The New York Times ran an interesting and fairly informative feature story on March 7; it covers the digital publishing industry's current digital resale controversy, which was sparked largely by the work of John Ossenmacher, the founder and CEO of ReDigi — a company that refers to itself as 'The World's First Pre-Owned Digital Marketplace.' The story includes a brief quote from Free Ride author Robert Levine; the quote probably does a better job than anything I've read before of explaining why digital resales will almost certainly lead to a fair amount of market insanity. As the article's author, David Streitfeld, writes: [caption id="attachment_81113" align="alignright"...

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"One of the biggest mistakes we as a society in general, and industry in specific make is that we mistake medium for the message. Those who can keep their eye on the message—Amazon and Netflix for example—profit handsomely. On the flip-side you have Flickr." —Om Malik This particular time of year—the stretch between Christmas and, say, the first week or two of January—seems to always result in some sort of consumer-relevant trend story that is repeated over and over again in the media, ad nauseum, until most people simply begin thinking of the story as nothing less than pure...

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