Tools of Change: Bill Burger

By Neal 

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In his Tools of Change keynote address, Copyright Clearance Center VP Bill Burger discussed how technological shifts have realigned the relationships between readers and content, beginning with a stark example from Encyclopedia Britannica, which earned $650 million in revenue back in 1989 but, in the post-Encarta, Wikipedia-ruled world of 2007, made only (an estimated) $50 million. The wiki model of information distribution came up again and again; he was particularly keen on a recent development called WikiTravel Press that’s already producing user-generated guidebooks to Chicago and Singapore, updated monthly and printed on demand. Pretty soon, you’ll even be able to compile a travel guide tailored to your exact itinerary. Such collaborative publishing models will grow increasingly common, Burger summed up, and “people will value the tools as much as the content.”