Businesses destined to add e-books to their content marketing efforts

In 2009, Forrester Research executives Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li made a splash with Groundswell, published by Wiley. It may be one of the more visible examples of a business—Forrester—publishing a book (the company got the royalties instead of the authors, the status quo for employees who write business books while employed), but because of the economics of book publishing, that’s about to undergo a massive shift.

Who publishes books is already in the throes of change. Amazon’s Kindle library is crammed full of titles produced by individuals who avoided working with a publisher at all; they simply format the book for the Kindle and offer it through the Kindle store. That’s the route taken by Christopher S. Penn with his Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer. Yes, Amazon gets a cut, but Penn keeps the rest.