about out-of-print titles whose rights have reverted to the author—will aggregators need to negotiate with every single author? “It will be very complex,” says Rosenblatt."