The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can't make any money with the basic capability any more.

This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not?

In a world where a book had to be a physical object, charging money was a way to cause more copies to come into circulation. In the digital world, charging money for something is a way to produce fewer copies.

Which makes them think of content in terms of these finished products, books; that’s the only way people get information, or the only way creative work gets to people. But those products in that form are really consequences of industrial organization, or management decisions made in the very recent past.

If you look back to the 19th century or before that, printed creative work was much more dynamic. It came about in pieces, then it was collected in books. Very few people were sitting down and writing books the way they do now.

How is publishing changing?...Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.

I don’t think people are going to make money off of books for very much longer. Just like music. How do you make money doing music? The real reason you do music is because you love it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll make some money from it. There are people making money writing, and there are paid journalists, and other things that pay in other ways, so I’m not really concerned about the economic model — I should be, because I’m playing both sides. I make my living doing it.

Money follows attention. Wherever attention goes, money will follow. I don’t know the exact revenue model, but I know money will come. The real key is getting people to pay attention. I’ve always had the belief that if you are getting people’s attention and keeping people’s attention, focus on when to monetize then. I’m not really focused on the monetizing aspect, because I don’t think we know yet.

So what have you learned? How do you keep people’s attention? In my weaker moments, I think that if I really truly believed in trying to reach as many people as I could, I would simply do YouTube videos. Because that’s what people are paying attention to. My TED talks have a far greater audience than any of my books ever will. I mean, how long did I prepare for a TED talk? I don’t know, 18 minutes? You just kind of do it. If I were to spend as much time on those as on preparing my book, I would spend a couple years working on a series of TED talks, 18 minutes each, that totaled up into a really fantastic experience.

It sounds like you’re more interested in getting your ideas out than you are about the mode for doing so.