... the shops on Ricci Street

Welcome!

What's the world coming to?

Computers are everywhere and are always on. Computers replace telephones. Computers replace TVs. Every appliance in your house has an Internet Protocol number. According to Nortel, there's no reason why the information can't come into your home or office along with the regular electricity supply.

To buy, you'll research the product online and run to the store to pick it up. Or you'll see and touch it in the store and take out your handheld computer to buy the product cheaper online.

You can probably understand that with books. To buy, you'll do your research at Amazon.com and run to the book store to get it right away -- if they have it. Or you'll hold the book and read the dust jacket in the store. Then next time you're at Amazon.com, you'll buy it 10% cheaper.

What about groceries?

1) The food packages can tell the pantry and refrigerator when they're empty.

2) The kitchen can tell the grocery store what's on standing order.

3) On the way home, you can pick up your groceries, already bagged, your account already debited. Or you can pay a little extra to have them delivered.

To sell, you'll need either a broker or you'll have to collect payment directly. In a world-wide market, micropayments make sense. You'll have three types of products.

Those that can't be digitized

Chairs, for instance.

Information about chairs can be digitized. The shopping, paying, servicing, and follow-up marketing can be digitized. But the chairs themselves can't be.

For example, Hot Seats is a site to sell Bill Jobling's painted chairs. He can show you a thumbnail of a folded chair (left) or an open chair (right). He can link to a larger image of the same chair so you can see some detail. The images arrive via the Web. If you want a chair, however, you're either going to go out to Clear Light Studio to pick it up, or Bill will send it to you via Mail Boxes, Etc.

Those that can't be acquired any way other than digitally

Bill will keep painting the same scene on chair after chair if he has enough orders. Mark Lavatelli, however, isn't going to keep painting the same painting over and over. So what do you do -- after it's sold -- if you want to look at one of Mark's paintings such as Red Pine on the left and Sanctuary on the right? If he has retained the digital reproduction rights, you can get them here. If you right-click on one of these images, you can set it as the wallpaper on your monitor.

Another example: interactive hypertexts such as Ricci Street. As a book, that is, ink on dead trees, Ricci Street would lose a lot of what makes it worthwhile. If you try to download it and keep it on your hard drive, it will be out of date before your hard drive stops whirring.

Such unprintable manuscripts are a new medium. Right now, I call it new media, but eventually it will be called something else and the term new media will be available for whatever comes next.

Those that can be digitized

When Mark sells a painting, it's gone. The new owners can move, admire, display, resell, abuse, deface, or burn it if they wish. All Mark will have is a reproduction, whether on paper or monitor.

So think about the manuscript of a novel. Back when it was literally "manu", by hand, it mattered whether you bought, resold, or burned it. Now that most manuscripts are digital until the ink is squeezed onto the dead trees, what are you going to buy when you buy a manuscript, a floppy disk with a copy of the files on the author's hard drive? What are you going to deface or burn?

Even when the printing presses give us 200,000 copies of the same book, it makes sense to build and staff large buildings to hold lots of books. They're commodities. That is, one copy is pretty much the same as the next and I don't really care whether mine is number 112,354 or number 112,355.

To the extent that a manuscript is linear and non-visual, it will make more and more sense to manufacture and distribute it online. An infinite number of copies of the manuscript are available on any computer worldwide. You can print the thing out if you wish.

What about textbooks?

The keys to the kingdom

By manufacture and distribute, I mean that I had something very important when I

registered RicciStreet.net
got a permanent IP number
put the first pages on a server

I felt a little like Gutenberg with a shiny new printing press. As you can see on the Traffic Report, people from around the world are visiting these pages. So not only did I have the keys to the press, I had the keys to the distribution system.

You can have them, too.