Excerpted from http://web.idirect.com/~freejack, my home of many years...
"My current jobs centers around digital content delivery - an extremely fascinating task. There is a tremendous inequity involved in the distribution of all forms of inte.llectual property, be it books, music, art or ideas. The inequity stems exists within what is commonly called "the channel", where the product has to flow prior to delivery to the end user or customer (in the case of books for insta.nce, the channel looks like this: author -> publisher -> distributor -> retailer -> customer).
The Internet has the potential to eradicate this inequity through a process called disintermediation. Disintermediation is quite simply. the elimination of the "middle man" in the distribution process. With the technology available today, there is no reason why the new distribution paradigm couldn't look like this: author -> clearinghouse -> customer."