frances pintler
ice cream metaphor: your content is plain vanilla ice cream. your printed physical book is an ice cream cone. your ice cream sundae is an enhanced ebook.
Greco & Wharton: university presses & open access - public tax dollars should be used for online copies - cover the copy costs for the digital files - press is then open to make cash off printed copies - works for US, but academic monographs are a world wide phenomena - libraries (their budgets) are the place where global money may be able for the International Library Coalition for Access to Books (ILCAB) - this may allow the cost of a monograph to come down to $2 a copy - currently monographs sell about 400 copies at around $80 each
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anthony antolino (copier - DMC worldwide)
keys to customer loyalty: user experience, connections, discover meaningful content quickly and efficiently
copia unleashes boolean search to allow better UI than a secret boolean language. also uses tagging for searching. also offers mosaic view for visual search. endless shelf for browsing. combat social fatigue when engaging with social networks (import friend lists, syndicate to other networks). runs a community algorithm to find how much a title corresponds across multiple silos including user ratings and tagging
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ramy habeeb
the Arab publishing market is considerably behind the English language market. this is an emerging economy market. 325,000 million Arabs worldwide, 120,000 in NYC it is a market the size of the US. this market though is not necessarily aware of eBooks. 80% of Arab works are available only 5km from the publishing houses in Egypt. however in kiosks though books are readily available grouped according to genre (even Harlequin). censorship is a real problem, but it was in the English speaking market not too long ago. the best way to combat it is to develop the market. the most dangerous censorship is self censorship but again that will go away. at the moment there is no viable OCR for Arabic so it is all hand keyed. unconscious censorship happens during this process. a typist was caught not typing up some pages because he said "but what was in the book wasn't true so I didn't type it". there can be innocent unintentional censorship. the Arabic world does not know about BISAC, BIC, MARC, ePub, ONIX, or even ISBN.
of 80 million in egypt 55 m are not connected, 45m have mobile phone, 15m have internet and 5m have mobile internet. some villages don't have a library or bookstore, but two mobile phone stores so it may be a viable way to distribute books.
PoD has been a great bridge builder between US and Arabic world. It serves the 4m Arabs in the US. You just need to think differently since things like ISBN might be there. Enable people on the ground to sell your book.
In Bangladesh there was an SMS learn English tool that had hundreds of thousands of users.
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tim o'reilly
when trying for enhanced eBooks you are betting you are smarter, faster, and more creative then all the competition. innovation actually comes from authors. The innovation is not what publishers have traditionally done.
"The ugly stuff will always need to be done." - John Ingram
production, distribution, pricing, channel management, sales are the things a publisher needs to be good at.
"obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy" - Tim O'Reilly
Power laws, weblogs and inequality - essay that points out that there are top blogs and that it did not become the voice of everyone that we though it would be. The top blogs are actually publishers. The Huffington Post is where authors write because they get more exposure and its better than their own blog. The app store is also facing this with having too many apps to wade through. Once its the size of a haystack you have a switch that favors certain bits of hay and the rest falls to obscurity.
"Large societies can function economical only if the have a redistributive economy in addition to a reciprocal economy" Guns Germs, and Steel
Those that know how to get eyeballs on their website win. It may be publishers and it may be retailers.
"The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort" - Lessons Learned blog
What you need is the capability to create the product quickly in new formats and sell it into emerging markets.
Most of what O'Reilly does on twitter is re-tweet. He has a ton of followers (see power law) and is effectively a publisher. One of the things a publisher does is bestow status on their product and really what you do is promote authors.
If you only pay attention to your own news then you aren't as valuable to your social network community and you're not engaging in the conversation.
O'Reilly event listings are about the authors, so events are listed regardless of whether it is an O'Reilly event or not. They want to be a hub, not just an endpoint. You're also proving yourself as a status builder if you're doing it for things outside your direct product.
Analytics are the heart of SEO and this is also true of social networking. You need to have good analytics for social network marketing. Take a look for instance at PeopleBrowser. You should have a cycle: Direct Message -> reporting -> Monitoring -> Analysis -> Build Followers
eBooks will also have great analytics because an eBook knows its being read. We can discover what the prices should be because we have the technology now to experiment (which the Apple Agency model allows).
A Story for Bed is an interesting product because its one you specifically buy to share with someone else. Social media will help develop this product as it evolves.
Social media is about how you can add value, not you or your story, or your product. Create more value than you capture. It's not just about what you get out of it, it's what you put into it for others.
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