People are tools of change not technology, but no change happens when you don't go about it in the right way. Many inventions fail because the brilliant inventor was a mediocre marketer, but those same inventions sweep through the world when a brilliant marketer picks them up.
For publishing, the impediments of change in the digital age surround rights. Digital Rights Management (DRM) gives power to distributors who could become the publishers in 10 years (most likely Amazon of course). Territory and format rights were created for different, less global times. We are in an age of instant global distribution and increasingly format agnostic devices. Some have suggested the better course for publishers may be less books better chosen. Having all the rights means having all the book -- a book that is far more important when you have fewer baskets for your eggs. Also the cost of supporting the infrastructure for these rights will only rise as the complexity increase in the global digital economy, which could be fatal to an industry that needs to cut costs to remain competitive. Furthermore, the long tail may be an argument for not making a quick short term profit selling rights which may someday return bigger dividends.
That said, technology may play into the notion of territory. Amazon's Kindle depends on a wireless network that is currently defined by political borders (it's US only now). Publishers should watch closely how Jeff Bezos speaks about the Kindle's wireless network, because this sleeper may awaken to be the true power behind this device's control of the industry. Corey Doctorow already pointed out the danger of giving Amazon the key to your own content via Amazon DRM. The Kindle's wireless network may be the wings for this content which will give power to both the concept of territory rights and more importantly Amazon. If Amazon sets up the wireless networks based on the old concept of territory, then they will be the way to maintain existing territory rights, which will make an argument for giving up just a little bit more autonomy to Amazon.
We all know that the digital world (the internet in particular) changes the scale of things, but absent from the discussion of pricing eBooks was scale. Production costs must be figured into the price of any product however this alone is not an argument for matching print and eBooks prices. If scale of eBook sales is vastly different than what we are used to then the price will be to. Furthermore there is a public perception that eBooks cost less to produce than print books. NPR recently reported (incorrectly?) that publishers agree that eBooks cost less then print books when NPR discussed the Kindle. Arguing the reality of the situation may be a dangerous PR move for publishers.
Toyota broke into the auto market in the US by pricing cars based on what consumers were willing to pay. Will US publishers take the course of Detroit and price books at the price they want or will they listen to the market?
If eBooks cost $2 or $5 might we all not just buy them just to have them? Maybe the modern definition of what Mark Twain said about classics is that a classic is a book you keep in your iPhone to show off. Already apps for iPhone hold social value (look at me I have a cool new app) -- maybe eBooks can be the same thing. It changes our outlook on purchasing books if they become so cheap that instead of buying a book because you will read it, that you buy it because you might read it.
The Espresso Book Machine offers publishers a way to keep all books in print. I'm sure there is a moral argument for piracy (Corey D's concept) to make illegal copies of a book that's not in print: If you're not willing to sell, why shouldn't I steal?
Since Amazon created the first (and still best) book data web services, the industry should simply standardize on them. Reps from good reads, library thing and others made the point that parsers have already been written for this standard. Why waste time and money on coming up with something else?
The book industry has missed some amazing opportunities. Radio came out and it was just a new technology for story in -- the same sense that cave walls, scrolls, and books were, but it was thought of as "not what we do". Then movies came out -- just a new medium for story, but "it's not what we do". Video games, blogs, and more are now falling into that category, but still publishers like to go into categorical boxes instead of being publishers of ideas/stories they want to be defined by their format. All publishers at base choose a good story/idea (discriminate), package the idea/story, and sell it.
Which may get to the core of the service publishing offers: It is the decider of what is and is not literature. It is the entity that works through the slush pile and discriminates.
Or then again, maybe the core business is books and publishing will slowly find its niche printing the mass produced illuminated manuscripts in smaller print runs with higher prices.
Lulu + good reads = amazon.com?
IT (and other techies) are not wagering the same stakes in the new publishing world. If publishing is lost to new digital economies, the IT folks feel they can just get a job at some other website or some other company with an IT department. Publishers and editors need the publishing world and would have to retrain (unless of course you buy the argument above about all publishing being essentially the same).
So everyone from the techie side should consider what (not just they, but what) everyone wagers when we dare to re-imagine the book publishing world. And everyone should remember that people are and will always be the real tools of change.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Valentine's Day Adventure Day
Our tradition each year for Valentine's Day was to ride the Roosevelt Island tram to Roosevelt Island where we would go to the Trellis Dinner for diner and stroll along the East River. The view from the tram down the avenues of NYC and the East River is amazing.
The tram has always been special to us since it was a destination on our first adventure day. The desire to ride the tram along with the High Line really were the initial inspiration for the whole concept of adventure days for us.
But this past Valentine's Day fell on a Saturday and having heard some bad news about Trellis we thought let's do something different. So we decided to get in our new Smart Car and drive along the coast of southern Long Island for a Valentine's adventure day. We crossed bridge after bridge after bridge and found ourselves in the little islands of Long Island.
Our first stop on Saturday morning was of course Synagogue, but when we got there at the end of the morning it was closed. It was in a rather barren area and behind a fence, so it was worth a stop. I decided to park with the car in get-a-weigh position though since we were knocking on strange fences.
The road ahead took us beneath the elevated tracks that you see in the distance of the above photo, which was much fun to drive along. The twists and turns though were disorienting enough that I decided then to drive home along a major highway. For now it was adventure day and we'd stop at a fenced in trailer Synagogue along the barren wayside, but we had a long day ahead, so I made the minor sin of making a definite plan even though this was supposed to be an adventure day with nary a plan.
As the afternoon went on and adventuring exuberance burned away the calories within our tummies, we decided finding food would be next on our list. We pulled through the parking lot at Sands because we'd heard of it but really didn't know what it was. The lot was empty and it was dark inside, so we got pack on the road where not too far along we found Reilly's. An independent bar and grill would give us a bit of local color and fill our stomachs that in their growls were at this point having a better conversation between them than us. We parked and walked inside. There were about eight people at an oval bar who all turned to look at us. I looked around the room at the few objects that were there. I was scanning for the kitchen, but the few stools, the bar, the people starring at me. The big bartender with both arms on the bar, the two doors with a man and woman icon on them. These were not a kitchen. The bartender asked if he could help us and Rachel asked if we could see a menu. The bartender answered the nagging question in my mind of where the hidden kitchen was by announcing there was no kitchen. "Oh thanks" we said, "we were looking for lunch" and we turned for the door. Outside a sigh which turned into laughter came out of both of us.
We found a wonderfully creative and tasty lunch down the way at the Speak Easy in Long Beach. They had the menu posted outside and deep fried avocado had us in the door. They also have customizable mac and cheese, so we had them throw in broccoli rabe. I snapped a picture of Rachel looking beautiful and just happened to capture the heart above hear shoulder (it's not difficult to catch the heart in her smile and twinkle in her eye).
After lunch we walked down the shore town street with all the little homes that were identical at one time, but now each so personalized you can hardly tell. Down the little street to wooden steps that led out of the world of pavement and brick. White sand stretched out along the horizon and the ocean who's waves rolled into the silence and receded for a moment of absolute peace.
Rachel went down to appreciate the ocean and the ocean came up to appreciate Rachel.
Along the way we saw the Dairy Barn. We assumed it was a drive through independent Dairy Queen. We pulled up and asked for ice-cream sandwiches since we had randomly gotten those on our first stop during our honeymoon. The guy brought out a box of six. Gosh we said, we don't want THAT many. He looked at us kind of funny and I noticed it was basically a drive up convenience store. I asked for a coffee, we paid, drove out, and had a good laugh.
A review of our trip would not be complete without mentioning that on this chilly February day, Rachel's heated seat was on full and mine was off.
Since the ocean was too tempting and too cold, we hoped back in the car again and encountered the unique traffic circles of Long Island.
Notice the cool Smart Car shadow in the lower left corner.
Then we went across a little bridge to Fire Island park where we drove slowly and looked at the lovely deer. I grew up with deer living in the backyard, so it was a little funny to me to play city person and stop to look at them, but they are graceful animals and it had been a long time since I'd seen one.
Having found Fire Island park we thought maybe we would take the ferry over to Fire Island, but the last one had left for the day. We did arrive just in time for the sunset. And Rob was nice enough not to charge us for parking...
For Valentine's Day dinner we stopped in at a few different places, scanned menus for lovely vegetarian dishes and moved along until we found a part coffee shop, part romantic restaurant called Milk and Cookies which was perfect for us. The spinach and artichoke dip platter was basically a small table that they carried over and the ice cream Sunday was served in a large goblet.
We decided to avoid the windy heathen small roads and take the Kosher highway home.
And it was smooth sailing all the way home.
The tram has always been special to us since it was a destination on our first adventure day. The desire to ride the tram along with the High Line really were the initial inspiration for the whole concept of adventure days for us.
But this past Valentine's Day fell on a Saturday and having heard some bad news about Trellis we thought let's do something different. So we decided to get in our new Smart Car and drive along the coast of southern Long Island for a Valentine's adventure day. We crossed bridge after bridge after bridge and found ourselves in the little islands of Long Island.
Our first stop on Saturday morning was of course Synagogue, but when we got there at the end of the morning it was closed. It was in a rather barren area and behind a fence, so it was worth a stop. I decided to park with the car in get-a-weigh position though since we were knocking on strange fences.
The road ahead took us beneath the elevated tracks that you see in the distance of the above photo, which was much fun to drive along. The twists and turns though were disorienting enough that I decided then to drive home along a major highway. For now it was adventure day and we'd stop at a fenced in trailer Synagogue along the barren wayside, but we had a long day ahead, so I made the minor sin of making a definite plan even though this was supposed to be an adventure day with nary a plan.
As the afternoon went on and adventuring exuberance burned away the calories within our tummies, we decided finding food would be next on our list. We pulled through the parking lot at Sands because we'd heard of it but really didn't know what it was. The lot was empty and it was dark inside, so we got pack on the road where not too far along we found Reilly's. An independent bar and grill would give us a bit of local color and fill our stomachs that in their growls were at this point having a better conversation between them than us. We parked and walked inside. There were about eight people at an oval bar who all turned to look at us. I looked around the room at the few objects that were there. I was scanning for the kitchen, but the few stools, the bar, the people starring at me. The big bartender with both arms on the bar, the two doors with a man and woman icon on them. These were not a kitchen. The bartender asked if he could help us and Rachel asked if we could see a menu. The bartender answered the nagging question in my mind of where the hidden kitchen was by announcing there was no kitchen. "Oh thanks" we said, "we were looking for lunch" and we turned for the door. Outside a sigh which turned into laughter came out of both of us.
We found a wonderfully creative and tasty lunch down the way at the Speak Easy in Long Beach. They had the menu posted outside and deep fried avocado had us in the door. They also have customizable mac and cheese, so we had them throw in broccoli rabe. I snapped a picture of Rachel looking beautiful and just happened to capture the heart above hear shoulder (it's not difficult to catch the heart in her smile and twinkle in her eye).
After lunch we walked down the shore town street with all the little homes that were identical at one time, but now each so personalized you can hardly tell. Down the little street to wooden steps that led out of the world of pavement and brick. White sand stretched out along the horizon and the ocean who's waves rolled into the silence and receded for a moment of absolute peace.
Rachel went down to appreciate the ocean and the ocean came up to appreciate Rachel.
Along the way we saw the Dairy Barn. We assumed it was a drive through independent Dairy Queen. We pulled up and asked for ice-cream sandwiches since we had randomly gotten those on our first stop during our honeymoon. The guy brought out a box of six. Gosh we said, we don't want THAT many. He looked at us kind of funny and I noticed it was basically a drive up convenience store. I asked for a coffee, we paid, drove out, and had a good laugh.
A review of our trip would not be complete without mentioning that on this chilly February day, Rachel's heated seat was on full and mine was off.
Since the ocean was too tempting and too cold, we hoped back in the car again and encountered the unique traffic circles of Long Island.
Notice the cool Smart Car shadow in the lower left corner.
Then we went across a little bridge to Fire Island park where we drove slowly and looked at the lovely deer. I grew up with deer living in the backyard, so it was a little funny to me to play city person and stop to look at them, but they are graceful animals and it had been a long time since I'd seen one.
Having found Fire Island park we thought maybe we would take the ferry over to Fire Island, but the last one had left for the day. We did arrive just in time for the sunset. And Rob was nice enough not to charge us for parking...
For Valentine's Day dinner we stopped in at a few different places, scanned menus for lovely vegetarian dishes and moved along until we found a part coffee shop, part romantic restaurant called Milk and Cookies which was perfect for us. The spinach and artichoke dip platter was basically a small table that they carried over and the ice cream Sunday was served in a large goblet.
We decided to avoid the windy heathen small roads and take the Kosher highway home.
And it was smooth sailing all the way home.
TOC after thoughts: marketing to the next generation
After becoming excited about the data Facebook offers as far as ad marketing goes (while wearing my work hat -- while wearing my home hat I don't like it), I was then disappointed at how the data is summed. The data is amazingly better than what you have for print advertising and you can still learn a lot about your marketing effectiveness, but it could go further. I was working with a friend on it and basically it was his ideas that were really making me see the potential and dream big. Then I read this at on ThePublishingTrendsBlog about the TOC conference:
If that's the case then marketers will absolutely need standards in reported user data. If everyone's on Facebook I can just do some test ads and find out who my market is and what they respond to. If everyone's on a hundred little boards, then I need to put ads on all those boards. A good business model would be to become the company who offered marketing for all those little boards and then aggregated data for marketers. Google AdWords comes to mind of course, though they would need to implement some of what Facebook ads currently offer.
Any niche site can become a social hub--teens aren't just using Facebook for social networking. One subject in the study, "David," spent most of his time on the "Silverfish Longboarding" discussion boards. (A longboard is a type of skateboard.) These microcommunities give teens, who tend to define themselves through 2 or 3 major interests when creating online personas, a sense of belonging.
If that's the case then marketers will absolutely need standards in reported user data. If everyone's on Facebook I can just do some test ads and find out who my market is and what they respond to. If everyone's on a hundred little boards, then I need to put ads on all those boards. A good business model would be to become the company who offered marketing for all those little boards and then aggregated data for marketers. Google AdWords comes to mind of course, though they would need to implement some of what Facebook ads currently offer.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Open Source Coffee Table Book: Publishing Pop Culture in the Digital Age
Nina Paley
The cutting edge of free expression has been open software. Nina has comic strips with a free license, but can't get a publishing house that won't pick it up. For technical and educational books it is possible, but not for anything else. She's going to release a film under the Creative Commons Share Alike.
Free culture <> communism
Free culture = Free Enterprise + Free Markets
Content is Free. People think they should get content free because it is free (internet).
Containers are not free (books, CD, computer)
Think of bottled water. Water is free, but bottled water is a service where companies offer us a convenience. They put their seal of approval on it and we pay for it.
Copyright is like a dam. Stagnant water becomes poisoned
Businesses that are going to succeed are going to get out of licensing and get into servicing.
Jonathan Coulton is a good example of a musician who understands this.
Producing Open Source Software is a book that's free online (Question Copyright.org) and sold physical via O'Reilly
The printed book = the tree ware
All open content for eBooks is just text, but cartoons would work great there, but there are no Open Source Coffee Table Books because there's a culture against it.
Free culture = Free enterprise
Free software makes money and so can free culture
If people like the thing, they want tokens from the thing
Publisher's offer an author endorsement mark and that's valuable. Signed and limited editions can also bring in money.
Giving stuff away actually works
The cutting edge of free expression has been open software. Nina has comic strips with a free license, but can't get a publishing house that won't pick it up. For technical and educational books it is possible, but not for anything else. She's going to release a film under the Creative Commons Share Alike.
Free culture <> communism
Free culture = Free Enterprise + Free Markets
Content is Free. People think they should get content free because it is free (internet).
Containers are not free (books, CD, computer)
Think of bottled water. Water is free, but bottled water is a service where companies offer us a convenience. They put their seal of approval on it and we pay for it.
Copyright is like a dam. Stagnant water becomes poisoned
Businesses that are going to succeed are going to get out of licensing and get into servicing.
Jonathan Coulton is a good example of a musician who understands this.
Producing Open Source Software is a book that's free online (Question Copyright.org) and sold physical via O'Reilly
The printed book = the tree ware
All open content for eBooks is just text, but cartoons would work great there, but there are no Open Source Coffee Table Books because there's a culture against it.
Free culture = Free enterprise
Free software makes money and so can free culture
If people like the thing, they want tokens from the thing
Publisher's offer an author endorsement mark and that's valuable. Signed and limited editions can also bring in money.
Giving stuff away actually works
TOC: NaNoWriMo
81% of people feel they have book in them. Jeff thanked God that all of the stories didn't get out. This is the story of when that happens.
National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo challenges anyone to use their website and write 50,000 words from scratch in November. Encouraging emails are sent out and people can post manuscripts to get and give advice. If you get to 50,000 words you upload your manuscript to the website, it is counted by a script, and the book gets deleted. If you win you get your name on the website and get a PDF that you can download, print, and write your own name on it.
This started in the Bay Area in '99 and if you know that era it was an era of incredibly bad ideas. The original group didn't know what they were doing so they used unorthodox techniques, like no one gets to go to the bathroom until you write 1000 words. Around week three of the first exercise these works which had been unencumbered by anything like plots or character development were suddenly developing and the writers were freaked out of their minds. They were not great books, they were bad books, but that month taught that novelists are not written by novelists, but by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels. This was a life changing event.
The event now is web based, but is still completely on the honor system. The advent of blogs brought 5,000 participants. Last year 150,000 writers won the contest. There is an education packet now that is sent out. Couples that have met at NaNoWriMo and even had children ... and it's caused divorce. Around 29 manuscripts from this contest have been sold to publishers including Water For Elephants (NYT best seller).
Spending 30 days running amuck in your imagination is one of the best things you can do.
Lesson one is that online communities grow from shared experiences. Give people something big, fun, and absolutely terrifying to do together. [fear binds people together]
You do not need to offer a publishing contract as a prize and in fact it's probably best if you do not.
A rule is that whatever you ask your audience to do, you must do together. It creates a truly shared experience.
Lesson two is that in the end books win. Every year people talk about books dyeing, but every year NaNoWriMo servers are groaning from all the work.
Many of the participants have no interest in publishing these manuscripts. They just want to explore their imagination for awhile. Helps you connect with equally crazy people in your area. It helps you connect with authors you read in a much deeper level.
People do congregate though they don't have to. There are kick off parties and thank god it's over parties. Writing in a group is a little like going to the gym where you help inspire each other not to be lazy.
People also meet online in the forums and are unusually supportive of each other.
The complete mediocrity of the price discourages cheating.
The enthusiasm for the book is incredible and undimmed. Books, writing, and reading will change lives and transform communities all around the world. This is big and its only going to get bigger from here.
National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo challenges anyone to use their website and write 50,000 words from scratch in November. Encouraging emails are sent out and people can post manuscripts to get and give advice. If you get to 50,000 words you upload your manuscript to the website, it is counted by a script, and the book gets deleted. If you win you get your name on the website and get a PDF that you can download, print, and write your own name on it.
This started in the Bay Area in '99 and if you know that era it was an era of incredibly bad ideas. The original group didn't know what they were doing so they used unorthodox techniques, like no one gets to go to the bathroom until you write 1000 words. Around week three of the first exercise these works which had been unencumbered by anything like plots or character development were suddenly developing and the writers were freaked out of their minds. They were not great books, they were bad books, but that month taught that novelists are not written by novelists, but by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels. This was a life changing event.
The event now is web based, but is still completely on the honor system. The advent of blogs brought 5,000 participants. Last year 150,000 writers won the contest. There is an education packet now that is sent out. Couples that have met at NaNoWriMo and even had children ... and it's caused divorce. Around 29 manuscripts from this contest have been sold to publishers including Water For Elephants (NYT best seller).
Spending 30 days running amuck in your imagination is one of the best things you can do.
Lesson one is that online communities grow from shared experiences. Give people something big, fun, and absolutely terrifying to do together. [fear binds people together]
You do not need to offer a publishing contract as a prize and in fact it's probably best if you do not.
A rule is that whatever you ask your audience to do, you must do together. It creates a truly shared experience.
Lesson two is that in the end books win. Every year people talk about books dyeing, but every year NaNoWriMo servers are groaning from all the work.
Many of the participants have no interest in publishing these manuscripts. They just want to explore their imagination for awhile. Helps you connect with equally crazy people in your area. It helps you connect with authors you read in a much deeper level.
People do congregate though they don't have to. There are kick off parties and thank god it's over parties. Writing in a group is a little like going to the gym where you help inspire each other not to be lazy.
People also meet online in the forums and are unusually supportive of each other.
The complete mediocrity of the price discourages cheating.
The enthusiasm for the book is incredible and undimmed. Books, writing, and reading will change lives and transform communities all around the world. This is big and its only going to get bigger from here.
TOC: Topics from the TOC Tag Cloud (toc.oreilly.com)
Kat: It's about the reader stupid
Fatazia?? Meyer?: For a long time people were in love with Amazon for the wrong reasons and afraid of Google. Amazon is this sleeping giant that wants to be a publisher. Jeff Bezos basically said he's out to destroy the business of publishers. They are working to become Apple. Kindle = iPod unless publishers take control. Amazon will have all control over prices.
Kat: I don't think Amazon cares about readers.
Kirk: I love free shipping from Amazon. Cloud computing and storage is great, but they are absolutely playing from the Apple playbook with the Kindle. Most people didn't think about eBooks until Oprah raised the Kindle. Amazon are iterating on their design.
Joe: Having the ability to have the book follow you across devices (bookworm) is something amazon doesn't have that will hurt them.
Kirk: Amazon is talking about software to let you keep your place on one Kindle on another. How many people own two Kindles? Now reading on a Kindle and then picking up an iPhone that's interesting.
Kat: a missing tag from the cloud is territory. It's a big issue.
Lisa Charters: The issue with territory started 12 years ago with amazon.com shipping books to Canada.
Kirk: If you don't work out the territory issues, there will be piracy. If the content isn't available and devices are widely available, then consumers have no other option than to use piracy. It's training people for piracy.
Kat: Google is doing what it's doing because publishers are too scared and won't work with each other, though it's getting better.
Mike: Chapter downloads on the Kindle is the killer app.
Fatazia?? Meyer?: For a long time people were in love with Amazon for the wrong reasons and afraid of Google. Amazon is this sleeping giant that wants to be a publisher. Jeff Bezos basically said he's out to destroy the business of publishers. They are working to become Apple. Kindle = iPod unless publishers take control. Amazon will have all control over prices.
Kat: I don't think Amazon cares about readers.
Kirk: I love free shipping from Amazon. Cloud computing and storage is great, but they are absolutely playing from the Apple playbook with the Kindle. Most people didn't think about eBooks until Oprah raised the Kindle. Amazon are iterating on their design.
Joe: Having the ability to have the book follow you across devices (bookworm) is something amazon doesn't have that will hurt them.
Kirk: Amazon is talking about software to let you keep your place on one Kindle on another. How many people own two Kindles? Now reading on a Kindle and then picking up an iPhone that's interesting.
Kat: a missing tag from the cloud is territory. It's a big issue.
Lisa Charters: The issue with territory started 12 years ago with amazon.com shipping books to Canada.
Kirk: If you don't work out the territory issues, there will be piracy. If the content isn't available and devices are widely available, then consumers have no other option than to use piracy. It's training people for piracy.
Kat: Google is doing what it's doing because publishers are too scared and won't work with each other, though it's getting better.
Mike: Chapter downloads on the Kindle is the killer app.
TOC: Speaking the Same Language
Least favorite thing about standards:
Tim Spalding: Bookstores are not online, they are web 1.0. You should be able to browse inventory online and know if something is in stock.
Kirk: DRM doesn't help anyone
OTIS: The best way to decide if you want a book is to read the excerpt. Publisher's should make the excerpt easily accessible. Random House keeps a spreadsheet of the videos with authors, but it's not available in an open API.
Clair: "As a lawyer I think going DRM free will come back in spades" "Open standards does not mean open content" Just because you release something in a feed doesn't mean you can't retain your copyright.
Kevin Smokler: Laying out book content well is nailed to the website. Data and nice layout should be automated and available.
Kirk: The web is an open and universal standard that is not owned by anyone. MS Office is universal and not open.
Tim: When looking for standards, look to the huge world of standards in libraries. ONIX was too insular of a discussion and not a real standard. Just take advantage of what libraries know, like FERBER (workid).
OTIS: Amazon created sites like goodreads and librarything by creating amazon webservices. Libraries and publishers should expose their data in the same format. You can't imagine the uses that people will come up with for your data.
Clair: Use the digital millennium copyright act to write a letter in 15 minutes and send a notice when you see your content reused. [if we build a booklamp data set we could check the web for this and send the letters easily] use well targeted attacks, don't go after your customers like the RIAA did. Try going DRM free and see how it goes. Make your customers trust you. Magnitune is doing well with the idea that "we're not evil" and let customers set a price between 5 to $18 and the average price was $15.
OTIS: I know a record producer who hated YouTube two years ago and now loves it because there's revenue sharing via YouTube and now he drives content to it. People will pay for content if its easy to do. Right now that's not true of eBooks
Tim: DRM free eBooks is a down elevator for profits for publishers. Music labels aren't really needed anymore with the new digital world, but what separates music from books is that book publishers provide all sorts of services and data around a book and they should focus on that.
Kevin: The data you have (like author events) is useful to people and you should make it available.
Tim: Get the reading guides out there. Just make a PDF in a folder somewhere.
Tim Spalding: Bookstores are not online, they are web 1.0. You should be able to browse inventory online and know if something is in stock.
Kirk: DRM doesn't help anyone
OTIS: The best way to decide if you want a book is to read the excerpt. Publisher's should make the excerpt easily accessible. Random House keeps a spreadsheet of the videos with authors, but it's not available in an open API.
Clair: "As a lawyer I think going DRM free will come back in spades" "Open standards does not mean open content" Just because you release something in a feed doesn't mean you can't retain your copyright.
Kevin Smokler: Laying out book content well is nailed to the website. Data and nice layout should be automated and available.
Kirk: The web is an open and universal standard that is not owned by anyone. MS Office is universal and not open.
Tim: When looking for standards, look to the huge world of standards in libraries. ONIX was too insular of a discussion and not a real standard. Just take advantage of what libraries know, like FERBER (workid).
OTIS: Amazon created sites like goodreads and librarything by creating amazon webservices. Libraries and publishers should expose their data in the same format. You can't imagine the uses that people will come up with for your data.
Clair: Use the digital millennium copyright act to write a letter in 15 minutes and send a notice when you see your content reused. [if we build a booklamp data set we could check the web for this and send the letters easily] use well targeted attacks, don't go after your customers like the RIAA did. Try going DRM free and see how it goes. Make your customers trust you. Magnitune is doing well with the idea that "we're not evil" and let customers set a price between 5 to $18 and the average price was $15.
OTIS: I know a record producer who hated YouTube two years ago and now loves it because there's revenue sharing via YouTube and now he drives content to it. People will pay for content if its easy to do. Right now that's not true of eBooks
Tim: DRM free eBooks is a down elevator for profits for publishers. Music labels aren't really needed anymore with the new digital world, but what separates music from books is that book publishers provide all sorts of services and data around a book and they should focus on that.
Kevin: The data you have (like author events) is useful to people and you should make it available.
Tim: Get the reading guides out there. Just make a PDF in a folder somewhere.
TOC: New Reading Habits, New Distribution Models
Japan has a system and expectations (KaiTai) of what literature should look like with for instance whitespace on the page inserted by the author for the mobile device. In the US this hasn't happened yet, but people are into the idea of the serialized novel. Especially people with frantic lives who don't have the time to sit down with a book for a couple hours. Daily Lit is looking to create content that is written for the mobile market. Like a cliff hanger at the end of each installment that Dickens did or just a distilled thought from a business book. Harlequin is doing "nooners" short things that can be read on your lunch break. [this is the first new technology I could see myself using]
The key to experimentation is to be open to what might happen, to not force a prediction on it. For instance Daily Lit tried out a service where a book could be built from a blog and it turned out that no one was interested, but suddenly in August they started selling 100 a day. Something happened somewhere that caused it to grow and the lesson learned for experimentation is patience, though, be sure to monitor it with good numbers.
Publishers do not observe what their readers do in their daily lives and they need to. 78% of 12-17 year olds play games online, but only 50% of generation-y, so a huge online change of attitude is coming.
One model big publishers could take is to watch the self or micro publishers and pick the books up when they start to go.
Lester Wunderman's book on marketing, "Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay" (Random House) is the best book on marketing.
Metrics: what is the cost (resource & outlay), time to return cost, what intangibles are trying to be achieved. There are no new metrics, just new terminology [really? don't we have access to far more accurate metrics] Though maybe it just boils down to how much time does it take the editor to do it and what the technology costs versus how many books need to be sold to cover that. [that does make sense]
A book that is written with reader comments may never be finished. It is a living document, a new format that continues to exist. It is a new form of literature that some authors will like and want to work in and others will not. Also this process could be split so when the book is finished and published, then a blog (or whatever) is started and that keeps the conversation going.
[maybe what the publisher should do is determine what the format the author should work in. they might pitch a commented novel, but the publisher says, no it should be a serial download]
Publishing is developing an infrastructure to tell stories
If there's only one reader for a novel, the new technology allows that -- though it may not be profitable
Video games are a different form of narrative art than we are used to. It is a new form of storytelling that engages people.
Reference books might be the kind of books that should allows evolve and not be static.
How does a small publisher deal with a book that lives forever? How do they keep resources on it constantly? [maybe what happens is that's the difference between front list and back list. Front is that which you keep updating, and back list sits static. Maybe you then pull a book from back list to front list in much the way you do today and push more money into it]
[Maybe big publishers should publish much less and watch micro publishers for good content. When they grab the good content they turn it into a big living document with all the technology behind it.]
The Smithsonian did a thing where they had a bluetooth enabled kiosk that electronically poked people with blue tooth devices and said, "hey are you interested in the American Indians exhibit, it's just around the corner?"
Daily Lit is mainly read on desktops or laptops, but mobile is growing.
The key to experimentation is to be open to what might happen, to not force a prediction on it. For instance Daily Lit tried out a service where a book could be built from a blog and it turned out that no one was interested, but suddenly in August they started selling 100 a day. Something happened somewhere that caused it to grow and the lesson learned for experimentation is patience, though, be sure to monitor it with good numbers.
Publishers do not observe what their readers do in their daily lives and they need to. 78% of 12-17 year olds play games online, but only 50% of generation-y, so a huge online change of attitude is coming.
One model big publishers could take is to watch the self or micro publishers and pick the books up when they start to go.
Lester Wunderman's book on marketing, "Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay" (Random House) is the best book on marketing.
Metrics: what is the cost (resource & outlay), time to return cost, what intangibles are trying to be achieved. There are no new metrics, just new terminology [really? don't we have access to far more accurate metrics] Though maybe it just boils down to how much time does it take the editor to do it and what the technology costs versus how many books need to be sold to cover that. [that does make sense]
A book that is written with reader comments may never be finished. It is a living document, a new format that continues to exist. It is a new form of literature that some authors will like and want to work in and others will not. Also this process could be split so when the book is finished and published, then a blog (or whatever) is started and that keeps the conversation going.
[maybe what the publisher should do is determine what the format the author should work in. they might pitch a commented novel, but the publisher says, no it should be a serial download]
Publishing is developing an infrastructure to tell stories
If there's only one reader for a novel, the new technology allows that -- though it may not be profitable
Video games are a different form of narrative art than we are used to. It is a new form of storytelling that engages people.
Reference books might be the kind of books that should allows evolve and not be static.
How does a small publisher deal with a book that lives forever? How do they keep resources on it constantly? [maybe what happens is that's the difference between front list and back list. Front is that which you keep updating, and back list sits static. Maybe you then pull a book from back list to front list in much the way you do today and push more money into it]
[Maybe big publishers should publish much less and watch micro publishers for good content. When they grab the good content they turn it into a big living document with all the technology behind it.]
The Smithsonian did a thing where they had a bluetooth enabled kiosk that electronically poked people with blue tooth devices and said, "hey are you interested in the American Indians exhibit, it's just around the corner?"
Daily Lit is mainly read on desktops or laptops, but mobile is growing.
TOC: Understand your Consumer BEFORE you Define your Strategy
20-30 year olds buy 35% of their books online. baby boomers = 20% and over 60 is less than that
Now is the absolute worst possible time to cut back on research.
PubTrack
-60-75 questions
-book acquisition
-individual activities
-key demographics
consumer metrics
-Book buyer profiles
-purchase metrics
-dollars
-actual selling price
-occasions
-reasons for purchase
-marketing awareness
-competing activites
-share of wallet
-planned / impulse buy
[survey is an old way of looking at this. why ask the consumer what they thought of the purchase when they're more than happy to write consumer data in profiles and twitter about bad experiences? is the person who will fill out the survey afterwards the same person we're trying to learn about? What percentage of people actually fill out surveys and is that the same subset as the new online buyer? I'd guess it's not]
Is the characters age, the book setting right for the buyer?
[they're watching who buys what in witch channels, but isn't the concept of a channel old school thinking or can the metaphor be adopted to the web and we call amazon a channel and ebay a channel?]
[why market towards men or women? that's deciding the data before it gets back to you. why not offer multiple cover images based on the user's profile?]
POS was the step to take publishing into the 20th century. Marketing research is the 21st century.
RH Gender dollars spent on books is Female 53%
More male purchasers are early adopters.
57% of adult books purchased are impulse buys. (2007)
Where is your co-op dollar best spent when impulse buys are done at the airport and B&N purchases are mostly planned.
4.5% of people become aware of books through print, but 13 or so percent from online and 30 some with store display. This breaks out interestingly by channel.
"this is the first time we've had the chance to measure the effectiveness of what we're doing" [!!!]
[we need to have experts on staff who understand research data and statistics]
concluding thoughts
"...are you stuck on sterotypical images?"
sales data is indispensable, but doesn't tell you about the person behind the sale
Now is the absolute worst possible time to cut back on research.
PubTrack
-60-75 questions
-book acquisition
-individual activities
-key demographics
consumer metrics
-Book buyer profiles
-purchase metrics
-dollars
-actual selling price
-occasions
-reasons for purchase
-marketing awareness
-competing activites
-share of wallet
-planned / impulse buy
[survey is an old way of looking at this. why ask the consumer what they thought of the purchase when they're more than happy to write consumer data in profiles and twitter about bad experiences? is the person who will fill out the survey afterwards the same person we're trying to learn about? What percentage of people actually fill out surveys and is that the same subset as the new online buyer? I'd guess it's not]
Is the characters age, the book setting right for the buyer?
[they're watching who buys what in witch channels, but isn't the concept of a channel old school thinking or can the metaphor be adopted to the web and we call amazon a channel and ebay a channel?]
[why market towards men or women? that's deciding the data before it gets back to you. why not offer multiple cover images based on the user's profile?]
POS was the step to take publishing into the 20th century. Marketing research is the 21st century.
RH Gender dollars spent on books is Female 53%
More male purchasers are early adopters.
57% of adult books purchased are impulse buys. (2007)
Where is your co-op dollar best spent when impulse buys are done at the airport and B&N purchases are mostly planned.
4.5% of people become aware of books through print, but 13 or so percent from online and 30 some with store display. This breaks out interestingly by channel.
"this is the first time we've had the chance to measure the effectiveness of what we're doing" [!!!]
[we need to have experts on staff who understand research data and statistics]
concluding thoughts
"...are you stuck on sterotypical images?"
sales data is indispensable, but doesn't tell you about the person behind the sale
TOC: morning keynotes day two
Nelan
COO LexCycle, maker of Stanza
2008 was the inflection point for eBooks. $44 million wholesale eBook sales in last 4 quarters. This is new territory and the numbers are not easy to come by, but it is a small part of the business for sure now.
Oprah, Bezos, Sony are all talking about eBooks recently, so it's hit mainstream (LexCycle downloads went through the roof after Oprah spoke). netbooks are a phenomenon too and have actually cut into windows sales. e-ink has changed readers and in general mobile displays are improving greatly.
The iPhone is a great reader because:
-international reach
-color display
-multi-function display
-built in wireless
-no external light required (backlit device)
-app store (vendors are judged on merits of their applications)
Enter IDPF's EPUB
-user's don't care about standards
-the Jave EE world proves importance of standards
-proprietary formats (and DRM) creates lock in for vendors
-standard format eases the burden of conversion (converting your ebook to multiple formats before sending it out the door)
Stanza
-1.3 million users
-5 million books downloaded
-100,000+ books available
-12 languages
-one of the top applications in the app store
-0.1% of Stanza downloads are free. The first month was only with free books.
Primary usage of Stanza:
-in bed 31% (this shows the importance of a backlight)
-on bus/train 29%
-waiting areas 13%
-home 12%
-work 5%
-bar / cafe / lunch / dinner 5%
-airplane 5%
-2 writes mentioned "in the bathroom"
Stanza has a Fictionwise store, smashwords, feedbooks, project guttenberg, munzi
Adding a custom catalog is a published standard (can take advantage of GeoLocation)
For the Fictionwise store buying patterns are representative of print sales and has 3x sales growth since Dec 3. The average price point is $10.25
Publisher Promotions
-Pan Macmillan Excerpts - first notice of Stanza
-Random House has a free titles promotion / free excerpts
-Harlequin (more bold in the eBook space) has given 4 free minis in Dec and 15 free titles per imprint
The O'Reilly iPhone missing manual was sold as a separate app and was well fitted because of the color the iPhone offers.
Most important take away: It's all about the readers!
Lessons Learned - Readers
-Quality matters - virtuous or vicious cycle
-Every reader is unique - give readers lots of options to customize their reading experience (which font, size, color, etc)
-Every device is unique - things that work for an iPhone might not work for a netbook.
-Listen to the user - twitter blogs facebook - users are happy to tell you what you are doing wrong
-Give your readers a voice
-Moving users from established behaviors takes time
-Friction is bad (remove friction and sales go up)
-Immersive reading
Lessons for Publishers
-Calls to action need to be clear and contextual
-keep it simple
-Hold technology partners to higher standards
-Keep experimenting - be bold
-Have an eBook marketing budget
-Support EPUB
-Support DRM-free
Stanza will be available on other deices someday
Nick Bilton
"I'm not sure what you guys are actually selling right now"
March 22 1876 said the new device called the telephone was going to destroy culture because no one will go out. When the phonograph came out they said it would eclipse the telephone.
Teaches a course called 1 2 10
Gets students to think about mobile device, computer, broadcast
Everything is a story: comics, news, fiction, even user interface is telling a story. And now everyone is a storyteller. We are being bombarded with information. Gary Small did a study at UCLA which shows are brains are more lit up (more area) when on the net than reading.
On twitter we are dealing with all this with swarm intelligence. Us on the net us much like ants.
We used to all get the same content, but now we get smart content.
Sensors as editors (your deices are full of them that aren't taken advantage of) - smart content
Paper is just a device, don't worry about the death of paper. it doesn't offer immediacy. Children are growing up in a world where they are omnivorous and opportunistic. They want immediacy and paper doesn't offer that.
IM and SMS represents a hybrid form of communication, no more dangerous than acronyms
When the printing press came out words moved to the page and stayed their until the web. TV and radio were other forms of communication [which might say publishers missed an opportunity twice and let other industries take over story telling instead of jumping into it as a media company]
The music industry has dealt with new devices and moved form records to tape to CD, but publishing hasn't done that.
"It's all just storytelling"
"I called up major publishers and asked to speak to the R&D group and they said 'the what group?'."
Smart cookies - cookies that exist on iphone, laptop, desktop
Some content is constantly changing and some sets static and we need to be conscious of that.
Versioning is a difficult concept to take from paper to online. Maybe a wikipedia model works for books.
The people in the music industry were so focused on the old profit levels that the rug was swept out from under them. People will pay for content, there is a profit model that will work.
There shouldn't be a book, a video, etc of the same story, they should all be used together in an immersive media and tell one story once.
When journalism started two philosophers debated whether the newspaper should be about the editors telling the proletariat what to think because they're too stupid or should the people tell the story. The former won (with the exception of letter to the editor). Now things have flipped on their head.
Tim O'Reilly
Reasons to be Excited!
Billions of people are coming out of poverty. Alex Tabarrok says it's as if we had a supercomputer with billions of our processors were offline and are going online.
The routing maps of the net are increasingly looking like neurons.
Already the web has published more pages of content than all of the books in print (the ones Google looked at for their project).
Lightweight development has to be part of the publishing process. There can't be a spec and rfd and weeks before it happens. You need to be able to pick up the phone and get it in an hour. You need to partner with people where it makes since. They had the idea of the Missing Manual and called Stanza.
The cell phone is ubiquitous and increasingly is the answer to questions (for instance you want to know which team one a basketball game, you can just look it up instead of debating with friends) [what's that mean that we won't have those knowledge debates? Will there be some shifting in the social status of people?]
compete.com shows how goodreads, shelfari, and librarything are on upward swings. There is a reading public on the net that are sharing information about books. [are these sites going to be the new publishers/editors that choose what we read?]
Stephen Fry is the second most followed on Twitter and is doing a great job self marketing.
Publishers need to get serious about being useful to their authors. The authors shouldn't have to self-market [or maybe they can, but the publisher provides the tools]. Look at 37 Signals and how they didn't need a publisher.
Everybody is not equal on blogs, some have more power. The job of a publisher is to make the authors more equal.
People talk about the long tail, but the people at the head of it have a lot of influence. Tim O'Reilly twittered about a site and the traffic had a huge bump.
Personalize the feed. People follow Tim O'Reilly, they don't follow O'Reilly Books.
Don't just make announcements
Reflect and amplify your community
Talk about what matters to you
People are paying for access to information. The internet is basic cable. Safari online books is a premium channel. There's also pay per view and people buy PDFs.
DRM gets in the way of people reading
Share what you learn so we can all get better faster together.
Sales from O'Reilly eBooks show that PDF sales are growing faster than mobi and epub. PDF has also consistently been largest. (Some books are only sold as PDF because they are too complex to go into the other formats.)
Participation drives revenue - when users are given early access to books under development, revenue in Safari more than doubles.
Web teaches us writing is no longer a solitary experience [wrong: it's still solitary, but now there are many co-authors]
The sales of the iPhone missing manual seemed to be additive. They doubled the price and sales went down 4 times, so they removed that.
Google's concept of algorithmic pricing is probably right.
bookworm is a great digital reading experience
Free books will enable the market for pay books
It's not just about making money
"Go forward, get out of here, make stuff happen"
COO LexCycle, maker of Stanza
2008 was the inflection point for eBooks. $44 million wholesale eBook sales in last 4 quarters. This is new territory and the numbers are not easy to come by, but it is a small part of the business for sure now.
Oprah, Bezos, Sony are all talking about eBooks recently, so it's hit mainstream (LexCycle downloads went through the roof after Oprah spoke). netbooks are a phenomenon too and have actually cut into windows sales. e-ink has changed readers and in general mobile displays are improving greatly.
The iPhone is a great reader because:
-international reach
-color display
-multi-function display
-built in wireless
-no external light required (backlit device)
-app store (vendors are judged on merits of their applications)
Enter IDPF's EPUB
-user's don't care about standards
-the Jave EE world proves importance of standards
-proprietary formats (and DRM) creates lock in for vendors
-standard format eases the burden of conversion (converting your ebook to multiple formats before sending it out the door)
Stanza
-1.3 million users
-5 million books downloaded
-100,000+ books available
-12 languages
-one of the top applications in the app store
-0.1% of Stanza downloads are free. The first month was only with free books.
Primary usage of Stanza:
-in bed 31% (this shows the importance of a backlight)
-on bus/train 29%
-waiting areas 13%
-home 12%
-work 5%
-bar / cafe / lunch / dinner 5%
-airplane 5%
-2 writes mentioned "in the bathroom"
Stanza has a Fictionwise store, smashwords, feedbooks, project guttenberg, munzi
Adding a custom catalog is a published standard (can take advantage of GeoLocation)
For the Fictionwise store buying patterns are representative of print sales and has 3x sales growth since Dec 3. The average price point is $10.25
Publisher Promotions
-Pan Macmillan Excerpts - first notice of Stanza
-Random House has a free titles promotion / free excerpts
-Harlequin (more bold in the eBook space) has given 4 free minis in Dec and 15 free titles per imprint
The O'Reilly iPhone missing manual was sold as a separate app and was well fitted because of the color the iPhone offers.
Most important take away: It's all about the readers!
Lessons Learned - Readers
-Quality matters - virtuous or vicious cycle
-Every reader is unique - give readers lots of options to customize their reading experience (which font, size, color, etc)
-Every device is unique - things that work for an iPhone might not work for a netbook.
-Listen to the user - twitter blogs facebook - users are happy to tell you what you are doing wrong
-Give your readers a voice
-Moving users from established behaviors takes time
-Friction is bad (remove friction and sales go up)
-Immersive reading
Lessons for Publishers
-Calls to action need to be clear and contextual
-keep it simple
-Hold technology partners to higher standards
-Keep experimenting - be bold
-Have an eBook marketing budget
-Support EPUB
-Support DRM-free
Stanza will be available on other deices someday
Nick Bilton
"I'm not sure what you guys are actually selling right now"
March 22 1876 said the new device called the telephone was going to destroy culture because no one will go out. When the phonograph came out they said it would eclipse the telephone.
Teaches a course called 1 2 10
Gets students to think about mobile device, computer, broadcast
Everything is a story: comics, news, fiction, even user interface is telling a story. And now everyone is a storyteller. We are being bombarded with information. Gary Small did a study at UCLA which shows are brains are more lit up (more area) when on the net than reading.
On twitter we are dealing with all this with swarm intelligence. Us on the net us much like ants.
We used to all get the same content, but now we get smart content.
Sensors as editors (your deices are full of them that aren't taken advantage of) - smart content
Paper is just a device, don't worry about the death of paper. it doesn't offer immediacy. Children are growing up in a world where they are omnivorous and opportunistic. They want immediacy and paper doesn't offer that.
IM and SMS represents a hybrid form of communication, no more dangerous than acronyms
When the printing press came out words moved to the page and stayed their until the web. TV and radio were other forms of communication [which might say publishers missed an opportunity twice and let other industries take over story telling instead of jumping into it as a media company]
The music industry has dealt with new devices and moved form records to tape to CD, but publishing hasn't done that.
"It's all just storytelling"
"I called up major publishers and asked to speak to the R&D group and they said 'the what group?'."
Smart cookies - cookies that exist on iphone, laptop, desktop
Some content is constantly changing and some sets static and we need to be conscious of that.
Versioning is a difficult concept to take from paper to online. Maybe a wikipedia model works for books.
The people in the music industry were so focused on the old profit levels that the rug was swept out from under them. People will pay for content, there is a profit model that will work.
There shouldn't be a book, a video, etc of the same story, they should all be used together in an immersive media and tell one story once.
When journalism started two philosophers debated whether the newspaper should be about the editors telling the proletariat what to think because they're too stupid or should the people tell the story. The former won (with the exception of letter to the editor). Now things have flipped on their head.
Tim O'Reilly
Reasons to be Excited!
Billions of people are coming out of poverty. Alex Tabarrok says it's as if we had a supercomputer with billions of our processors were offline and are going online.
The routing maps of the net are increasingly looking like neurons.
Already the web has published more pages of content than all of the books in print (the ones Google looked at for their project).
Lightweight development has to be part of the publishing process. There can't be a spec and rfd and weeks before it happens. You need to be able to pick up the phone and get it in an hour. You need to partner with people where it makes since. They had the idea of the Missing Manual and called Stanza.
The cell phone is ubiquitous and increasingly is the answer to questions (for instance you want to know which team one a basketball game, you can just look it up instead of debating with friends) [what's that mean that we won't have those knowledge debates? Will there be some shifting in the social status of people?]
compete.com shows how goodreads, shelfari, and librarything are on upward swings. There is a reading public on the net that are sharing information about books. [are these sites going to be the new publishers/editors that choose what we read?]
Stephen Fry is the second most followed on Twitter and is doing a great job self marketing.
Publishers need to get serious about being useful to their authors. The authors shouldn't have to self-market [or maybe they can, but the publisher provides the tools]. Look at 37 Signals and how they didn't need a publisher.
Everybody is not equal on blogs, some have more power. The job of a publisher is to make the authors more equal.
People talk about the long tail, but the people at the head of it have a lot of influence. Tim O'Reilly twittered about a site and the traffic had a huge bump.
Personalize the feed. People follow Tim O'Reilly, they don't follow O'Reilly Books.
Don't just make announcements
Reflect and amplify your community
Talk about what matters to you
People are paying for access to information. The internet is basic cable. Safari online books is a premium channel. There's also pay per view and people buy PDFs.
DRM gets in the way of people reading
Share what you learn so we can all get better faster together.
Sales from O'Reilly eBooks show that PDF sales are growing faster than mobi and epub. PDF has also consistently been largest. (Some books are only sold as PDF because they are too complex to go into the other formats.)
Participation drives revenue - when users are given early access to books under development, revenue in Safari more than doubles.
Web teaches us writing is no longer a solitary experience [wrong: it's still solitary, but now there are many co-authors]
The sales of the iPhone missing manual seemed to be additive. They doubled the price and sales went down 4 times, so they removed that.
Google's concept of algorithmic pricing is probably right.
bookworm is a great digital reading experience
Free books will enable the market for pay books
It's not just about making money
"Go forward, get out of here, make stuff happen"
eBook Pricing Afterthoughts
The essential thing missing from the eBook pricing discussion at TOC yesterday was quantity. Publishing is an industry which has great difficulty (not without reason of course) at determining the quantity that will be sold. There are many reasons why this is difficult for print books and it is in some ways a more essential question because balancing availability with demand is at least seen as all important (the notion being that one's desire to buy a particular book is fleeting). In the digital world, balancing availability with demand is a large scale issue and not related (in most cases) to any particular book. A server needs to be able to sell x books in y minutes, not 5 copies of book A and 10 copies of book B.
In the digital world though quantity may be the most important question regarding pricing. We may discover that some books are so valuable and the reach of the internet so broad that the market will tolerate $100 prices. On the other hand it may be proven that a low price of $10 or even $1 results in millions of sales for even mid list titles. Consumers may be more frivolous with eBook purchases if they are cheap.
Already we are seeing a phenomenon with the iPhone app store that may predict this. Apps for the iPhone are social currency. Having the latest and greatest trick loaded on your phone impresses your friends. We may find that Twain's definition of a classic is "a book that everyone downloads to their iPhone and talks about, but never reads".
Also, at $1 (or a similar level) people might be tempted to purchase just to try it out. Maybe people will purchase books in a manner similar to channel surfing, where they download, read a few pages, download another, read a few pages, and so on.
Then again maybe the fears are true and publishing will fall apart and book prices will rise (or salaries and advances go down) as the public becomes less and less interested in reading. If that is the case though it won't matter whether eBooks are sold at hardcover prices or not. You cannot undercut the cost on something that the market does not value. The most impressive thing about the internet and the digital age is scale. How likely is it that the quantity of eBooks sold will not scale?
In the digital world though quantity may be the most important question regarding pricing. We may discover that some books are so valuable and the reach of the internet so broad that the market will tolerate $100 prices. On the other hand it may be proven that a low price of $10 or even $1 results in millions of sales for even mid list titles. Consumers may be more frivolous with eBook purchases if they are cheap.
Already we are seeing a phenomenon with the iPhone app store that may predict this. Apps for the iPhone are social currency. Having the latest and greatest trick loaded on your phone impresses your friends. We may find that Twain's definition of a classic is "a book that everyone downloads to their iPhone and talks about, but never reads".
Also, at $1 (or a similar level) people might be tempted to purchase just to try it out. Maybe people will purchase books in a manner similar to channel surfing, where they download, read a few pages, download another, read a few pages, and so on.
Then again maybe the fears are true and publishing will fall apart and book prices will rise (or salaries and advances go down) as the public becomes less and less interested in reading. If that is the case though it won't matter whether eBooks are sold at hardcover prices or not. You cannot undercut the cost on something that the market does not value. The most impressive thing about the internet and the digital age is scale. How likely is it that the quantity of eBooks sold will not scale?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
TOC afternoon keynotes
Jeff Jarvis
What Would Google Do (WWGD)?
Hypocrisy warning: Because the author got an advance he published a traditional book and did not "eat his own dog food" and make the book searchable.
The link changes everything
Everybody needs a little SEO
Think distributed (people don't have to come to us)
We need to do the work of publishing in public
It's about the process (EG blog) not a product
Elegant organzation is what FaceBook and publishing should do
mass market is dead, it's all about the niche
AOL should have become FaceBook instead of partnering with a media company
yahoo shouldn't have become a movie studio, they should have become an advertising giant like google
publishing is not about making books, it's about ideas and community
life is beta (it's a form of transparency too)
Craig Newmark: get out of the way (media tries to control all the time, but need to learn to get out of the way)
What if Google ruled the world?
-GoogleCollins - kill the book to save it
- video book, eBook / vBook, audio book, powerpoint, twitter reviews, performance, blog process
- what if publishers bought access to ideas across all media [some authors only have one idea they keep rewriting in new wonderful ways]
- what if readers subscribe to updates
- what if books were updatable searchable, linkable, correctable [adobe forms might let us do correctable]
- what if the book were a process more than a product
The process of peer review in a blog leads to deep thinking (in contrast to Is Google Making us Stupid).
In a content economy you pay for copies. In a process economy contents with links give value to the content; a book without links is worthless.
Is advertising replaced by quality and service. Are the customers the ad agency?
Impact of google
we stay linked forever
is privacy over because of publicness
does the internet make us smarter
government - transparent administration?
talent - this is the creation generation
publishing has always let people make their mark, but now the scale can be much bigger. 80-some% of people
Sara Lloyd (the Digitalist)
What does the future look like for publishers?
Are publishers extending into the online world or being commented on in the world?
The digital market offers a great big marketing opportunity. Free blogging before the publication puts a huge amount of pressure on the published product. It has to be a package that incorporates the experience.
You're operating on shifting sands.
The future does not look like what you think it will.
Nintendo DS put its toe in the water with classic book offerings.
The mobile phone has already adapted faster and better than any eBook reader device.
google has the ability to completely change the industry.
8% of the apps for the iphone on the first week were various reading apps.
5 out of 10 of the bestsellers in Japan began on a mobile device.
Stanza is at 1.2 million when eBook readers sell in hundreds of thousands
50% of those in Africa have a phone and they spend 30-70% of their income on it - huge potential for educational marketing
if an access/subscription model becomes the standard, google will probably win
social DRM is needed for the market to grow
google is ignoring the publishers DRM / propriety battle and just figuring it out in a simple way
the challenge for publishing is working with average users instead of against them
content is king --> comments are king
go out and be part of the conversation instead of bringing people to you (and learn from it)
publishing currently has the distribution key, but could loose that
publishing may need to offer tools, services, forums,
may need to collaborate much more effectively
publishers understand markets, not people (they talk about reaching the "general reader")
"we need to reengineer pricing for the new models"
publishers have always outsourced for technology (book binding, XML). now it should have that strength inside.
publishers need to come out of their ivory towers. publishers are rubbish at working with each other.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/music
nature can react instantly to change, but it takes longer to redraw the maps.
need to invest in digital infrastructure
need to use the internet as a tool or resource (the book isn't this pure source of content and the internet not)
need commercial models of distribution that value the content
need standards for interoperability
need to constantly review our performance
need to respect the reader
Jason Freid
keynote
37 Signals - The best software with the least amount of necessary features
37 Signals made $500,000 on a PDF book and an additional 500,000 on ___ [conferences?] in a couple years on the side.
Don't consider themselves author, in fact wrote the book by accident.
Whenever you make something you make something else -- there's always a byproduct (a lesson learned later).
The lumber industry started to cut down trees to make structures. There were these waste products (chips and dust) that they later realized they could turn into products and now lumbar byproducts is an industry onto itself. The oil industry did a similar thing.
37 Signals byproducts were their opinions, success, failures.
Around 2003 37 Signals realized they couldn't use email to manage projects and went looking for a project management tool. They look at MS Project and its all about stats and graphs, but management should be about collaboration. So 37 Signals made a system and used it for themselves. Customers noticed it and asked for it. It went on the market in 2004 (base camp). They became a full time business
business is paranoid about sharing business ideas
If a famous chef sold a cook book other people wouldn't put him out of business
business needs to build an audience.
they started sharing what they did and making money just talking about what they do
they don't think they know what they're doing, but they know what works for them so they're not afraid to talk about it
they realized they'd been writing a book (about how meetings suck, etc) on their blog so they made a book
They sold a book through a publisher and only made 12,000 because publishers like to make themselves money
so they decided they next book would just be by selling a PDF (a form people could consume) it started selling really well
people asked for a print book, so they publish it on LuLu and get about 50,000 a year for it.
they decided to put the book up for free online to help build the audience
now they have an audience and are working on another book (with a traditional publisher)
they did well because they wanted to control their content and had the guts to do it
publishers have byproducts that they could sell but don't want to (audio recordings of 37 signals team yelling at each other, early drafts)
publishers should sell/share proposals, early versions (it works for the extended features of a DVD)
they wanted mainstream appeal with their next book and be a bestseller. they are very good at selling to their audience (tech people), but wanted to extend the audience.
they are thinking of having a guy do a sketch cartoon version of the book.
the book generates a lot of publicity which is great for the business. just talking things through also helps a lot in understanding them.
the software has an affiliate setup, but the books aren't in that because they're sold through a separate system.
Jason Epstein
Technology and Human Nature
[NOTE: Jason spoke softly and it was very difficult to make out what he said, so there are certainly more errors in my summary than usual below]
We're at the end of the Guttenberg era. A cultural revolution is on its way if we survive the economic collapse, icebergs melting, and missiles. Technology made possible by Guttenberg's invention. Rather than spread the Bible, the press spread our secular cultural. Some Muslims at the time said the press was Satanic. Hiroshima and the economic collapse cast blame on the press.
The internet is like the press going to bring a revolution.
We are storying telling animals that find ourselves in these stories. It's in our nature to hold on to the most truthful stories and discard the rest. What is false does not survive. We read Homer yet their were other stories about Troy.
Americans will always do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.
Most of our time on Earth stories and poems were memorized works. A technology was invented to capture these in scribbles and we found in ourselves somehow the ability to glance at these scribbles and decode them. We built up a codex and all of our civilization is encoded within it. If all of it becomes electronic, may we pray that a great malfunction does not loose them all. Ephemeral content such as encyclopedias are not archived and are increasingly existing only in digital form.
Its not impossible to imagine a digital world in the future without Ginsberg.
Non-fiction will always be written by people working alone in their studies, not in linked networks. The real experts always work this way.
Literary work with a few exceptions has always been a solitary work.
iPhones will produce a few gems amongst the rabble. Rights will become superfluous. Digital rights management is essential. It is not about greed, but survival. Copyright law is too long though and should only last the lifetime of the author. [publishers would have an inherit bias towards younger writers]
Some booksellers have become publishers. Word of mouth has always been the best source of information about books.
Like American automobile producers, publishers will defend their business model until they are forced to change.
Talented editors only need a small amount of management to function, which is increasingly more so in a digital world.
Agents might become group managers of editors. Authors will use not for profit arrangements to protect themselves.
Customers will pay less. Whenever new publishing paradigms exist,... man is a story telling creature and that will persist.
Print on demand can be even further decentralize publishing. Dedicated reading devices have a place as they approach the original codex.
The wheel doesn't have to be reinvented though. Multipurpose mobile devices will instead be the main choice.
The most economical presentation device will remain to be the original.
An Espresso book making machine at the University of Alberta prints about 100 books a day. This could happen at any college bookstore to produce course notes and texts.
The decentralized world wide digital marketplace can extend to coffee shops and other such places. The 15% Hispanic population could be much better served by this. The sub-Saharan market which is highly under-served can be reached out to.
The Espresso is brand new and not fully tested, but those who have seen it operate have seen the future.
What Would Google Do (WWGD)?
Hypocrisy warning: Because the author got an advance he published a traditional book and did not "eat his own dog food" and make the book searchable.
The link changes everything
Everybody needs a little SEO
Think distributed (people don't have to come to us)
We need to do the work of publishing in public
It's about the process (EG blog) not a product
Elegant organzation is what FaceBook and publishing should do
mass market is dead, it's all about the niche
AOL should have become FaceBook instead of partnering with a media company
yahoo shouldn't have become a movie studio, they should have become an advertising giant like google
publishing is not about making books, it's about ideas and community
life is beta (it's a form of transparency too)
Craig Newmark: get out of the way (media tries to control all the time, but need to learn to get out of the way)
What if Google ruled the world?
-GoogleCollins - kill the book to save it
- video book, eBook / vBook, audio book, powerpoint, twitter reviews, performance, blog process
- what if publishers bought access to ideas across all media [some authors only have one idea they keep rewriting in new wonderful ways]
- what if readers subscribe to updates
- what if books were updatable searchable, linkable, correctable [adobe forms might let us do correctable]
- what if the book were a process more than a product
The process of peer review in a blog leads to deep thinking (in contrast to Is Google Making us Stupid).
In a content economy you pay for copies. In a process economy contents with links give value to the content; a book without links is worthless.
Is advertising replaced by quality and service. Are the customers the ad agency?
Impact of google
we stay linked forever
is privacy over because of publicness
does the internet make us smarter
government - transparent administration?
talent - this is the creation generation
publishing has always let people make their mark, but now the scale can be much bigger. 80-some% of people
Sara Lloyd (the Digitalist)
What does the future look like for publishers?
Are publishers extending into the online world or being commented on in the world?
The digital market offers a great big marketing opportunity. Free blogging before the publication puts a huge amount of pressure on the published product. It has to be a package that incorporates the experience.
You're operating on shifting sands.
The future does not look like what you think it will.
Nintendo DS put its toe in the water with classic book offerings.
The mobile phone has already adapted faster and better than any eBook reader device.
google has the ability to completely change the industry.
8% of the apps for the iphone on the first week were various reading apps.
5 out of 10 of the bestsellers in Japan began on a mobile device.
Stanza is at 1.2 million when eBook readers sell in hundreds of thousands
50% of those in Africa have a phone and they spend 30-70% of their income on it - huge potential for educational marketing
if an access/subscription model becomes the standard, google will probably win
social DRM is needed for the market to grow
google is ignoring the publishers DRM / propriety battle and just figuring it out in a simple way
the challenge for publishing is working with average users instead of against them
content is king --> comments are king
go out and be part of the conversation instead of bringing people to you (and learn from it)
publishing currently has the distribution key, but could loose that
publishing may need to offer tools, services, forums,
may need to collaborate much more effectively
publishers understand markets, not people (they talk about reaching the "general reader")
"we need to reengineer pricing for the new models"
publishers have always outsourced for technology (book binding, XML). now it should have that strength inside.
publishers need to come out of their ivory towers. publishers are rubbish at working with each other.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/music
nature can react instantly to change, but it takes longer to redraw the maps.
need to invest in digital infrastructure
need to use the internet as a tool or resource (the book isn't this pure source of content and the internet not)
need commercial models of distribution that value the content
need standards for interoperability
need to constantly review our performance
need to respect the reader
Jason Freid
keynote
37 Signals - The best software with the least amount of necessary features
37 Signals made $500,000 on a PDF book and an additional 500,000 on ___ [conferences?] in a couple years on the side.
Don't consider themselves author, in fact wrote the book by accident.
Whenever you make something you make something else -- there's always a byproduct (a lesson learned later).
The lumber industry started to cut down trees to make structures. There were these waste products (chips and dust) that they later realized they could turn into products and now lumbar byproducts is an industry onto itself. The oil industry did a similar thing.
37 Signals byproducts were their opinions, success, failures.
Around 2003 37 Signals realized they couldn't use email to manage projects and went looking for a project management tool. They look at MS Project and its all about stats and graphs, but management should be about collaboration. So 37 Signals made a system and used it for themselves. Customers noticed it and asked for it. It went on the market in 2004 (base camp). They became a full time business
business is paranoid about sharing business ideas
If a famous chef sold a cook book other people wouldn't put him out of business
business needs to build an audience.
they started sharing what they did and making money just talking about what they do
they don't think they know what they're doing, but they know what works for them so they're not afraid to talk about it
they realized they'd been writing a book (about how meetings suck, etc) on their blog so they made a book
They sold a book through a publisher and only made 12,000 because publishers like to make themselves money
so they decided they next book would just be by selling a PDF (a form people could consume) it started selling really well
people asked for a print book, so they publish it on LuLu and get about 50,000 a year for it.
they decided to put the book up for free online to help build the audience
now they have an audience and are working on another book (with a traditional publisher)
they did well because they wanted to control their content and had the guts to do it
publishers have byproducts that they could sell but don't want to (audio recordings of 37 signals team yelling at each other, early drafts)
publishers should sell/share proposals, early versions (it works for the extended features of a DVD)
they wanted mainstream appeal with their next book and be a bestseller. they are very good at selling to their audience (tech people), but wanted to extend the audience.
they are thinking of having a guy do a sketch cartoon version of the book.
the book generates a lot of publicity which is great for the business. just talking things through also helps a lot in understanding them.
the software has an affiliate setup, but the books aren't in that because they're sold through a separate system.
Jason Epstein
Technology and Human Nature
[NOTE: Jason spoke softly and it was very difficult to make out what he said, so there are certainly more errors in my summary than usual below]
We're at the end of the Guttenberg era. A cultural revolution is on its way if we survive the economic collapse, icebergs melting, and missiles. Technology made possible by Guttenberg's invention. Rather than spread the Bible, the press spread our secular cultural. Some Muslims at the time said the press was Satanic. Hiroshima and the economic collapse cast blame on the press.
The internet is like the press going to bring a revolution.
We are storying telling animals that find ourselves in these stories. It's in our nature to hold on to the most truthful stories and discard the rest. What is false does not survive. We read Homer yet their were other stories about Troy.
Americans will always do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.
Most of our time on Earth stories and poems were memorized works. A technology was invented to capture these in scribbles and we found in ourselves somehow the ability to glance at these scribbles and decode them. We built up a codex and all of our civilization is encoded within it. If all of it becomes electronic, may we pray that a great malfunction does not loose them all. Ephemeral content such as encyclopedias are not archived and are increasingly existing only in digital form.
Its not impossible to imagine a digital world in the future without Ginsberg.
Non-fiction will always be written by people working alone in their studies, not in linked networks. The real experts always work this way.
Literary work with a few exceptions has always been a solitary work.
iPhones will produce a few gems amongst the rabble. Rights will become superfluous. Digital rights management is essential. It is not about greed, but survival. Copyright law is too long though and should only last the lifetime of the author. [publishers would have an inherit bias towards younger writers]
Some booksellers have become publishers. Word of mouth has always been the best source of information about books.
Like American automobile producers, publishers will defend their business model until they are forced to change.
Talented editors only need a small amount of management to function, which is increasingly more so in a digital world.
Agents might become group managers of editors. Authors will use not for profit arrangements to protect themselves.
Customers will pay less. Whenever new publishing paradigms exist,... man is a story telling creature and that will persist.
Print on demand can be even further decentralize publishing. Dedicated reading devices have a place as they approach the original codex.
The wheel doesn't have to be reinvented though. Multipurpose mobile devices will instead be the main choice.
The most economical presentation device will remain to be the original.
An Espresso book making machine at the University of Alberta prints about 100 books a day. This could happen at any college bookstore to produce course notes and texts.
The decentralized world wide digital marketplace can extend to coffee shops and other such places. The 15% Hispanic population could be much better served by this. The sub-Saharan market which is highly under-served can be reached out to.
The Espresso is brand new and not fully tested, but those who have seen it operate have seen the future.
TOC: Pricing Digital Products
[On NPR the other day they were talking about the Kindle and the reporter said how publishers love it because it is so much cheaper for them. From my experience this is simply not the truth, but it definitely is the public perception. As you can see below Sarah Lloyd argues that the costs for a text are fairly fixed and not based much on the format. As an audience member pointed out though the price points for hardcover and paperback differ, so the industry promotes the idea that format dictates price. Sarah Lloyd said well it's about old versus new content. To an extent this is true, but what about initials published as trade paperback? Also what was completely lacking from the conversation is that most books aren't profitable. Each book cannot have its own costs built into the price given that we know so many books are write offs. Although Sarah Lloyd was arguing for author's wages, this is business. If the public demands cheap books, then maybe all authors end up being English teachers. It's a horrible scenario that I don't want to see happen, but just because it's the wrong thing it doesn't mean it's not the logical outcome when you add it all up. Maybe all writers will need day jobs in the digital world. Maybe as Nelan said publishing won't be able to afford to rent buildings on Broadway. We should strive to change the scene, but we will fail if we do not face these real potentials.]
Many potential panelists said "I'd love to talk about it, but I can't"
O'Reilly sells 3 formats in a bundle when it sells an eBook and gives free updates
45% of worldwide sales on oreilly.com electronic and 55% print
65% electronic for international only
eBooks were first sold at 50% MSRP. Bookmarked and linked all eBooks before making available, so changed price to 30% and then 20%. Basically they saw resources were being used to create it.
When talking to others it sounds like a black art for pricing eBooks. Lexical was priced at a somewhat arbitrary price and sold way beyond expectations. Publishers are calibrated for pricing based on the print world and are not ready for the digital.
Nelan - Lexical
Stanza reader has about 1.3 million downloads and 3 people at the company. O'Reilly drops a book into it and it becomes a best seller.
The way to understand pricing is where is the money going. 45% of the price is for the publisher, 10% goes to the distributor, DRM 3-5%, and credit card 3-6% - retailer gets 35% left over and has to discount with that. Should distributors really be getting 10%. Does it make sense to pay 3-6% for DRM, a lock you don't have the key to? Also consider that costs will drop as user-ship goes up.
Sarah Lloyd
We should not re-calibrate cost structure too quickly. Most of the costs in the book are ones that are about creating the content. For instance the advance given to the author is a cost that doesn't go away when you make an eBook. As time goes on some costs will go down. $1.99 ebooks can't happen for this reason [but what about sales levels, I can only fit so many books on my shelf, but I could fit millions on my computer]
Some people buy books for insurance because it might go out of print. Will we loose that with on demand availability?
Sarah Lloyd
Gifts can be made out of gift cards, but what you probably will see is print books being made more lovely and better suited as gifts and eBooks will be more like the throw away books for the beach. These two products will become more extreme.
Are we going to be looking for a new type of author/content creator? Reader expectations about corrections or embed videos or links put new pressures.
Noren
eBooks have changed our way of reading. One user was looking for the time in the margin of a printed book and another flicked the page to turn it. Maybe the price can be justified by adding extra content. A travel guide could have weather/construciton advisories built in. Also bundling digital and physical might add value.
At some point we'll need an algorithm for adjusting price versus interest.
Sarah Lloyd
Authors expect to be paid to right. Publishers have a responsibility to sustain the culture that currently exists. Whereas musicians can make money on touring, artists can only rely on the book itself. We are willing to watch the same song played over and over, but not the same painting repainted, or the same chapter rewritten.
Pricing is about what it costs to produce.
Noren
The curious case of Benjamin Button was number one on the app store. It was also available on the free side. The O'Reilly book, the missing iPhone manual was priced at 4.99 and sold really well. Much of the
We have a moment in time to assert what we feel the price of the product should be.
Traffic form India on O'Reilly is the highest, but sales are the lowest. Should they price differently?
Noren
Fictionwise uses the model of MSRP and then lots and lots of rebates. Others deal with people comparing CostCo prices to online and don't want a rebate.
Do a good job of segmentation and understand your audience.
Try different things. You have lots of titles to play around with. The missing manual as an app instead of a book in Stanza didn't seem like a great idea but it worked really well.
Sarah Lloyd
Don't listen to the people on the fringes on the industry who are trying to dictate what the books are worth. Stand up for your authors.
Many potential panelists said "I'd love to talk about it, but I can't"
O'Reilly sells 3 formats in a bundle when it sells an eBook and gives free updates
45% of worldwide sales on oreilly.com electronic and 55% print
65% electronic for international only
eBooks were first sold at 50% MSRP. Bookmarked and linked all eBooks before making available, so changed price to 30% and then 20%. Basically they saw resources were being used to create it.
When talking to others it sounds like a black art for pricing eBooks. Lexical was priced at a somewhat arbitrary price and sold way beyond expectations. Publishers are calibrated for pricing based on the print world and are not ready for the digital.
Nelan - Lexical
Stanza reader has about 1.3 million downloads and 3 people at the company. O'Reilly drops a book into it and it becomes a best seller.
The way to understand pricing is where is the money going. 45% of the price is for the publisher, 10% goes to the distributor, DRM 3-5%, and credit card 3-6% - retailer gets 35% left over and has to discount with that. Should distributors really be getting 10%. Does it make sense to pay 3-6% for DRM, a lock you don't have the key to? Also consider that costs will drop as user-ship goes up.
Sarah Lloyd
We should not re-calibrate cost structure too quickly. Most of the costs in the book are ones that are about creating the content. For instance the advance given to the author is a cost that doesn't go away when you make an eBook. As time goes on some costs will go down. $1.99 ebooks can't happen for this reason [but what about sales levels, I can only fit so many books on my shelf, but I could fit millions on my computer]
Some people buy books for insurance because it might go out of print. Will we loose that with on demand availability?
Sarah Lloyd
Gifts can be made out of gift cards, but what you probably will see is print books being made more lovely and better suited as gifts and eBooks will be more like the throw away books for the beach. These two products will become more extreme.
Are we going to be looking for a new type of author/content creator? Reader expectations about corrections or embed videos or links put new pressures.
Noren
eBooks have changed our way of reading. One user was looking for the time in the margin of a printed book and another flicked the page to turn it. Maybe the price can be justified by adding extra content. A travel guide could have weather/construciton advisories built in. Also bundling digital and physical might add value.
At some point we'll need an algorithm for adjusting price versus interest.
Sarah Lloyd
Authors expect to be paid to right. Publishers have a responsibility to sustain the culture that currently exists. Whereas musicians can make money on touring, artists can only rely on the book itself. We are willing to watch the same song played over and over, but not the same painting repainted, or the same chapter rewritten.
Pricing is about what it costs to produce.
Noren
The curious case of Benjamin Button was number one on the app store. It was also available on the free side. The O'Reilly book, the missing iPhone manual was priced at 4.99 and sold really well. Much of the
We have a moment in time to assert what we feel the price of the product should be.
Traffic form India on O'Reilly is the highest, but sales are the lowest. Should they price differently?
Noren
Fictionwise uses the model of MSRP and then lots and lots of rebates. Others deal with people comparing CostCo prices to online and don't want a rebate.
Do a good job of segmentation and understand your audience.
Try different things. You have lots of titles to play around with. The missing manual as an app instead of a book in Stanza didn't seem like a great idea but it worked really well.
Sarah Lloyd
Don't listen to the people on the fringes on the industry who are trying to dictate what the books are worth. Stand up for your authors.
TOC: If Shakespeare had a Hard Drive - Matthew Kirschenbaum
[My interest in this session is that archiving the data surrounding a book may be a service a publisher can offer. If everything is digital the publisher has the authority to say, this was the original version, this is the first edit, this is an actual correspondence with an editor, etc.]
Today nearly all literature is born-digital in the sense that it is composed on a word processor and saved on a hard drive.
What we have from Shakespeare today are most likely memorial productions put together afterwords. It is what we have to study since we have no authoritative text, so experts use the sources available and learn what they can from them. T.S. Elliot's first version of "The Waste Land" is different from the first published edition and we can use both to understand the text.
When we saw "the complete works of X" are we speaking of the published work, the unpublished, the laundry bills with a signature? We have a fairly good grasp of this challenging question, but for contemporary authors it is a bigger question. What are the bounds of the writings of a contemporary author? Do we consider their Twitter postings when we speak of their complete works?
No matter how we answer that question, we also have a question of what gets archived. Norman Mailer's old laptop for instance is on display in Texas (Ransom center) as an artifact.
Hybrid documents. We may have a hand written version, the typed version, the MS word version, the Story Space (hypertext) version, an HTML version, and an eBook. The same text migrates across the spectrum and typically gets edited at each step. We have a philosophical question here about whether the text is all of these things or one thing that goes through them.
What do we do with an old email that says "if you want to make public all or part of this, fine". Is that part of the author's corpus then.
Fronds = stuff that belonged to the author that became part of an archival collection.
Challenges: hardware failure, data format obsolesce, physical format and device obsolescence, volume of data, cataloging (finding aids), metadata, versions & duplicates (great for comparative literature, but could mean thousands of versions of the text if you use time machine), confidentiality (other data on the drive), authenticity, security, copyright & intellectual property (what do you do if the author donates a computer with pirated data on it?) Some archivists are setting up terminals with old computers so they can access old data.
In the past archival material survived in attics or basements, but that's highly unlikely with digital data. So what does this mean? Should the archivist approach the author early on and preserve the data. What is Stephen King's inbox worth? Should it be archived? Authors could become savvy to the monetization of their born digital documents and complicate this.
For every challenge there is an opportunity. - Wikipedia and track changes in MS Word allow you to see document history. Wouldn't it be a useful tool for textual analysis to look at this history to see what attracted the attention of editors. We can even use this for determining authenticity.
The challenges (and opportunities) are at least as much social as technological. The New Yorker's fiction editor said she sometimes prints interesting email from authors, but otherwise the server is automatically erased. This is a social issue, not a technical one really.
An authors computer is not just a device, but an environment. Just say there was a BDSM photo on Norman Mailer's desktop from the previously mentioned laptop (there's not), wouldn't that inform us about the author? We're interested in pictures hanging in the room when a piece was composed, so we should also be interested in how the author customized the computer. it's part of their workspace.
Libraries have policies for discarding dust jackets and actually many text have no surviving dust jacket. So what will be the similar thing for this time? Are we interested in file structure and organization, bookmarks, cookies, etc?
Part of the digital workflow should be attention to preserving the digital life of the book. People do care about drafts and correspondence between authors and editors.
Today nearly all literature is born-digital in the sense that it is composed on a word processor and saved on a hard drive.
What we have from Shakespeare today are most likely memorial productions put together afterwords. It is what we have to study since we have no authoritative text, so experts use the sources available and learn what they can from them. T.S. Elliot's first version of "The Waste Land" is different from the first published edition and we can use both to understand the text.
When we saw "the complete works of X" are we speaking of the published work, the unpublished, the laundry bills with a signature? We have a fairly good grasp of this challenging question, but for contemporary authors it is a bigger question. What are the bounds of the writings of a contemporary author? Do we consider their Twitter postings when we speak of their complete works?
No matter how we answer that question, we also have a question of what gets archived. Norman Mailer's old laptop for instance is on display in Texas (Ransom center) as an artifact.
Hybrid documents. We may have a hand written version, the typed version, the MS word version, the Story Space (hypertext) version, an HTML version, and an eBook. The same text migrates across the spectrum and typically gets edited at each step. We have a philosophical question here about whether the text is all of these things or one thing that goes through them.
What do we do with an old email that says "if you want to make public all or part of this, fine". Is that part of the author's corpus then.
Fronds = stuff that belonged to the author that became part of an archival collection.
Challenges: hardware failure, data format obsolesce, physical format and device obsolescence, volume of data, cataloging (finding aids), metadata, versions & duplicates (great for comparative literature, but could mean thousands of versions of the text if you use time machine), confidentiality (other data on the drive), authenticity, security, copyright & intellectual property (what do you do if the author donates a computer with pirated data on it?) Some archivists are setting up terminals with old computers so they can access old data.
In the past archival material survived in attics or basements, but that's highly unlikely with digital data. So what does this mean? Should the archivist approach the author early on and preserve the data. What is Stephen King's inbox worth? Should it be archived? Authors could become savvy to the monetization of their born digital documents and complicate this.
For every challenge there is an opportunity. - Wikipedia and track changes in MS Word allow you to see document history. Wouldn't it be a useful tool for textual analysis to look at this history to see what attracted the attention of editors. We can even use this for determining authenticity.
The challenges (and opportunities) are at least as much social as technological. The New Yorker's fiction editor said she sometimes prints interesting email from authors, but otherwise the server is automatically erased. This is a social issue, not a technical one really.
An authors computer is not just a device, but an environment. Just say there was a BDSM photo on Norman Mailer's desktop from the previously mentioned laptop (there's not), wouldn't that inform us about the author? We're interested in pictures hanging in the room when a piece was composed, so we should also be interested in how the author customized the computer. it's part of their workspace.
Libraries have policies for discarding dust jackets and actually many text have no surviving dust jacket. So what will be the similar thing for this time? Are we interested in file structure and organization, bookmarks, cookies, etc?
Part of the digital workflow should be attention to preserving the digital life of the book. People do care about drafts and correspondence between authors and editors.
TOC: How Change Happens - Scott Berkun
"Tools of Change" puts the focus on the tools, change actually takes place because of people. No technological innovation happen in 1776 when the American Revolution happened. No transformative tool was used. "There is no change until someone stakes their reputation on doing something different You not make change without power"
We do not like change because (via evolution we have to be concerned about how we use calories)
- creates work
- requires thinking
- have to talk or listen to each other
- raises questions we prefer to avoid
- risk of embarrassment
Mazno: Hierarchy of needs. People are unhappy when they are stuck moving up the hierarchy.
Protections against change
- codify rules and mythologize origins
- binds society
...
idea killers (from the myhs of innovation)
"this is not how things are done" has no bearing on the merit of the idea
we seek change when we get motivated by problems and are unhappy. the people who are allies for change are the people who are unhappy.
"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas S. Kuhn -- about paradigm shifts. Book quotes Max Plank saying new scientific truth triumphs when the proponents die and a new generation familiar with new ideas comes up.
Revolution is only great in the US because we had a successful one. In the world your chances are pretty bad. Talk about the thing, not revolution or radical shift.
Power - autocracy is the most expedient way to make change (Constantine made people go from feeding Christians to lions to being friendly because of an edict). Look for who has power to make change happen.
Grass Roots - term came from progressive party. The idea of disseminating ideas is great, but all you do is push the idea around until someone who has power to make it happen. It's just a vehicle for disseminating ideas, not a vehicle for change itself.
Progress happens from power (what change can you mandate), persuasion (who will support you), intuition (what can you anticipate). Case study: Chester Carlson & Xerox. Look at innovations and you often find the person tried it and failed and then someone else came along who knew how to sell it and it took off.
Playbook for individuals (entrepreneurship is a similar process)
- pilot (incubation, beta, a test) - do it on a small scale first
- show success
- find allies
- ask for more resources, stake reputation
- repeat
- (coup!) (launch)
Management is largely structured around preservation (the profession is only about 150 years). Innovation is talked about, but managers are rewarded for keeping things stable. A manager who wants innovation needs to have their people innovate, not themselves.
- Pavlov lives - people do what we are rewarded for.
- Hire for change (age & psychology)
- Accept some ideas you don't like (good employees have knowledge you don't have)
- Encourage interesting failures
- Only you can provide cover fire (most important thing a manager can do)
Agenda
- people make change, not tools
- we fear change
- facts: revolution, power (whose power can you borrow), grass roots
- tactics: pilot & repeat, cover fire
Real change is about the people who put themselves at stake and made it happen.
"48 laws of power" <-- interesting Machiavellian read for those without a soul
We do not like change because (via evolution we have to be concerned about how we use calories)
- creates work
- requires thinking
- have to talk or listen to each other
- raises questions we prefer to avoid
- risk of embarrassment
Mazno: Hierarchy of needs. People are unhappy when they are stuck moving up the hierarchy.
Protections against change
- codify rules and mythologize origins
- binds society
...
idea killers (from the myhs of innovation)
"this is not how things are done" has no bearing on the merit of the idea
we seek change when we get motivated by problems and are unhappy. the people who are allies for change are the people who are unhappy.
"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas S. Kuhn -- about paradigm shifts. Book quotes Max Plank saying new scientific truth triumphs when the proponents die and a new generation familiar with new ideas comes up.
Revolution is only great in the US because we had a successful one. In the world your chances are pretty bad. Talk about the thing, not revolution or radical shift.
Power - autocracy is the most expedient way to make change (Constantine made people go from feeding Christians to lions to being friendly because of an edict). Look for who has power to make change happen.
Grass Roots - term came from progressive party. The idea of disseminating ideas is great, but all you do is push the idea around until someone who has power to make it happen. It's just a vehicle for disseminating ideas, not a vehicle for change itself.
Progress happens from power (what change can you mandate), persuasion (who will support you), intuition (what can you anticipate). Case study: Chester Carlson & Xerox. Look at innovations and you often find the person tried it and failed and then someone else came along who knew how to sell it and it took off.
Playbook for individuals (entrepreneurship is a similar process)
- pilot (incubation, beta, a test) - do it on a small scale first
- show success
- find allies
- ask for more resources, stake reputation
- repeat
- (coup!) (launch)
Management is largely structured around preservation (the profession is only about 150 years). Innovation is talked about, but managers are rewarded for keeping things stable. A manager who wants innovation needs to have their people innovate, not themselves.
- Pavlov lives - people do what we are rewarded for.
- Hire for change (age & psychology)
- Accept some ideas you don't like (good employees have knowledge you don't have)
- Encourage interesting failures
- Only you can provide cover fire (most important thing a manager can do)
Agenda
- people make change, not tools
- we fear change
- facts: revolution, power (whose power can you borrow), grass roots
- tactics: pilot & repeat, cover fire
Real change is about the people who put themselves at stake and made it happen.
"48 laws of power" <-- interesting Machiavellian read for those without a soul
TOC: Open Publishing Lab (OPL) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)
The OPL is researching new methods of content creation and developing open source applications
3E's Mantra: extend enable enpower
The lab has only been an idea for a year and a half. It has an attraction model that has drawn students in to volunteer.
Innovation Festival will occur at RIT sometime soon and unveil some of the labs work.
PROJECTS:
1. Open Publishing Guide (website to guide users through the publication process for people with little or no technical experience) uses Drupal, Vimeo, Flex, JavaScript, and jQuery
2. page2pub (browser extension to grab content from online resources to put into a well formated ad-hoc publiction for print) seeks to annotate not based as much on who its from, but who it's for. uses XUL, XML, ePub, Flex, Flash, Java. Phases: Gather --> Transform (standardize formating) --> Publish. CSS is such a mess on the web, so they strip it out "there's a fair amount of crap". Better to just strip it and fix it later.
page2pub (uses zotero like interface but a user interface expert will take a look at it soon)
Class diagram
controller (in the center to connect the following 4)
ePub conversion (constructor, data, write, converter, read)
gathering (page, metadata, image, selection, constructor) -- user regular expressions, put they stopped coding for a week to look back and examine decisions and decided to change
UI (interface, interface manager)
File I/O (load, new, data, save)
3. the innovation news (iNews) - can you do a newspaper on the hour? (create a virtually instanaeous cross media newspaper) Uses drupal, wireless digital cameras, 2 dimensonal barcodes, Xinet & DALiM, javascript, XML. Stories are wirelessly updated via the iNews website. Input is highly regulated to gurantee metadata. Stories got a unique story code so a photographer and writer could work the same event and maybe never even meet, but it comes together on the site. Software formats the content and cues waiting for char count. editors would do last minute editing and picture tweaking. Editors approves content and it gets published. News is mapped onto Google Earth via GPS coordinates in the source metadata. Content was exported as XML and flowed via javascript into an InDesign template. used iterative model for improvement. 90 volunteers and 3 paid staff.
4. social networking game (sng) - how can print be used as a single point in a larger grouping of multiple connections. Players register for the game and fill out interests (vectors of differentiation). When you play the game you get tag, game card, and 2d barcode are given to participants. You find someone with a matching icon on their card and then trade bar codes with them. It is a social enabling tool - lets a child recognize an interest in an adult and talk. At the end of the game the cards are scanned in and the whole field of play is mapped. The players are then reconnected with the people they met via Twitter or Facebook. They build a connection wheel (like Facebook friend wheel) so you can see your connections. Also they generate data on interest breakdowns. They are interested in selling services because DRM issues will make it harder and harder to sell software.
OPL is looking into the idea of a 3D book scanning so you could do a scan of a delicate book without ever opening it (the ink has a certain thickness, so an MRI could detect that). Also they'd like audacious questions to be asked of them from industry to inform their projects and would like visitors.
There is no mandate, these are self organized scholars.
3E's Mantra: extend enable enpower
The lab has only been an idea for a year and a half. It has an attraction model that has drawn students in to volunteer.
Innovation Festival will occur at RIT sometime soon and unveil some of the labs work.
PROJECTS:
1. Open Publishing Guide (website to guide users through the publication process for people with little or no technical experience) uses Drupal, Vimeo, Flex, JavaScript, and jQuery
2. page2pub (browser extension to grab content from online resources to put into a well formated ad-hoc publiction for print) seeks to annotate not based as much on who its from, but who it's for. uses XUL, XML, ePub, Flex, Flash, Java. Phases: Gather --> Transform (standardize formating) --> Publish. CSS is such a mess on the web, so they strip it out "there's a fair amount of crap". Better to just strip it and fix it later.
page2pub (uses zotero like interface but a user interface expert will take a look at it soon)
Class diagram
controller (in the center to connect the following 4)
ePub conversion (constructor, data, write, converter, read)
gathering (page, metadata, image, selection, constructor) -- user regular expressions, put they stopped coding for a week to look back and examine decisions and decided to change
UI (interface, interface manager)
File I/O (load, new, data, save)
3. the innovation news (iNews) - can you do a newspaper on the hour? (create a virtually instanaeous cross media newspaper) Uses drupal, wireless digital cameras, 2 dimensonal barcodes, Xinet & DALiM, javascript, XML. Stories are wirelessly updated via the iNews website. Input is highly regulated to gurantee metadata. Stories got a unique story code so a photographer and writer could work the same event and maybe never even meet, but it comes together on the site. Software formats the content and cues waiting for char count. editors would do last minute editing and picture tweaking. Editors approves content and it gets published. News is mapped onto Google Earth via GPS coordinates in the source metadata. Content was exported as XML and flowed via javascript into an InDesign template. used iterative model for improvement. 90 volunteers and 3 paid staff.
4. social networking game (sng) - how can print be used as a single point in a larger grouping of multiple connections. Players register for the game and fill out interests (vectors of differentiation). When you play the game you get tag, game card, and 2d barcode are given to participants. You find someone with a matching icon on their card and then trade bar codes with them. It is a social enabling tool - lets a child recognize an interest in an adult and talk. At the end of the game the cards are scanned in and the whole field of play is mapped. The players are then reconnected with the people they met via Twitter or Facebook. They build a connection wheel (like Facebook friend wheel) so you can see your connections. Also they generate data on interest breakdowns. They are interested in selling services because DRM issues will make it harder and harder to sell software.
OPL is looking into the idea of a 3D book scanning so you could do a scan of a delicate book without ever opening it (the ink has a certain thickness, so an MRI could detect that). Also they'd like audacious questions to be asked of them from industry to inform their projects and would like visitors.
There is no mandate, these are self organized scholars.
Notes from the Tuesday morning keynotes at O'Reilly TOC
What appears in [brackets] are my thoughts (as with all of the posts that being with "TOC:"). Otherwise everything is from the speakers.
Bob Stein
A Book is a Place...
What is a book?
Webster says pages bound into a volume
Stein: user driven media (Producer driven media transforms to user driven media)
Stein started Criterion Collection as a "publishing company" when that was a term for paper, but Stein saw it differently. When you put a movie into a theatre its broadcast, when you put a VHS into someone's hands, that's publishing.
Stein published some of the first ebooks (Maus cd-rom)
Internet separates "book" from object (no longer paper or CD in your hand)
Stein: books are what humans use to move ideas around time and space.
The idea 10 years ago was push the data out to everyone, but not that the people would bring data to the world (internet).
"they told me it'd be slow... I'll just continue... unless you all want to get off the network" <-- Stein's presentation couldn't load Flock page Stein got an author (without gods) to blog about his writing, and then gam3r 7h30ry was written with note cards and user comments along side it [this is authors doing group work. maybe this brings extroverts to writing or are introverts actually extroverts on the page?] The internet "has completely changed the bounds of the classroom" the conversation follows them elsewhere "The Golden Notebook" was an experiment in public reading. Text on the left and comments on the right. Stein wanted to encourage a cultural of commenting in public reading. It was a failure, but the 7 readers who participated and commented loved the experience. Asynchronous reading group is what Stein calls it. It used Comment Press. [it was a failure for spectators, but not participants -- common theme?] Book writing process can now be a discussions in a blog while producing it and then Comment Press after the book comes out. extends boundaries "Books are much more social experiments than we realize" Stein: "a book is a place where readers (and sometimes author) congregate." "World of Warcraft is the best proof that a book is a place" The participants are paying money to write a fiction book together "Our great grandchildren will think of reading as a social experience -- something they do with others." "The principle role of publishers in the future is to build and nurture vibrant communities for authors and their readers" [should we be archive WoW for future generations? is hosting a world what we do? a place for the conversation?] Marginalia in old texts is a conversation. We used to converse with the book in the margin, stopped for a long time, and now can start again with the digital age. There were no page numbers in books for 70 years (1400s). Book technology evolves. [if reading is such a social activity in the digital world, where will the introverts go?] Peter Brantley Literature as a (web) service
We still think of books as objects. Sometimes works of art. There are still some beautifully made, but they are typically machine made industrial, quickly made. A Torah is way outside what we think of as a book. We have a limited definition. IA Richards: "A book is a machine to think with". Reading is a secluded, private, activity. Reading is a social product. "Our analog cultural is being digitized". What is a book is about to be redefined. Flickr "This is no Barnes and Noble". A book has a new set of relationships, they are networked commodities. Reading is becoming a social act. [The extroverts are taking over the introverts turf?] "What is published will be less about the book than the people who read them" We need to move mentally from books to people. digital words can be joined across books.
The Gemeinschaft book, the book for itself is become the geim___ book, the book for the community. Moving towards an environment of participatory engagement. A book is a passageway into a world of thought and the books can work together.
"The Skin Project" a short story written in tattoo one person and word at a time.
HOMEWORK
1 If you machine translated all the worlds non fiction books into all languages you would at least preserve the "knowledge tokens". you have made the awareness of knowledge available as it is accessible to a huge portion of the world. just knowing the knowledge exists is worth a lot
2 wikipedia is linked into print books. linked data. new awareness and knowledge that's machine generated - google does this now
this is now a service world, not a product world. rights about the text are not the world, but its about the connections. services generate renewable revenue.
"books are empowered in the digital age by words and the people who read them" google book search has figured this out
literature is a catalyst
Corey Doctorow
Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks
The music publishers built a moral case for people ripping them off with their practices. For instance searching people at movie theaters for cameras. If you're going to treat me like a felon, I might as well act like one.
eBooks have the worst ratio of hours in meetings to profit
the lawsuit against google is the only place where publishing has gone against itself (google was offering a way for users to find books they want to buy and publishers attacked it). [there was a audible tone of disapproval from the audience when Corey said publishing shouldn't have attacked google]
DRM is a futile errand in general. Books can be retyped and scanned. Harry Potter was proofed and translated into German in 24 hours. Publishers do everything they can to offer non-DRM products (paper) and then work to encrypt the digital version
video game called Spore. had the most draconian DRM ever and was the most pirated video game in the year it was released
in Russia they stopped piracy by making day and date release. it needs to be released in Russia on the same day it is released in america (game makers of HAL said this)
if publishing has one good thing to offer against piracy, it's that they're not the record industry. the deals artists get from publishers is so much better than musicians. the moral argument for pirating music is that music companies are jerks
vendors want DRM because they make publishers pay for it
the message from overdrive about DRM is that if you pay for your books you will lose them someday. if you steal your books you get to keep them forever.
DRM locks you into the DRM provider. the law requires the customer to repurchase the product. You can't offer them your version of DRM after encrypting your product with their DRM. you lose control of your destiny when you use another's DRM the company that controls the licensing controls the future
DRM is all cost no benefit. Kindle and audible require DRM
any time someone puts a lock on something you own and won't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit
"while you were worried about google amazon came in and clobbered you"
amazon's unboxed product has terms that allow them to remove files from your hard drive and to copy the contents of their drive to amazon.
"don't break copyright law" should be your ULA. A 12 year old buying Harry Potter isn't prepared to agree to the legalese of a ULA and much worse he'll grow up some day and see what you asked him to do and feel exploited.
If you look at a ULA, you do not own a product. Purchasing a product that the ULA tells you is not your product (or worse that you'll be infringed on by the company just for agreeing to the ULA) is a moral case for ripping off the company that issued the ULA -- a moral case for piracy.
Brewster says they used to spend a lot of time back in the day copy protecting software products. The company that offered all the copy protection was Microsoft. Delfina FTP bought into this and then Windows became the number 1 platform and shipped a free FTP and Delfina was dead.
DRM platform is this kind of thing. wave about DRM with one hand and take control of the platform with your right hand
to safegaurd the future of publishing say to amazon that you will not sell another product without the choice to include DRM or not. it's a terrible notion to allow amazon to dictate the future of DRM
Bob Stein
A Book is a Place...
What is a book?
Webster says pages bound into a volume
Stein: user driven media (Producer driven media transforms to user driven media)
Stein started Criterion Collection as a "publishing company" when that was a term for paper, but Stein saw it differently. When you put a movie into a theatre its broadcast, when you put a VHS into someone's hands, that's publishing.
Stein published some of the first ebooks (Maus cd-rom)
Internet separates "book" from object (no longer paper or CD in your hand)
Stein: books are what humans use to move ideas around time and space.
The idea 10 years ago was push the data out to everyone, but not that the people would bring data to the world (internet).
"they told me it'd be slow... I'll just continue... unless you all want to get off the network" <-- Stein's presentation couldn't load Flock page Stein got an author (without gods) to blog about his writing, and then gam3r 7h30ry was written with note cards and user comments along side it [this is authors doing group work. maybe this brings extroverts to writing or are introverts actually extroverts on the page?] The internet "has completely changed the bounds of the classroom" the conversation follows them elsewhere "The Golden Notebook" was an experiment in public reading. Text on the left and comments on the right. Stein wanted to encourage a cultural of commenting in public reading. It was a failure, but the 7 readers who participated and commented loved the experience. Asynchronous reading group is what Stein calls it. It used Comment Press. [it was a failure for spectators, but not participants -- common theme?] Book writing process can now be a discussions in a blog while producing it and then Comment Press after the book comes out. extends boundaries "Books are much more social experiments than we realize" Stein: "a book is a place where readers (and sometimes author) congregate." "World of Warcraft is the best proof that a book is a place" The participants are paying money to write a fiction book together "Our great grandchildren will think of reading as a social experience -- something they do with others." "The principle role of publishers in the future is to build and nurture vibrant communities for authors and their readers" [should we be archive WoW for future generations? is hosting a world what we do? a place for the conversation?] Marginalia in old texts is a conversation. We used to converse with the book in the margin, stopped for a long time, and now can start again with the digital age. There were no page numbers in books for 70 years (1400s). Book technology evolves. [if reading is such a social activity in the digital world, where will the introverts go?] Peter Brantley Literature as a (web) service
We still think of books as objects. Sometimes works of art. There are still some beautifully made, but they are typically machine made industrial, quickly made. A Torah is way outside what we think of as a book. We have a limited definition. IA Richards: "A book is a machine to think with". Reading is a secluded, private, activity. Reading is a social product. "Our analog cultural is being digitized". What is a book is about to be redefined. Flickr "This is no Barnes and Noble". A book has a new set of relationships, they are networked commodities. Reading is becoming a social act. [The extroverts are taking over the introverts turf?] "What is published will be less about the book than the people who read them" We need to move mentally from books to people. digital words can be joined across books.
The Gemeinschaft book, the book for itself is become the geim___ book, the book for the community. Moving towards an environment of participatory engagement. A book is a passageway into a world of thought and the books can work together.
"The Skin Project" a short story written in tattoo one person and word at a time.
HOMEWORK
1 If you machine translated all the worlds non fiction books into all languages you would at least preserve the "knowledge tokens". you have made the awareness of knowledge available as it is accessible to a huge portion of the world. just knowing the knowledge exists is worth a lot
2 wikipedia is linked into print books. linked data. new awareness and knowledge that's machine generated - google does this now
this is now a service world, not a product world. rights about the text are not the world, but its about the connections. services generate renewable revenue.
"books are empowered in the digital age by words and the people who read them" google book search has figured this out
literature is a catalyst
Corey Doctorow
Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks
The music publishers built a moral case for people ripping them off with their practices. For instance searching people at movie theaters for cameras. If you're going to treat me like a felon, I might as well act like one.
eBooks have the worst ratio of hours in meetings to profit
the lawsuit against google is the only place where publishing has gone against itself (google was offering a way for users to find books they want to buy and publishers attacked it). [there was a audible tone of disapproval from the audience when Corey said publishing shouldn't have attacked google]
DRM is a futile errand in general. Books can be retyped and scanned. Harry Potter was proofed and translated into German in 24 hours. Publishers do everything they can to offer non-DRM products (paper) and then work to encrypt the digital version
video game called Spore. had the most draconian DRM ever and was the most pirated video game in the year it was released
in Russia they stopped piracy by making day and date release. it needs to be released in Russia on the same day it is released in america (game makers of HAL said this)
if publishing has one good thing to offer against piracy, it's that they're not the record industry. the deals artists get from publishers is so much better than musicians. the moral argument for pirating music is that music companies are jerks
vendors want DRM because they make publishers pay for it
the message from overdrive about DRM is that if you pay for your books you will lose them someday. if you steal your books you get to keep them forever.
DRM locks you into the DRM provider. the law requires the customer to repurchase the product. You can't offer them your version of DRM after encrypting your product with their DRM. you lose control of your destiny when you use another's DRM the company that controls the licensing controls the future
DRM is all cost no benefit. Kindle and audible require DRM
any time someone puts a lock on something you own and won't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit
"while you were worried about google amazon came in and clobbered you"
amazon's unboxed product has terms that allow them to remove files from your hard drive and to copy the contents of their drive to amazon.
"don't break copyright law" should be your ULA. A 12 year old buying Harry Potter isn't prepared to agree to the legalese of a ULA and much worse he'll grow up some day and see what you asked him to do and feel exploited.
If you look at a ULA, you do not own a product. Purchasing a product that the ULA tells you is not your product (or worse that you'll be infringed on by the company just for agreeing to the ULA) is a moral case for ripping off the company that issued the ULA -- a moral case for piracy.
Brewster says they used to spend a lot of time back in the day copy protecting software products. The company that offered all the copy protection was Microsoft. Delfina FTP bought into this and then Windows became the number 1 platform and shipped a free FTP and Delfina was dead.
DRM platform is this kind of thing. wave about DRM with one hand and take control of the platform with your right hand
to safegaurd the future of publishing say to amazon that you will not sell another product without the choice to include DRM or not. it's a terrible notion to allow amazon to dictate the future of DRM
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Best unavailable message ever
Error messages are usually the least user friendly messages. On the positive side this may be because they are seen the least and don't require refinement, but after seeing error message haikus I've thought for a while that they should be more pleasant. Sure you're still upset to see that there was an error, but it takes a little bit of the edge off to know the developer was trying to make you feel better.
During the presidential inauguration I wanted to watch the early activities on the web before I went down to my companies cafeteria and watched the main part with my coworkers. I wasn't sure where to go for the video and tried a few places that didn't work. My favorite no luck experience though was CNN with the message below. From a marketing perspective I must say even though I had the worst scenario (going to a news site and getting zero coverage), I actually felt better about the brand. Incidentally I ended up at BBC who had choppy but working video.
During the presidential inauguration I wanted to watch the early activities on the web before I went down to my companies cafeteria and watched the main part with my coworkers. I wasn't sure where to go for the video and tried a few places that didn't work. My favorite no luck experience though was CNN with the message below. From a marketing perspective I must say even though I had the worst scenario (going to a news site and getting zero coverage), I actually felt better about the brand. Incidentally I ended up at BBC who had choppy but working video.
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