Today’s publishers have a business model that involves passively waiting for writers to approach them directly and individually—and then saying “no” a lot.

Under this arrangement, writers are often forced to make difficult choices about who to approach first.  If their material is time-sensitive, the wrong choice can mean it won’t be published anywhere. And even if the material is not time-sensitive, an intolerably long time can elapse before the writer sees a payday.

Under the Magazines 2.0 approach, we’ve already seen how anybody could not only recommend a piece of writing and derive revenue from the readers they've guided to it, but also include this content in a virtual magazine of their own creation—without ever needing anybody’s explicit permission to do so, because it would be built into the system that the content owner would be paid every time someone reads it.

Underlying this approach is a presumption that there’s a computer system out there somewhere keeping track of all the reads and payments due. This system would have to know of the existence of all the content items participating in Magazines 2.0.  

Why couldn’t the electronic version of the content itself also reside there?  If it did, WebMaven Magazine could do more than link to each of the articles it wants to include in any given issue. When someone finishes reading such an article, the system that keeps track of who reads what piece of content (as a result of being sent there by whom) could also send this reader back to WebMaven magazine, placing him in the exact spot where he left it.

It would also be feasible for the underlying system to store the supporting technical materials (for example, cascading stylesheets) by which each online magazine presents text and images in a manner reflecting its own distinctive style. The new system could also offer a choice of more generic presentation formats for use by smaller virtual publishers or independent writers.

In an environment like this, writers could simply post their writing somewhere within the shared system, and thereby render it available for inclusion (by reference) in any virtual magazine or other online collection of material.  As noted previously, the compensation and all other legal issues would be already have been established as part of the standard terms of participating in the system.

Now in addition to no longer having to worry about which publication(s) to pitch their work to first, writers would have full, clear legal ownership of it—entitling them to the lion’s share of any revenues it might generate.

This arrangement would by no means have to set virtual publishers to weeping and gnashing their teeth.  They’d be getting the exact same money for their role in marketing and presenting the content to readers as they would have if they’d linked to an article whose rights happened to be owned by another publisher, instead of the writer.

As for traditional publishers unwilling to participate in Magazines 2.0...well…

It’s in the nature of our world to continually change.  If one of today’s publishing behemoths fails to adapt to this, why should its fate be any different from that of the glyptodon?

Any mourning of its demise should also be tempered by considerations of how much the prospects of individual writers stand to improve.  Being fairly and equitably compensated for their work would not be the only benefit they'd derive from Magazines 2.0.  

With the rise of a go-getter class of publishers scouring the new online service to find good content to include in their virtual magazines, more writers than ever should be able to connect with the public and get their message across.  Gaining this type of access can do a lot to reduce a previously-overlooked scrivener's sense of being dismissed as inconsequential.

The salutary effect is likely to spread to the writer’s friends and acquaintances as well.  And just knowing a person like yourself who has been accepted into the larger conversations of the day can substantially diminish your own sense of being insurmountably excluded.

This is exactly the kind of structural change to favor Davids over Goliaths that a world currently suffering under the crush of a toxic gigantism of scale needs in order to grow healthier.

A similar model of content curation, marketing, and distribution could also be applied to more than just our reading material—and yield comparably positive results.