Sausages and Pigs

This is the BIG question to my mind currently running through many publishers mind. I think that there is no doubt that content needs to be multi platform compliant, but it falls into a similar area as advertising as to justifying the cost of delivering it.
There is no doubt in my mind that if you can give information in as many platforms as possible, then more people will hear about it and potentially be interested in what the content is saying. There is also no doubt that people having bought into something want to own it and therefore if ownership is a book, they will buy it. When we are looking to publish new books, we are keen to explore whether there are different ways of delivering the content via video, audio or words in anything from website / you-tube / myspace / second life etc. Reading yesterdays Financial Times articles on publishing, it is clear that it is not just us small independents that this is seen as an opportunity to reach new audiences.
However the issue is the cost of making it available.
We know that when you aggregate content, if you know what you hope to do with that content prior to the aggregation, it is cheaper and cost effective to make it available. We have an analogy of sausages and pigs - namely when publishers have made their sausages, it is hard to make it back into pig to make a different sausage. If however you have a pig and a need to make a variety of sausages, then making them all at once is the way forward.
Publisher with BIG backlists, have a problem of paying for the process of making their sausages back to pigs and then making new sausages.
Smaller publishers have the issue of having the budget to allocate to creating content deliverable on multi platofrm. This is where we fall. I am happy and keen to do author interviews for the web. I am happy to make the books available on line free for all. The issue is that we have already made our sausages!
However, watch this space though as we had a meeting recently with a possible author who has ways of reaching audiences which do not require PIGS! (sounds like a beer)