Notes | Roger Swannell

A digital product is any good or service delivered in digital form (like software, apps, ebooks, or streaming media), while an information good is a type of good whose core value is the information or content it contains (like data, knowledge, or symbolic content).

In practice, information goods can be delivered either physically (e.g., a printed book) or digitally (e.g., a PDF), so a digital product is about the form, whereas an information good is about the nature of the value.

Core conceptual difference

Digital product:

Defined by its mode of delivery and use: it exists and is consumed in digital form (software, online course platform, SaaS UI, game, etc.).
May or may not primarily embody “information” as content; for example, a CAD tool or a photo-editing app is a digital product but not purely an information good.

Information good:

Defined by what is being sold: information, knowledge, or symbolic content (text, audio, video, data).
Can be instantiated both physically (DVD, book) and digitally (stream, download); the economic properties hinge on the information being non-rival and easily copied, not on the carrier.

Economic and design implications

Economics:

Information goods are characterized by high fixed costs of creation and near-zero marginal cost of reproduction, with strong non-rivalry and potential non-excludability (easy copying, piracy).
Digital products share low marginal cost of replication, but many add constraints and service layers (licensing, access control, subscriptions) that change pricing and usage economics beyond “pure” information-goods logic.

Product/UX perspective:

When thinking about a digital product, attention goes to journeys, features, interactions, and ongoing updates.
When thinking about an information good, attention goes to content quality, intellectual property, and pricing/versioning of the information itself.

How they overlap

Many things are both:

An ebook, a streaming film, or a downloadable dataset are digital products that are also information goods, because they are digital in form and informational in value.

But not all:

A printed reference book is an information good but not a digital product.A purely functional cloud API for compute (e.g., GPU time with minimal content) is a digital product but only weakly an information good, because the primary value is computation or capability, not information content.