Matter

I wonder if Medium will ever get into book publishing (and e-book), similar to what FG Press is doing. You could do a lot of validation beforehand on the appetite for certain content, you've got an audience you can market to, etc.

@jonnym1ller you can gather a couple of open source tools and make it work in your own website with no so much effort. But building an audience from scratch... not so easy.

@mbavio in its early days I think there was definitely some credibility attached to it. On HN readers would upvote posts just because they were had the Medium URL, but now that its open and 10k stories are being published every week I'd argue that you still have to build your audience from scratch to a large extent – their social recommends only help to amplify the top content. I think that @byosko's point is interesting – for example this post (http://bit.ly/1il0sjk) received 150k+ views on Medium last year and the illustrator was subsequently approached by Random House and has since secured a book deal.

@jonnym1ller That's a cool story. Doesn't surprise me. I'd predict more of this will happen. Medium could change publishing beyond just letting "everyone post content" and if I had to guess, I'd say they're looking at how that happens, be it magazines, books, e-books, etc.

For sure, or perhaps a byliner-esque subscription model... or even given their impressive network of writers they would also be in a strong position to provide community contributed and professional content for brands looking to tell authentic stories that relate to their mission/values and engage with their audiences (aka similar to Contently)... I'll be interested to see how it all pans out!

@jonnym1ller I think we are saying the same thing. I know it's hard to build an audience even on Medium these days, but there is a small chance that you could get a brilliant post lost in time if you just build your blog. That's not gonna happen if you on Medium. And I'm saying this from team "I miss the old times of blogging", unfortunately.

@mbavio I'm sure that's a factor but the Medium writing editor is a real pleasure to use.