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Henry Bevan explores the ethical dilema faced by those at the mercy of the technology giants.

A month ago at the Digital Book World in New York, New York University professor Scott Galloway said that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google were dragons disrupting the publishing world. They are knocking the ball so far out of the park, eventually they will knock it into another sport. He labelled the Big 4 “the Four Horsemen”.

Blendle, an article micropayment app has launched in the US this week, seeking to reinvent how readers "can discover and support the best journalism in the country".

Could this be the long-awaited "iTunes of journalism" that finally turns the broken publishing model around? Blendle and its partners certainly hope so, and they place great emphasis on making it second nature to pay for content.

2015 brought sweeping changes across the industry. The technology giants started elbowing each other for a slice of the publishing pie, ad-blocking went mainstream and a handful of large magazine titles shockingly kicked the bucket.

The digital world can be tough. Terms come and go at such a pace, and before you know it, everyone's chattering about HTML and mobile-first strategies without having ever stopped to explain what they mean.

We here at Page Lizard are just as guilty of this, and we're aware that people can sometimes be a little embarrassed to stop us and ask about the basics.

What is article-based publishing, why is it important and what do we need to do to be ready for it?

Page Lizard have launched the first in a series of lunchtime webinars by hosting Sean Briggs; an independent publishing consultant at Creative Workflows, to discuss article-based publishing.