Last week, Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg (left) went to a launch party for Luxid 5.0, billed as "a collaborative solution for analyzing and process strategic information," and at that party, he heard Elsevier Health Sciences technology officer Mirko Minnich talk about the evolution of online publishing from a single-website model to a cross-platform model to a new wave of "applications that know who you are, what you're trying to do, where you are in the process of doing it, and then providing appropriate content to help you do it."

Well, that got him thinking about the book publishing industry:

"It wasn't the only time I heard talk of 'improving the return on content assets' during my week in New York City. The fact is, most publishers have huge collections of valuable content and there are nearly innumerable ways to get value from it with a combination of imagination, re-use, re-purposing, and customer-centered—as opposed to content-centered—design."

Put it another way: Content isn't king, the customer's experience of that content is. And Kellogg raises an interesting question concerning the pricing of that experience: "Will we irrationally persist in paying $50 for something that buries us in information instead of ideally $75 for just the bits we need (paying a premium for the time savings) or at least perhaps $10 for just the bits we need (thinking that we're not using the whole book, just a bit of it)?"

His examples rely heavily on nonfiction models, but here's another scenario, which assumes that what you want to do is enjoy some short fiction: Would you pay $25 for a hardcover short story collection by an author you've never read before? Or $30 for an hardcover that includes one short story by, let's say, Amy Hempel, and ten more stories by writers she hand-selected? Or $20 for a paperback edition of that anthology as opposed to the usual $15? Or $5 for a pamphlet or electronic edition of that Hempel story plus one other randomly selected from her batch of ten recommendations?