Wikipedia Book Summaries
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Want to read that new book that has just been published but don't have a couple of hours to spare? Wikipedia has just launched a new service that may help. Called WikiSummaries, it contains book summaries in the form of articles and chapter summaries.
There are not that many books yet in the database, especially not business books, but that will no doubt change quickly. In the meantime, here are links to the WikiSummaries of Jim Collins' Good to Great, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Blink, and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics. Is this the beginning of the death knell for enterprises selling book summaries? (Who can compete if someone else is giving away what you sell, for free?)
Being a wiki, the summaries are contributed by the public at large and may be edited by the public at large, with contributions being moderated to ensure quality and avoid malicious vandalism.
WikiSummaries is further evidence, too, of the rapid commoditization of knowledge in the 21st Century. Firms currently relying on selling knowledge may have to revisit their business model soon, if this pressure is not upon them already. Alternatives that they might consider include moving towards:
1. Selling the skill the application of the knowledge to a client's specific circumstances, rather than the knowledge itself.
2. Selling time sensitive knowledge before it ages, where those giving knowledge away for free are not geared to doing so before it is too old to be useful.
3. Selling the service of assisting clients to be able to better do either of these themselves.
Question: What are YOU selling today, that someone else may be giving away for free, tomorrow?
(Read here too, as another example, how Nick Carr over at Rough Type describes how the average small business can satisfy most of its IT needs for .... er, ... $10 a year!!!)
Hat tip to Peter Klein over at Organizations and Markets for pointing out WikiSummaries.
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