The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Attributed)
Some roles are becoming obsolete in the move from publication as involving atoms to involving bits; as your example with blacksmithing shows, there will remain, indefinitely, a luxury class of craft book publication involving atoms, but it will become a small niche.
Some roles are being disaggregated from the rest of the process; this includes printing (http://lulu.com), payment (http://paypal.com), and distribution (http://www.bittorrent.com).
The screening role is not just a matter of reviews, advertising, and channels; it's also a matter of authentication: pulling content from authoritative sources is more likely to get you what you thought you were downloading. This is a service that costs money to provide, and is worth paying for.
Roles that were separate--author, fact-checker, copy editor, chief editor--in some cases are skipped--are there any copy-edited Twitter feeds worth following?--or combined--many bloggers do all their own editing--if they are performed at all. It's worth considering the differences across musical genres between the roles of composers and performers: these are very differentiated in classical music and still distinct in some rock genres, where you see specialist composers or song writers or lyricists producing scripts for performers to produce and interpret, while pop music is dominated by performers who compose the bulk of their own works, which can be more passionate and personal but also leads to a lot of terrible works. You get very different kinds of art from these distinct processes, but both result in lots of wonderful art, and we'd be worse off for the loss of either one.
The economic power that comes with exclusive atoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)) break down with non-exclusive bits and nonrival distribution, but artists have been rediscovering how to produce exclusive and/or rival goods, from concert experiences to t-shirts, from autographs to commissioned works, while building fan communities that support them--distributed patronage (http://www.bonepoets.com/adopt.html)--as well as producing secondary goods for those fans--reputation, social signaling, community--through means that go well beyond mere copying of digitized art.
There will still be rock stars in the new world. (http://craphound.com/?p=2360) And the rock stars will pay for editors to the extent that paying for editors helps them be rock stars.
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Some roles are becoming obsolete in the move from publication as involving atoms to involving bits; as your example with blacksmithing shows, there will remain, indefinitely, a luxury class of craft book publication involving atoms, but it will become a small niche.
Some roles are being disaggregated from the rest of the process; this includes printing (http://lulu.com), payment (http://paypal.com), and distribution (http://www.bittorrent.com).
The screening role is not just a matter of reviews, advertising, and channels; it's also a matter of authentication: pulling content from authoritative sources is more likely to get you what you thought you were downloading. This is a service that costs money to provide, and is worth paying for.
Roles that were separate--author, fact-checker, copy editor, chief editor--in some cases are skipped--are there any copy-edited Twitter feeds worth following?--or combined--many bloggers do all their own editing--if they are performed at all. It's worth considering the differences across musical genres between the roles of composers and performers: these are very differentiated in classical music and still distinct in some rock genres, where you see specialist composers or song writers or lyricists producing scripts for performers to produce and interpret, while pop music is dominated by performers who compose the bulk of their own works, which can be more passionate and personal but also leads to a lot of terrible works. You get very different kinds of art from these distinct processes, but both result in lots of wonderful art, and we'd be worse off for the loss of either one.
The economic power that comes with exclusive atoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)) break down with non-exclusive bits and nonrival distribution, but artists have been rediscovering how to produce exclusive and/or rival goods, from concert experiences to t-shirts, from autographs to commissioned works, while building fan communities that support them--distributed patronage (http://www.bonepoets.com/adopt.html)--as well as producing secondary goods for those fans--reputation, social signaling, community--through means that go well beyond mere copying of digitized art.
There will still be rock stars in the new world. (http://craphound.com/?p=2360) And the rock stars will pay for editors to the extent that paying for editors helps them be rock stars.