What brought you back to spirituality?

guess you could say i read about it
i was reading lots of things in college
but really i don't know
slowly it slipped in
i let my guard down
left my mind open
and my heart expanded

Date: July 5, 2005 3:58:47 PM EDT

The Song of the Flame

There's something wonderful about stove top coffee
The gushing sound of the water pouring into the cup
A brief parting of the silence in the still of morning
Instant coffee foaming as it transforms from solid into liquid
The foam that comes from within, swirls to the top, and settles
resting

It is the process more than the outcome:
Rinsing the pot, filling it, lighting the range.
The gas sings a little
There's something about waking up
and that song played around the flame
it parallels my brain and the thoughts beginning to alight

But truly it is none of this
Though I appreciate all these things
They are story composed on top of feeling
That for so long I knew not how to explain
But I can tell you this:
There were sailing trips
With me and my dad
Just the two of us in a little boat
And we were close in feeling but rarely in words
these trips tended to close the gap
And I would wake to a small propane range
Singing it's little morning song through the flame
I having just stirred to the sounds in the galley of a pot being rinsed.
I would wait to hear the rumbles of the boiling water
Then sit up and watch my father
He would place a cup before me
and one where he would sit
and he would pour the coffee in my cup
the foam swirling to the top
And he would pour coffee in his cup
And that swirl would come to the top
And I had a feeling I could not explain
Except to say
I love stove top coffee in the still of morning



originally composed 2011 May ?
read at Art House 2011 May 5 with the title "Stove Top Coffee"

Kiddush English translation

A year or so ago we were given the honor of saying the blessing over the wine
at a very happy occasion. We said the traditional Hebrew but wanted a
more modern English version so we slightly modified a version we
found online to read. Sharing just in case anyone else could use it.

Blessed is G-d
ruler of the universe
who has created the
fruit of the vine

2 roads diverged in a yellow wood*

Consumed with thoughts from 3 in the morning
My mouth sometimes ran wild like my mind
Only hindered by my friend
Who said he didn't put much stock in thoughts of the night
Wait...until morning

It happens still
I sit awake
Snuggled closely with my love
But even in marriage we can be alone
Just for moments, but even in the best of company
we can be alone.
And I know it is the solution but i hate the thought of it
Wait...until morning

And though the fear is there
So to is an inspiration
A 3 am epiphany may scare the soul
question a lifetime.
Feeling so real, so novel, so right
and in that moment when you are sure it is genius
when you are ready to change it all
just remind yourself
in a still small voice
Wait...until morning



*"You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem – very tricky."
-- Robert Frost on The Road Not Taken

originally composed 2011 May 4
read at Art House 2011 May 5
read at Symposia 2011 May 12

my poetry

As one of my previous entries indicates, I have been doing a lot of thinking about who I am and what I am doing with my life. Over the past few years I have largely not been writing. From time to time during that period I have thought I was through the writer's block and celebrated a single work as a come back only to return to rarely picking up a pen and writing drivel when I did so.

Some serendipitous events recently brought me back to the pen. About a month ago changes at work had me wondering about the course of my career there (the restack, which I later came to terms with). I realized my life balance between work and writing had shifted so much that work was all I had. In the past both work and writing were significant parts in my life. If there was a dark cloud in one, I could step out from under it into the other. This helped me have a good attitude in both places in the past. But without writing, I was left in the rain.

Then, I saw Il Postino for the first time. Years ago I would have imagined myself as Neruda hoping to someday reach his stature, but I found I related to Mario and was envious of his ability to express the beauty in his small town. (I must admit that I was influenced by knowing the real life story of Massimo Troisi which was revealed in the DVD special features.) Finding my aspirations relating to Mario instead of Neruda reminded me how a high school English teacher said he found that as time went on when he read Jean Anouilh's Antigone he related more to Creon than Antigone. Still, what was important for my writing was that I saw the story of writing igniting the flame of life in someone at a time when I sought to stir the smoldering ashes in my writing life.

I realized that though I had always wanted to be a famous and critically acclaimed poet that maybe I could just be me. I could write without amazing ambition. Maybe I could just write for the poem and not for me. I was lucky enough to have a conversation some years back with David Amram (he did the music for one of Art House's productions plays) and he told me something that makes more and more sense to me as a life lesson: loose yourself in what you do, do what is best for the project, become part of what the group creates.

These realizations led me to pick up the pen now again and actually produce a few pieces that I could consider sharing. As I mentioned previously, I had tried to write a few times recently but maybe my aspirations blunted me, but whatever the case what I produced were just a collection of words on the paper, nothing worth repeating. However one night's insomnia led to my composing and the success of that writing led me to picking up the pen again.

A few days later I went to see a friend's one person play. To see an artist delve into a new medium (it was her first time acting per se) with such success was inspiring. Afterwords a mutual friend encouraged me to read at the next Art House open mic and I returned to the mic a couple days later.

But there was one more realization to be had. All these year's I had been saving my poems for The Collected Works of Bill Rood but now I was resigned to write for the poem's sake and not my fame. So I realized I might as well put the poems up on my blog and not keep them caged up at home--let them out to meet new people. After all, this is about them not me.

I've decided to try to publish a poem a week on this blog. In keeping with my new thoughts on it being about the work and not me (again inspired by David Amram) I decided to publish with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I'll schedule them to post on Mondays at 7 PM EST. I have two new works scheduled and if I am unable to come up with new ones I will present older ones.

One thing to realize about my poetry is that typically I write for performance, so some of the conventions on the page are meant more to guide my performance. Also, another quirk is that I write at the end of the poems where I have performed them and when. I've always tried to not reread a poem at the same reading so back when I was active this became a necessary convention.

So what's left is for me to be me and compose little written creations. I hope you enjoy.

On the Wings of the Phoenix

The phoenix you are expecting tonight
was just a bird before becoming ashes and dust.
Ashes like me, dust like you.

The phoenix itself was just a bird
and it had to fail to become a story.
That is, if it’s true that death is a story
or if it’s true that death is failure
if it’s true that death is anything at all.
The story of the phoenix tells us
that which can burn always has hope.

The phoenix was just a story, a myth
but in so many retellings it is alive.
Either reborn or never having died.
A life is just a story
and a life remembered sounds like myth
creating the moment and space
to be reborn in many retellings.

They say that which reaches too high
will fall from the sky.
Like the boy or the bird
and the wings that burnt.
But those same stories say
from the flames of the sun
the boy Icarus became an ocean;
the phoenix bird never died.

The hero you is just a myth with a thousand faces
retelling the story that anything can fly.

You are mainly water
but there’s hope --
you can still burn



originally digitized 2008 May 3
edits on 2008 May 12
read at Rebirth, part of the Cathedral Arts Festival 2008

untitled poem

I’m going through a time
which one might say
that’s all life is

and I’m trying to accept
that I can try
even though maybe I won’t
be a superstar.

See for a lifetime
I had to be famous
if I was going to try
if I would bother to live
but now
maybe it is ok
to try
but just be
just succeed to be ... me



originally composed 2011 May ?
read at Art House 2011 May 5

digital writing and reading

Jan Swafford argues that we read differently on paper and offers experience with students editing their writing on paper. As the article of his paper states he is arguing "why e-books will never replace real books." I wonder though if advances in touch screens will change this.

Ever since realizing that our cat appears to understand that I interact with an iPad but he seems to have no clue that I'm moving a cursor on the desktop with a mouse, I've wondered if touch screen is significant. Hearing stories of children that take more readily to iPad than desktops furthers this. Maybe what is really significant is that we now have a combination of touch screen and gesture based interfaces that is subtly revolutionary. "Subtly" because it may be the kind of revolution we only notice in retrospect.

The revolution will come when we are able to edit text with sweeps of the fingers and gestures that seem to hold the text itself it will be more visceral than using a pen or pencil. Currently the experience of writing on paper is more directly connected to the words and letters than typing on a keyboard that makes characters appear elsewhere on a screen. However with advances in gesture input and touch screens (or possibly motion sensors) may bring us an experience that is even more connected to the experience of bring words to the page/screen.

By-the-way, I find the cartoon from Swafford's article funny, so I had to include it.

Political Parties and Genetics

I was impressed when I read in one of Steven Pinker's books that identical twins separated at birth tended to vote along the same party lines. I thought of the idea again when I came across The Psychology of Conservatism Academic Press, by G.D. Wilson. According to wikipedia "His 1973 theory that a heritable trait reflecting fear of uncertainty underlies social attitudes in all fields has much empirical support." According to Wilson the fear of uncertainty leads to conservative beliefs. (Do not read "fear" with bias though, I think a better choice of word would be "dislike".)

What I find compelling is the idea that maybe our genes lead us to have certain reactions based on certain emotions. Obviously there's no GOP or Democrat gene, but I find the idea that some people are more likely to react with a yearning for traditional values (maybe a certain nostalgia based sense of security) when exposed to uncertainty and fear does work for me. In other words the idea is that when presented with a certain stimulus some people are genetically predisposed to have a certain emotional response and this response tends to fall along certain political party values.

This then makes it a strange thing to debate political parties. Sure we can debate specific issues and possibly come to consensus across party lines, but the overall party is emotionally based and that's not something you can argue someone into changing themselves on (most of the time). I should disclose that I've always been skeptical against having a debate over whether one party is better than another, so I'm predisposed towards believing in the science that agrees with me. :)

This then led me to wondering if the political party in power matters for the overall economy. If in truth the economy has very little to do with politics or government (with a few rare exceptions). Of course we should vote for the politician that upholds the values and platform that we think is right, but I'm not sure we should vote based on the overall economy although we probably always will since it may be an emotional reaction that reason can't best.

It also had me thinking about the graph of the US GDP versus which party is in power. I can't find it now, but it showed that for the past 100 years or so the economy improved with Democrats in power and went down with Republicans in power. At first I thought this might be meaningful of who you should vote for, but now I am not so sure. If times of uncertainty and fear bring out conservative values then we'll have Republicans in power then. Times of fear and uncertainty are probably bad economic times (certainly at least with consumer confidence) so we have low GDP. Instead of the party being causal, maybe its just reflective. This would certainly be true if in general the government really has only a minor impact on the overall economy.

All of the above is just musing though and nothing I'm really sure about except that I do believe our genes can lead us to have certain reactions based on certain emotions and this has predictive implication.

eReaders - iPad vs. Kindle

The predictions that Amazon is making about paperback sales are interesting. I like their customer centric stance even if I'm just the tiniest bit skeptical when they say the price cuts are all about the customer -- thing is, it shows they have their eye on the right spot. The chatter around the new Kindle is interesting and has little to do with the device as the message that comes with it. I feel like Kindle vs. iPad is like the past Presidential Democratic primaries in how there were a number of runners but its really about two different candidates. I keep rethinking my position on what I think will happen and what I want to happen. However, my basic idea has been that Kindle (and to a lesser extent other eInk devices) will be for that small set of the population who's always been publishing's core audience. Ipad readers will be where bestseller breakthroughs occur and the average person has a copy of maybe a couple books like Da Vinci Code or the Twilight series. The challenge of a bestseller has always been to hit both core audience and average person, but now that is complicated by a need for the content to bridge devices/platforms.

What Kindle and iPad eBook sales may mean

The predictions that Amazon is making about paperback sales are interesting. I like their customer centric stance even if I'm a little skeptical when they say the price cuts are all about the customer, because it shows they have their eye on the right spot (customer). The chatter around the new Kindle is interesting and has little to do with the device as the message that comes with it. I feel like Kindle vs. iPad is like the past Presidential Democratic primaries in how there were a number of runners but its coming down to two different candidates. I keep rethinking my position on what I think will happen and what I want to happen. However, my basic idea has been that Kindle (and to a lesser extent other eInk devices) will be for that small set of the population who's always been publishing's core audience. Ipad readers will be where bestseller breakthroughs occur and the average person has a copy of maybe a couple books like Da Vinci Code or the Twilight series. The challenge of a bestseller has always been to hit both core audience and average person, but now that is complicated by the need for the content to bridge devices/platforms.

The price of freedom and free is vigilance: Facebook privacy thoughts

A friend posted within Facebook about how we should all read the article "Facebook privacy" on the Library at the End of Time

My first thought is if Facebook worries you, what do you think about Google (and I'm well aware of who pays for this blog)?

This seems to be the new internet business model (which I would credit my friend, but he's the one who will later be revealed as very privacy conscious):

1. figure out what kind of data is valuable to data mine
2. figure out a free service that people will want to use that collects said data unobtrusively
3. sell the data after you mined enough for it to be valuable (or earlier since a lot of people do not understand statistics well enough)

There's a lot of new business books out there these days about how to monetize "free". The thing about free is that someone always pays for it. You are reading this content for free and I can afford to give out a few thoughts for free, but I still need a day job to pay for this leisure time and my thinking and opinions will be influnced by that. But what's more important to focus on is blogger.com or facebook.com and not my little blog.

A site that has massive numbers of users like Facebook requires massive hardware and someone has to figure out how to pay for that. I'm not justifying it -- I'm saying that's the thinking you need to go through to sniff out privacy concerns. And you may not find them or you may not find them yet. The price of freedom and free is vigilance.

Although lost privacy worries me, I don't think any of it is malicious. I think the big problem of evil is that its usually done by those thinking they are doing good (if you're familiar, see my omelet poem). Frankly, I'm undecided on whether the new world of lost privacy is all together bad, but weighing the pros and cons consciously should be essential to any societal shift. Anyway, part of the motivation of Facebook aside from profit is to improve data quality. Although Facebook does so much better at targeted advertising then something like TV, the data really isn't as good as it could be and some want to improve it.

There's also an interesting study that shows the majority of people on a social network do not interact with people outside the social circles they would interact with in the physical world. This is relevant to those who say just dropping off Facebook completely is not an option. Sure social networking makes it all easier, but like with most luxuries we don't use it the way you would expect. They said in the 1950s that housework would take up less of our lives because there were now all these new efficiencies from washing machines, vacuums, dish washers and the like. But instead we found ways to keep the house cleaner, bought more things to clean, and spend about the same amount of time at it. I think the same may be true of social networks: we are not using it to expand the network or spend less time maintaining it, we are merely diving into the details a little more and spending about the same amount of time on it.

I'm speaking of course about the majority of people and not fringe groups like those that are called "addicts" (which seems to be the initial response for many who then calm down after their first exposure).

I have a friend who does not do any online social networking. He has a Facebook account but it's with a pseudonym and there's no identifying information on it. So he keeps in touch with what's going on but doesn't share anything. He does his networking the old fashioned way. I think if you did the same you might end up giving up a certain amount of yourself merely based on Google searches which reveal more about you than any normal Facebook status update (he actually gets around that but it requires vigilance and skill).

So what I think about vacuums, dishwashers, and Facebook is that we always give up a little something, but we seem to do our best to bring it back to the status quo, somewhere where the familiarity brings a feeling of safety. And this I think is what you are up against when you want to warn people of the dangers within: they've naturally brought this new thing into a safe spot in their lives.

And Facebook? They were sold to a parent company long ago and parent companies do not take in little orphans to shelter and protect them. Parent companies want to very quickly raise the children up so they can go out into the world and have a real job making profit. And Facebook costs a lot to run because of the massive number of people who use the site. And just as most parents get worried about you not reaching your potential, the parent company is always going to push the child to make the most profit (parent: "what? you have an advanced degree and you're working in retail?").

But I do not say these things to say "this is how it is" and "the battle is over". Instead it is merely: know what you are dealing with (both regarding Facebook itself and the average Facebook user) and know what you are looking for.

Scala

Through a friend's influence I decided to play around with Scala. The easiest way to install it on OSX is macPORTS, according to the O'Reilly book. Turns out macPORTS had two curve balls for me. The first is that at work we have all remote rsync disabled, so I had to use this setup:

modified /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf to not use rsync with this line:
http://www.macports.org/files/ports.tar.gz [default]

synced ports tree with this line:
sudo port -d sync


Then when I went to sync it turns out the name of the port had changed to include the version number so when you tried to "install scala" you were told "Please one of the numbered scala* ports instead". Now I see what the message means but when it first appeared the awkward phrasing threw me. Anyway I googled it, google translated a Japanese blog and found the answer which I have below.

_____
bash-3.2$ sudo port install scala
---> Computing dependencies for scala
---> Fetching scala
Error: Please one of the numbered scala* ports instead.
Error: Target org.macports.fetch returned: obsolete port

bash-3.2$ port search scala
[...scala27...scala28...]

bash-3.2$ sudo port install scala28

ISNI

I heard about the The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) at O'Reilly TOC and figured I'd look into it later. On the one hand as one who dabbles with code and system design, any standard that gives a code to a name is great. And the more open, the more people that sign up, so the more likely it is to be a practical standard (as opposed to a academic standard, which is theoretically great but no one uses it). However, the immediate thing that strikes me about it is 16 digits (really 15 with a check digit). Really once you hit more than 7 (+ or - 2) then no one can be assumed to memorize it, so just go way high with the number so that it'll be replaced as a standard before you run out. Give it 32 digits because no one is memorizing 16 or 32 and really cut and paste is going to be the method of transmission, not memorization in human brains.

Still that's a small point and probably not an issue for ISNI. What they aim to do is give a numeric code "to the Public Identities of Parties that participate in the creation, production, management or distribution of cultural goods in the digital environment." Which like I said, if its adopted it is great.

Another numbering agency that got into conversation was ISTC which makes numbering for the works themselves. Again adoption is key, but if you're putting out documents, why not register with everything and just list a bunch of different identifying numbers?

The Quilly Little Hedgehog

We saw a wonderfully written and directed film called "The Lives of Others" about the secret police in East Germany and suddenly I knew how to write a poem based on a poetry group assignment about a headless hedgehog. I had also just heard that in Poland hedgehogs are abundant (I gather its like squirrels in Jersey).

"The Quilly Little Hedgehog"

The quilly little hedgehog
rolls into a ball
he is able
he is able

The quilly little hedgehog
waddles along
life roles on
life roles on

The quilly little hedgehog
survives in Poland
rolls in numbers
rolls in numbers

The quilly little hedgehog
hides his head to danger
he is headless
he is headless

The quilly little hedgehog
sees despair in others
he has vision
he has vision

The quilly little hedgehog
never saves another
he is safe now
he is so safe now

Year in Review

We are starting a new New Year's Eve tradition, creating a year in review canvas. We have created one the past couple years. It starts with canvas board (26" x 32") and various markers, pencils, and paints. We spend the night remembering events and doodling about the past year to create a sort of drawn collage of the past year.

xkcd

TOC: twitters

here's my twitter stream from the TOC (Tools of Change) conference:


that's all she wrote - O'Reilly TOC is over for 2o1o about 7 hours ago via web

working with audiences we know that some create more value than others - Dale Dougherty -- might not be good rgrdng internet democratizing about 11 hours ago via web

enhancing ebooks is not adding bells and whistles, just enhance the reading process: Peter Meyers. #toccon about 12 hours ago via HootSuite Retweeted by you and 4 others

is electricity like content? there was once a time we paid for it, but now we expect it free. look at laptop users at the conference #toccon about 12 hours ago via web

treat twitter like a dinner party when thinking about what you say - Andy Hunter (electric literature mag) about 12 hours ago via web

you can't keep it from being available online (because of piracy), but you can decide whether you participate in the sale or not #toccon about 13 hours ago via web

so what if digital sales cannibalize print sales when people will pirate content online if its otherwise not available? #toccon about 13 hours ago via web

odets room is filling up already even before the last session ended #toccon 2:26 PM Feb 23rd via web

while at the copyright session at TOC, saw someone at this site: http://questioncopyright.org/ #toccon 2:15 PM Feb 23rd via web

blogging about TOC at http://ollav.com 2:03 PM Feb 23rd via web

TOC: wednesday keynotes

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

====================

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

====================

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.

====================

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.

TOC: agile

dave thomas, andy hunt (the pragmatic programmers)

medium size publisher - the accidental publisher - both programmers that read books, but no nothing of the industry - riding out the current storm - would not have gotten into publishing if they knew what it meant - did all their own work when using a publisher (even had to do own indexing), so figured why not self publish

categories to satisfy: readers, authors, business, production. collectively called four axis of incompetence

in tech books too often the author tries to show off knowledge to the lowly reader. "guide by your side, not a sage on the stage" is the goal. The Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition and Bloom's Hierarchy are things to look to when figuring this out. Your reader follows the Hero's Journey where the start with a big goal of understanding the subject matter, so you start small, gain difficulty, and finally send the hero home a changed person.

Publish without DRM because they want the reader to enjoy and not have anything get in the way and so far no issues.

Readers

Focused on community via website as destination, talks, screencasts, beta programs to encourage participation. Instead of only releasing the book as a finished product some books are selected to be released when about 75% complete. People buy the book and are eligible to receive all versions until the book reaches completion. This has been a major win for readers and authors. Readers get access to the information early and the authors get instant feedback and make the books better.

Authors

No MS Word. Standard contract for everyone to keep it simple - no special deals. No advances and 50% royalties (except one title). Some titles (4%) get more than 400K in royalties. The bulk (29%) get $25-50k. They have no idea if this is great because they're the only one to publish this data [murmurs in crowd that it was "freaking awesome"]. Authors get real time sales data, real time foreign rights data. Authors get money from beta immediately, so in one way you could say they get an advance.

Cheap, lazy, close to customer.

Cheap. Always cash flow positive. No marketing really, just word of mouth. One (almost) employee full time in production area. Business mostly runs itself (once a month download some data, once a quarter cut royalty check).

Close to customer. Don't use amazon store. build direct relationships. combo packs and betas mean people come to them first. avoid 3rd party distribution (no Apple app store or amazon). Authors can upload changes to books and customers can download. Quirky - weird sense of humor: emails come from gerbils up in the cloud, an in joke. Responsive - handle own support and try to be very responsive. Customer is amazingly forgiving with problems since they get real person and no form letters. They are much happier with the personal touch.[]

Units sold have recently switched to direct sales instead of channel sales which means higher profit margin. eBooks are now roughly 50% of the business. They can't deal with channel demands such as 7 month notice on new titles, which is difficult because they create books faster than that. eBooks mean no more channels for them.

production
agile: automated, repeatable, testable, distributed, build any time, iterative
book side is almost completely automated. They can create ebook in 37 seconds while others are doing things like going from mobi to indesign in 5 days.

they use one markup language. PML (pragmatic markup language). Only one author pushed back and they canceled the book (out of 250 authors). PML is simple, logical, target-independent, used by authors editors indexers copy editors and layout folk. PML is an XML that is made to look like HTML and be easy to read. The same format is used end to end. For instance their's for the first use of a term. They didn't use docbook because it doesn't work great for authors. Most of the authors are technical so some use vi, emacs, oxygen, or whatever they want using the PML DTD.

Combine PML with assets (images, codes (code kept separate to allow easy updates and is runable & testable) ) combined in build process to go to PDF, device or paper. The build process has no hands on contact. They run one single command to build the book out.

have a centralized repository that has all books, presentations, content, publicity, accounting and is located in the cloud and backed up. When an author joins, they get a login to the repository and can check out all the tools and a skeleton book that they can work with. Editors also can connect to the cloud to work with the book and use special markup to communicate back and forth with the authors. The indexing happens their automatically. The copy editor starts editing the title directly while the author is in read only mode. In the next stage it goes to layout which is still using PML. There is continuous build so the author can always get the latest build via their author portal. There is versioning at every step. Reporting is amazingly detailed. (there's one tag called layout which allows for all print specific things such as window/orphan)

downsample images to work on smaller devices. all code has a link to download the code from their site.

pragprog.com
use malloy for paper book fulfillment. there's social DRM, they put the customer's name at the bottom of every page.

we control the relationship through the central site to better server the readers

if you give someone a spreadsheet then it means your boss thinks you are less valuable than a programmer. automation keeps mistakes from happening. do not allow special cases from author (they are special, but its because of the content they create not the special font they want). Create trust through transparency and share to everyone you can. Have direct relationships and do not give them away to amazon or apple. Use gerbils. Everyone needs gerbils.

They use amazon S3 for the cloud.

For management and career books they experimented with allowing authors to write without the tags. That worked when the content did not require the tags. They still created PML, but let the authors use an easier interface.

TOC: Doing Your Own Thing

dale dougherty (make magazine)

84,000 people listed their primary occupation in the US census. Amateurs like to act like pros. The audience likes this too.

entusiasts - do something that builds a following based on what they do (see guitar zero)

your idea becomes my idea

Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen - twitter & facebook can be seen as tools of production, not consumption. the user is in control

what's difference about publishing today is that we use the same tools our customers use. we no longer have access to limited things like presses or distribution.

people build a me network to maintain their network (like maintaining a friendship) and not always seeking to expand it. Each of us is already connected to many social networks, both fixed and fluid, professional and personal.

social networks used to be fixed (where you grow up, where you go to work), but now anyone can build a custom network. we build a "my network" as a social stack which includes identify, relationships, and activity. we all make the news

understand things by participating in them - Jay Rosen's mindcasting

a web 2.0 media strategy seeks to build a network of users whose interactions create value. the challenge is that the interactions happen everywhere, not just on a single web site or single device. make magazine articles get more comments on facebook than their site. Google may have the right idea with their API. see Social Graph API for site connectivity data

socialgraphics will help us understand the network associated with a person via social media analytics (peopleBrowser or squawq)

working with audiences we know that some create more value than others and we may want to respond to them differently

tremendous uptake in physical things being used to create a data feed to twitter

used the term "maker" to unify those with various skills into one community

as publishers we magnify and amplify what people are doing

TOC: secrets of digital publishing

rick joyce, peter costanzo

he who is learning the most is likely to succeed

enhanced = organic = hard
+ rethink layout
+ casting "the shake"
+ what wants to be audio
+ takes 6 months for an app, 7 days a week
+ 3rd party development gets expensive (it costs a lot of money to get programmers to do what you want)

the fact that its hard is the reason to do it. it gets easier each time

less is more, different is good

approach an iPhone app with the thought that the author is in your pocket

we are in a world where we can be more pricing dynamic

building for speed and timeliness

eBooks can support break away titles since there's no lag at the printing press

to create an eBook in 24 hours requires a lot of thinking before hand

TOC: Taking the Middle

digital democratizes as price to entry and distribution are much lower. low overhead favors small publishers who's large cost is usually in printing as opposed to large publishers who through scale do not incur high costs (relatively) for printing.

Bomb magazine - arts related since 1981 - expanded audience through website - received grant to change static site into dynamic site - put legacy content online - has more readers now online than in print - as a non-profit felt free content was part of mission - finding other sources for income: sponsorship, ads - revenue risk seems to be paying off so far - looking into making eBooks of old content - anti-DRM as a consumer but it may become a friend of the magazine

soft skull press - indy press - 15yrs old - started at Kinkos in East Village as renegade punk publisher who embraces risk - published first anti-Bush bio - dedicated to print, though excited by digital - DVD extras look like they are put together in 20 minutes by PAs - video and digital in an eBook is not necessarily a great idea - the content should match the author's vision and the work - instead of just thinking digital think of the thing that best fits the work - experimenting with street art as a promotion and using QR scanable codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code) - has an author who twittered entire novel - DRM is an ongoing debate within the organization - personal experience is that DRM is incredibly frustrating, but concerned about bottom line - hope that you can have faith in readership that they will be honest - as an indy you are much more likely to not be ripped off by the consumer since they identify with you and want to support you unlike a big house such as Random House or S&S

N+1 magazine - politics arts culture - ugliest website for many years - planing renovation of website - looking to make the site finally somewhere where people want to linger - all profits come from subscription sales - reads XKCD geek cartoons everyday put realized that the author never got money from her - looked at online store for XKCD and thought about buying a print of the strip to put on the road - with small publishers people feel they are exercising their will by supporting indy publishers - sell things 'Radio Head Style' which is a suggested minimum - try micro payment with a returning readership - agrees with Soft Skull sentiment about indy press having personal relationship with customer that will help to combat piracy

gigantic - biannual arts magazine - on route to being a non-profit - innovative but cheap format - using digital for a grassroots diy way with facebook and twitter

has book contract that is not only for a book, but also requires 10 online posts be made - some contracts require a certain amount of activity for publicity which includes doing content - requires authors to keep their attention and thought going after the book is published and by doing it at contract time it makes the later publicity part of the creative process for the book - had authors write for gawker.com and found print sales went up for that author's books

electric literature - five streamlined short stories published in every viable medium (all devices and POD) - printing bills normally take away all profits - POD offers no up front printing costs - embraced all social media - $5000 goes to authors, $1000 to each - create media database, form relationship with authors, gain reach - published story by Rick Moody to twitter - uses 140 char limitation of twitter as a structure for story - 153 tweets as dialogue between two people - wanted it to be as big as possible, so it was stretched over 3 days - one part of the 153 was tweeted every few minutes - was new to twitter and had a small following - reached out to other publishers and readerships for co-publisher - got 30 co-publishers - reached audience of 34,000 via co-publishers - one issue was that some people were annoyed that they received the publication from multiple people they were following - lesson learned: you don't mess with people's twitter feeds - LA Times mentioned how there was concern about consumer complaints over receiving multiple comments on the same topic - media declared it a failure but that caused publicity - readership (twitter followers) was up - used publicity to be able to get on top of the media narrative with their own content - has most followers of any indy publisher in the world now - a large publisher might have pulled the project because it annoyed people but as a small publisher there was nothing to loose and ended up capitalizing on it - anti-DRM for eBook sales since only one copy of their DRM'd publication sold

TOC: Afternoon Keynotes

ignite

==================

erin (wordnik)

data about words. smart words. looks like tagged media. where the words came from, who used them, etc.

==================

liza daly (ibis reader)

global conversation of our lives

bookworm - upload your book into the cloud

ibis is web based like bookworm but mobile focused. works on PSP3

books as autonomous agents, know things about their existence on the web. an ebook has no back cover, it spills out onto the web. it can lead you to the book's sequel.

==================

judy schwarz

wrote her book with slow publishing and an espresso book machine at her local bookstore

==================

ebooks allow you to collect and analysis the data about what works in enhanced edition ebooks. for instance bunny monroe is read from 1-2 am for a half hour and Obama is read for two hours at lunch time. also audio is used more often than any other type of content (including video). no-one read the copyright page (even by accident). respect privacy and allow people to shut off reporting (50% do). get analytics (your competitors do). experiment, be nimble, get analytics

==================

emma barnes (onixcentral.com snowbooks.com)

our world is full of infrastructure that can be glue together in new ways.

to make a catalog take your ONIX XML and run it through XSL and InDesign can understand it.

==================

richard nash (soft skull)

Community
Compainionship
Communion

get out there and put your work in the world not because it will get you published but because you love it
getting published does not make you happy. once the book is printed and on the shelf, the postpartum depression begins
being connected to writers and readers is what brings happiness

rnash@thinkCursor.com
redLemona.de

==================

bob pricthett (logos bible studies)

ebooks means no more monopolies. users can move on so easily to another book
doesn't open to a cover page, but opens to a task oriented user interface
search recognizes keywords
shows phrases that repeat by visually showing the path of sentences
linked place names
bundle related content
integrate tools and content
unique digital assets

=================

al kakowsky (question of the day - iphone app)

contact your people
get all your friends/fans to download your app on the same day
put in relevant keywords and one outlier like "kindle"
create the next world
call that guy

==================

nilofer merchant (the new how)

Batman had power because he was the ultimate collaborator. he always believed in something good. to have power we need to have sidekicks to work with us to create good things. they complete skills and tools. we also need to dawn the cape. we need to know how to have fair fights and have conflicts. focus on the how and not the what. lead us. fight fair. step up. collaboration and power for new era

==================

jamey graham (ricoh innovations)

visual search vía natural characteristics of a page. iCandy = iphone app. QR codes are here. visual search is like shazam for music. can take a picture of a page of text and get back rich media links

==================

hillel

software that coordinates kids books and video of relatives reading the book

==================
brewster kale (bookserver) "A Future for Books"

internet archive
goal of universal access to all knowledge
collect TV, moving images, audio, books, book locations (open library), webpages (way back machine)
costs $.10 a page to digitize a book. get about 6 errors per book for recent books and almost none for older ones.

all books: public domain 20% (free), out of prong 70% (borrow), in print 10% (pay) of 10 million books
the web is multiple devices, multiple search engine, and multiple sites
we have universal access to free stuff, but not universal access to knowledge
BookServer: distributed system for lending & vending on the internet. connects devices to books whether in libraries, online libraries, stores, publishers, internet archive, inkmesh
one kid one laptop has made 1.8 million books available to kids

the US has a law that says that those with a certain level of disabilities (blind & dyslexic) can have access to book content via Daisy encryption via a copyright exception. making books available to the print disabled.

==================

jim cathey (qualcomm)

mirasol - display technology with extremely low power consumption. may be a great thing for ereaders. publishers used to control all the aspects of a book (paper weight, font), but in the digital world publishers are giving up those choices to the device manufacturers. publishers need to understand the components of the device to create the presentation they want instead of handing off that responsibility. upwards of 70% of the energy of a device are used by the display. having the device last longer will allow the user to interact with it longer and keep the revenue streams open.

==================

jeff gomez (starlight runner transmedia storytelling) storyworlds

as a kid read kikaida which was a manga comic. the story continued as a TV series Kikaider 02. in the last epsiode every died. then a few weeks later there was going to be a 3D movie that concluded the story. that experience wanted to make stories like this which would make him chase the story through different media platforms. this was transmedia storytelling, the most powerful form of communication yet devised. books started transmedia storytelling, for instance Dracula became a stage play. when Superman jumped media things were added to the Superman universe that later found their way back. The Blair Witch Project was the first cross media storytelling story to start on the web.

TOC: DRM, digital content, and the consumer experienc: lessons learned from the music industry

kirk biglione (medialoper.com)

the future of all media is still digital. media companies are challenged by this transition. consumers have been burned by DRM and are carrying that baggage with them to the book world. even though the book industry hasn't done anything yet.

if we are not going to make the same mistakes as the music industry then we all need to agree on what those mistakes were. was adopting DRM one of the mistakes of the music industry.

in the 90's the music industry was doing really well because consumers were buying their whole collections again, this time on CD. they started developing the next medium to move consumers to. historically consumers bought what they were told (8 track, casseette, etc). the music industry didn't think consumers would go for a lower quality MP3. consumers however gained access to the tools the music industry had once had a monopoly on and everything changed. the recording industry lost touch with the power the consumer had (they had control) and also what the consumer wanted.

music industry mistakes:

1. mistaking consumer demand for piracy. the music industry has always attacked pirates, but they didn't understand that the internet pirates had different motivations. this was a new kind of pirate who wasn't interested in making money or attacking the industry. this kind of pirate was interested in getting the word out, social status, and was somewhat of a barometer of demand. from 97 to 2002 there were almost no legitimately available music tracks to download. what happens when you buy a new content device such as your first CD player or eReader? you want to by your old favorites for that device. ever try to buy a Thomas Pynhon eBook? it's not available legitimately. if you search for it online, you'll find an illegitimate source. however forget the ipod moment when the music industry suffered. we could have a CD moment when people try to fill their ereaders with old favorites and repurchase their collections

2. do not declare war on what consumer wants. the Diamond Rio came out and the RIAA sued it. the claim was that the Rio stood in the way of what consumers wanted, but actually it was exactly what they wanted

lawsuites are not a good business model (unless you're a lawyer). the RIAA sued a dead person, a family w/o a computer and a 12 yr. old girl. during this time their sales plumeted. lawsuits will not prevent change

3. assuming DRM must be the answer. this is a myth. only one physical copy is needed for online piracy. there is also a myth that DRM free means free, in fact consumers will pay. myth: DRM keeps honest consumers honest - reality: DRM often turns consumers into hackers. DRM shapes the marketplace for digital content.

CaseStudy: Microsoft PlaysForSure. The music industry began to become nervous about iTunes. MS came out with a DRM technology called PlaysForSure in 2004. A large number of manufactures and content providers adopted the technology. they branded everything that used it with their logo. by any metric it was the standard for DRM. it seemed iTunes wouldn't stand a chance. in 2006 Microsoft pulled the plug on PlaysForSure and instead wanted to push the Zune (which copied iPod). after the Zune launched most of the PlaysForSure sites closed or became DRM free.
how did this happen? consumer lust (for iPod and apple), iTunes and iPod had a superior consumer experience because of the tight integration, iPods weren't PlayForSure compatible

CaseStudy: Adobe Content Server. Adobe DRM is widely licensed and has a large number of content providers. Sony decided to move towards Adobe DRM instead of using its own proprietary DRM. B&N supported it with their Nook. then Apple came along and said that iPad ebooks will support ePub standard. seems Amazon doesn't stand a chance. there is now an ePub v.s ePub war since it is wrapped in different DRM by different companies. we have three major players. notice that Amazon is following the Apple playbook and tightly integrating their player and website. they are also looking at moving to other devices with a "kindle everywhere" approach and supporting iphone, desktop, etc. what consumers want in the end is for it "just to work". they want anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose. this is either DRM free or Kindle if Amazon does it right. top eBook preferences: reasonable pricing, wide selection, and interoperable. remember consumers win. the top searches on medialoper.com are "who do I remove DRM" and it peaks on Christmas day.

to the consumer if Amazon makes Kindle books work on everything, then that looks like open to them. to the publisher though you are locked into one distribution partner.

"We used to fool ourselves, we used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."
-- Bronfman CEO Warner Music

TOC: rethinking copyright in the digital world

edward colleran, rafat ali, sree sreenivasan, eric schwartz

as news publishers, 9 times out of 10 if we ask people to take something down or change it, they comply.

everyone in the world who's interested in copyright is in this room ;)

recommended sites: mashable.com readwriteweb.com lifehacker.com

hulu represented a very big moment when they allowed people to embed a certain clip from hulu into your site. in the beginning it was any clip, but now its their choice. still it represents a major mental shift to decide to not try to own every little bit of the content. the more you can do that the more your work can stand out in a crowded field. great content can die on the vine unless we can get it out to people.

3 billion photos are added to facebook every month. 5 billion pieces of content a day.

copyright law is territorial, but obviously those laws are broken down in the digital world. therefore there is an effort to harmonize. the US has been trying to catch up with European laws.

a guy setting up a music collective in Moscow was executed because an organized crime group was also trying to set up a music collective. copyright issues can be very different based on location.

60-70% of people who receive a notice that they are engaged in unlawful activity cease that activity.

MP3 trumped LP because of convenience, not audio quality.

an industry driven by fewer Harry Potters and a lot more individualism (niche).

"free is more complicated than you think"

once you put content behind a payment system, then there's an implicit promise that the content is just for the one viewer. Someone wouldn't try using an embed code from that site for instance.

sharing is a hugely gray line on line.

your content has to be discoverable and then you need to build the business around that.

one of the nice things about twitter is that people give credit to where content came from. it has a good culture. we should all become good pointers to content. pay journalists seem to have a harder time understanding this then people on twitter.

the largest reuse of materials is by other rights holders that take preexisting materials and adapt them. "fare use" for them is probably different than that for a non-profit.

this culture of acknowledging change and crediting is coming from some of the folks that got to the internet first which gave it credibility. some web sites are much better about correcting their own mistakes than the NY Times.

the media reporting on the media is a tricky area with free use. can I rebroadcast your broadcast in order to talk about your reporting style in your broadcast?

TOC: a different model

kassia krozser (booksquare), anneal james (harlequin digital)

models:
publishing originals
backlist model (backlist rights will be hot topic)
fast market (news oriented, rapid, timely)
o'reilly safari (subscription model)

subscription has built in drm, when they stop paying they no longer have access

korina express is experimenting with no drm, lower/higher advance, world rights/contracts.

contract model is different at korina. 30% royalties, which means D2C. different rights, digital, print, world, all English because digital is w/o boundaries and readers want that. instead of asking for lifetime of copyright, they ask for 7 years. digital reserves don't work with the model but its a limitation based on legacy systems.

experiment with employees. for instance freelance, telecommuting editors. invest the editor in the marketing aspect.

establish brand in the digital world, far more important than physical. directs consumers to you instead of amazon. offering DRM free allows you to subvert amazon's kindle and brand.

every author writes with Word and it has the worst XML output. challenge is getting good and clean XHTML output.

paying quarterly was challenge for 2 year royalty sales. digital authors expect to be paid a month or two after on sale. one of the reason they get paid early is that they get no advance. this actually puts more money in authors hands faster which encourages them to take more risks.

the royalty system should be able to do the accounting needed.

can scheduling handle word count instead of page count?

biggest challenge is "self imposed limitations" - skip (ingram)

your customers are not the retailers, they are the readers

what percentage of online shopping carts are abandoned? why?

customer support. you're going to cry with them when you try to install ADE and it doesn't authenticate the first time. this is not the traditional role, but retailers are having to face handling customer service. by going D2C you will hear more of the consumer complaints that you otherwise would not.

how do you future proof your business when you are the future

TOC: running two companies

dominique rachat (sourcebooks)

be a digital entrepreneur while running a traditional book publishing company

sourcebooks is entirely bootstrapped. not knowing anything about the industry was a great benefit. moved from 1 book to 300 and from 1 employee to 75.

symptio is experimenting with selling eBooks in brick and mortar locations

"we have very bad data in this industry." transformation occurs in the margins, in increments. if you have bad data you cannot interpret transformation.



What do we mean by the transformation to eBooks. Would it be greater than 50% of sales being eBooks? Maybe not. CDs comprised 65% of all music sold in the first half of 2009 compared to paid digital downloads. It can take a long time for old formats to disappear. We will be running two companies for a long time.

showed graph of another company where B2B sales dropped over time and digital B2C grew. Total company sales remained mostly constant over time, but dipped when B2C overtook B2B, but eventually returned to normal levels. It took five years to hit the tipping point when C overtook B.

where do you start? define your verticals.

mike shatzkin: verticals/categories "the organization and delivery of stuff - including information - into…"

for categories think about how you search online. verticals should be very narrow and specific, not broad. Sourcebooks had 43 verticals when they looked at their data. They can be defined by thinking about what you're good at (expertise) and what communities you're an essential part of.

Content now puts us into a bigger frame of publishers. If you publish sports writing, you're competing with ESPN. Publishing in the largest sense.

think through the content you own and lay it out on a continuum. see strategic opportunities that might fit into it. for instance maybe a different price point product or an iphone app.

when developing an app, have fun with it and that should shine through. learn and iterate. in this approach, eBooks are only one kind of content you're delivering. help authors to monetize content in various ways. the world becomes bigger this way.

one way where old media and new media overlap is dominating categories. in any category the majority of consumers are light users. For instance although some buy every baby naming book, most only by one or two. Since these people are not experts, they will buy popular products which have a "natural monopoly" in this way. on the retail side category leaders are disproportionally supported. Implications of this:
1. competition is higher in fewer categories as time goes on (make sure you have a vertical for the product)
2. greater need for collaboration between authors and publishers. we publish authors not books

they develop all of their iphone apps in house with wire frames, then send it outside to be coded. whole new set of skills to learn.

digital experiments have a real effect on print book sales

poetryspeaks.com "the most complicated and expensive" thing we tried. it's about a community of poets. discovery = marketing site for poets. took the unique approach to secure all rights for contents before posting. made baseball cards for poets. it is an experiment, not necessarily a revenue stream, but definitely a learning experience. Metrics are what counts, don't have an ego or an opinion when learning, let the data speak. comparing 6 weeks before and after it appears the site increased book sales 55%

enhanced ebooks have the campfire effect. its immersive, visceral, immediate.

technical issues: people don't want to download another platform (format), drm

content issues: create theater of the mind, content "heat", leaving the book/integration, engagement/immersion

the ipad will create an enormous future

innovation is iteration - Micahel Cader

there is no bad time to innovate - Jeff Besos

innovate yourself out of a tight box

TOC: O'Reilly Tools of Change Tuesday Keynotes notes

peter collingridge (apt) "enhancing the ebook"

bookseer.com - recommends books with simple interface
25thestate.com - animation
feels book value is going down, but technology can bring it back
new company: enhanced edition - splits: consultancy developer marketer
key decision: be premium
be intuitive as possible
features: use ePub - synchronize audio to text
concept to product = one year
enhanced-editions.com
challenges: disintermediation, shift to digital, drm, price, rights territory, strutter

"publishing is currently a very linear process" (author -> agent -> publisher -> retailer -> consumer)
EE is author agent publisher reader network (author connects to network and vice versa)
the new way is not linear, though not circular, but definitely iterative

eInk is not as compelling as enhanced eBook
it is time to rethink: rights (sell vs. consolidate)
the skills will be different, but cheap to acquire (such as SEO) it just needs to be nurtured by the house

some big name authors are going on their own to have new technology built for them

it is not to replicate the current experience, but innovate the next experience. the best technology is invisible, so focus on user interface was key

"what matters most is how you walk through the fire" - Bukowski

we encourage you to download an enhanced edition eBook, but not on the TOC network as it is rather large - andrew savikas

==========================

william patry (of Google) "law is not a business solution"

though its not what you'd expect a lawyer to say, not all problems should be solved with law. if there are non-legal ways to solve problems then we should use those. Not a lot of people have respect for how the legal system solves problems, it may the single worst place to find closure on a topic. some feel the better our copyright laws. "people don't copy stuff that they don't watch". don't blame problems on copyright which are actually marketing issues. strong copyright won't make people want to watch a show they don't want to. people see copyright as a way to preserve where they are now. sending a 20 year old kid to jail won't save your bottom line. it won't make people go to more shows. its not commercial success. "regulatory capitalism" = incumbents succeed through law instead of innovation. regulation is too often used a shield to protect the status quo from new competition. rather than innovate and respond to consumer needs, incumbents seek to criminalize threatening behavior from new comers. copyright law can stop people from doing some things, but it can't make consumers buy things. no copyright law will turn a failing business around.
increasing penalties or jail time does not make a crime go away. copyright cannot create economic value. giving something copyright status does not imbue it with value.
the united states has become the fat detroit of nations. we are loosing our desire to innovate (achieve?) and instead are milking aging cows until they run dry
it takes a real manager to manage the downcycle of a product.
macmillian offered dynamic books which allows professors to edit textbooks without the permission of the original author. the ebooks are $45 instead of around 120 or so. if you have a lawful copy of something you can give it or sell it to someone else (resale, protected by copyright law, first sale doctrine). publishers have tried to recapture the lost value of resale by upping initial cost. by making the dynamic books course specific, they have little resale value hence the initial price can be set low. rather than try to break the first sale doctrine they have an innovative strategy. instead of "compete with free" they side step it.

==========================

skip richard (ingram) "are ebooks dead?"

media habits change quickly and adoption is rapid because of broadband
the ebooks of today which are a carbon copy of the old books will be gone and the enhanced ebook will take its place
3 trends: growth of online retail ('write this one down: "there is no fundamental right to survive"', "people are willing to pay if the price is right and the convenience is there"), device change (cross media reading experiences), generational differences (the line between physical and virtual is blurring, like webkinz - skip's daughter saw no distinction between the stuffed animal in her hand and the digital product on the screen)

anecdote of man in hot air balloon who's lost and calls down to guy in

suggestions to managers:
1. simplify (be awesome at just one thing - don't do everything - have unique differentiator)(a study of jams - we all love choice, but we can have analysis paralysis, so limit the variables - see also 12, less books, one a month and have 8 bestsellers - get back to basics, help content reach its destination, create innovative content - move from defense to offense with eBooks)
2. connect (find customers and know them, know who controls your destiny: the waiter controls the butter not Senator Bill Bradley who wants butter and asks don't you know who I am - watch periphery, we take our social queues from others and diminish change, just as there's defused responsibility our industry should not just watch what others are doing)
3. conquer (get out of your comfort zone - forward momentum is often slowed by self - new players change things faster because they don't know what the "limitations are supposed to be" - Art Tatum learned to play piano by following a recording of two people on a player piano and did what was previously thought impossible)

if you hear the excuse "that's the way we've always done it" then you know you're causing your own problem

==========================

sameer sharif (impulses) "the new dynamics of publishing"

content development and audience development are the two places for innovation
audience development: social networking opens up dialog like never before. it means B2B is gone and we need to connect to audience (track & measure, optimize, maximize ROI). rather than broadcast, communicate. we move from B2B to B2C and from manufacturing to service industry. social marketing seems to work as displayed by metrics.

==========================

arianna huffington "publishing is dead"

"books don't end in print, books don't end with the printed page"
"you cannot enter into the same river twice" - ?
this is now the golden age of engagement for the consumer
"the medium is definitely not the message"
"unplug and recharge" - disconnect from devices and everyday preoccupation and concerns, and a book is the best way for that
this "magical pubdate" forget about it. there are not three days between pubdate and oblivion. start talking about your book earlier. you may have put your career on the line, why not talk about that book. don't be anonymous, the age of anonymity is over. very often its the interns that will be running the publishing house a few years down the road. the first book does not need to be a new book. online we will discover new books and old books. this idea of focusing on the new book needs to go away.
"we believe nothing is more important right now than rediscovering empathy"
"the message is platform agnostic"
we ask why people blog for free, but no one asked why they watch tav for free. also blogging is the new audition platform.
open up about your struggle and others will share. talk about your own fears and create intimacy. its less polished, first thoughts best thoughts

Lincoln

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S BEARD: THE IDEA OF AN 11-YEAR-OLD GIRL!"

to be named

We are named from birth
Before we are known
and in the moment
When we seek knowledge
We are asked to name ourselves.
You, seeker of knowledge
Name your path
Place a name in your moment
Of acceptance of how little you know
Of how difficult it is to say what something is
You must name yourself
Something no one
Except maybe yourself
Can know
And in a moment
Of self discovery and change
You must freeze it all in a word

So I do not
I freeze it in two
One for who I was long ago
(Though shades of who I am)
And another for who I am becoming
An expression at once
Of stasis and change

Date: June 7, 2006 5:34:23 PM EDT
Subject: Poem Topic: choosing a Jewish name

Tohuvabolu

The morning commute
A mix of slow thought and fast movement
Like an old recipe
Familiar and without thought
Like an old familiar friend
Forgot to ask what's new
Because it never is
And when it is
You never knew
Never asked
Moved through the conversation
Like a crowd of strangers
That you know well enough
To predict and avoid
Pass by with minimal contact
Conversation held high
To escape depth
It so slows us down
Connecting
When our mind is on movement
It does not land
And the one you passed by
Is stranger now
Former friend forgotten
Misplaced
In the busy life
That moves
So fast
That everything stops

art - poetry based on an idea by Daphna

Art is an island
Every approach from the water is possible
By north, by south, by east, by west
There are many ways to an island
But it is tough to live there
No island has everything
Just as no man is an island
But to be there for a time
Has a certain effect

Smart Car stuff

Check out the interesting pic of an electric Smart Car from an auto show. It's the third pic in the slide show.

Also, Kenwood produced an amazing DVD/CD/GPS that Smart is putting in the ForTwo. Here's what the newsletter had to say:

smart USA is now offering a Kenwood entertainment/navigation system as optional equipment on all 2010 models or as an aftermarket unit on all smart fortwos. [...] The entertainment system features Garmin navigation software and NAVTEQ mapping technology, as well as built-in Bluetooth capabilities.

The entertainment system allows owners to enjoy better sound with its 3-way Performance Series speakers. It is satellite and HD Radio ready, and offers the ability to operate the iPod®, iPhone® or iTouch® through the system’s 6.1” front panel touchscreen.

For more information on the Kenwood Entertainment System, contact your local smart center.

I'm guessing it's either this or a similar unit.

iPod Hard Drive Replacement

Although I only ever dropped my old iPod once, my newer iPod fell on the cement about once a week for a few weeks in a row. I would watch it fall in slow motion, its metallic case gleaming in the sunlight as it twisted and turned. On impact, the protective case would immediately split open plastic falling to the side leaving the iPod free to slide along the pavement scratching the face.

The plastic case that snaps around it kept it free from scratches in my backpack, but was a little too slippery for my uncoordinated hands. Maybe the case saved the iPod from some of the impact of landing on concrete by sacrificially exploding open, but not enough.

On the third or fourth hard landing I picked it up and put the earphones on. It was still playing and I listened to it for probably another fifteen minutes, but then the music stopped. I heard static and was surprised to still hear static when I took the headphones off. Some little part had come loose in the hard drive and as it tried to spin the disc I could hear it scrapping a little groove. My little iPod had decided to grow up and become a DJ scratching analog sounds.

After its aria was played, a red X appeared advising me to visit http://apple.com/support/ipod



So instead I searched for sites on how to replace a hard drive. At first I was thinking of replacing it with a flash disk since there's little hope of my coordination (especially before my morning coffee) will improve, but at the moment that would entail a major shortage in available space. So instead I found a good blog by someone who had experience replacing fifth generation iPod hard drives.

I purchased a replacement size drive on eBay for around $60 and assumed it would come with the wonderful plastic tool that every blog mentions alongside iPod mods. But instead I just got a miniature drive in the mail. So I decided to be resourceful.

Those are Metrocards from the NYC subway. I was collecting them for a friend's art project, but ended up relizing they would work as wedges. I slid them into the long sides of the iPod to release the tabs that hold the iPod together.




As it turned out it took more than one card.



The cards wedged it open enough that I could slide each progressive card further in. Eventually it was wide enough that I could fit an old credit card in and apply a little pressure. Once the gap opened enough I used a micro screw driver to carefully pry the iPod open.

Unplugging the battery is easy, but the ZIF socket on the drive wasn't obvious. The long black (or yellow) tab lifts up towards the ribbon cable and away from the drive. It lays parallel to the ribbon cable and lifts to be perpendicular to the cable.



I was a little concerned at the exposed circuitry on the new drive (1), so I used the plastic separator from the old drive (2) and put a few pieces of electrical tape on it (3). The blue foam separators were still a little sticky so I didn't use any extra adhesive (4).

After that it was just a matter of putting everything back together. Before snapping it back together I plugged it into my laptop. Instead of putting the drive in disk mode I just connected it to iTunes.



iTunes announced that the iPod was in recovery mode, so I clicked the restore button and it went to work. After a minute or so iTunes reported an error. I unplugged the iPod, plugged it in again, and clicked restore again. This time it was successful. After seeing that it was working ok, I disconnected it and snapped the iPod back together. So far it hasn't decided to become a DJ, so things look good.

who amazon owns

Here's a great use of mixing subway map and corporation ownership for visual presentation. It is also an interesting look into how Amazon.com has grown.

All Points West

Yesterday I went to see Gogol Bordello at this festival I knew something vaguely about. The Jersey summer torrential downpours this year left the ground muddy, but there was no rain on the one day we were there. The festival was All Points West and all I knew was the name kinda confused me since it is an East coast thing. I dug through their site though and found this:

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the now abandoned Central Railroad Station at Liberty State Park served as the gateway for immigrants on their journey into the United States as they embarked across the country to ALL POINTS WEST.

What a great metaphor for a festival which takes artits who have followings but launch them into the spotlight and take them to all points of other fan basses (especially on Saturday which was to my eyes an eclectic lineup). Maybe it is a complex metaphor, but in its second year I do not understand why the marketing for an arts fest doesn't make use of such a rich one. Ellis Island is down a little bridge to your left, Gogol Bordello is playing on the main stage, and the only reference I see in the marketing is Lady Libery's torch.

I actually like a lot of the art, imagery, and general marketing for the festival and think it is top notch, don't get me wrong. I just see this as missed potential. And it's not totally missing, they use trains in some of the art, but it just seemed incidental to me since there's a train station and the Statue of Liberty at Liberty State Park.

The other missed potential I'm wondering about this morning is iTunes. Now that we're at a time when you can buy albums track by track, why not have a festival album pre-show release that has one or two hits from every band in the lineup to generate interest. Sure it would only be more hard core fans, but I know I would have been tempted to buy it. Then my choice of choosing a stage (which by-the-way the stages are named after the old train lines that ran through the park land years ago), would have been educated by the pre-show collection. And of course anyone going probably owns a couple tracks that are in the collection, so iTunes should give the option to not download or be charged for those tracks. And of course once the festival is over offer a after show collection of the set list. There would certainly be gaps because of medleys or new songs that aren't available in iTunes (and some bands may not want their music in iTunes, etc), but you could just put a PDF in the blanks with the APW logo and the explanation that track X is not available and why (with promo info as well).

This idea came to me by a realization by some people of my slightly older generation who were surprised that there was not a single CD for sale at the festival. The younger generation was debating why you would buy a CD. True story, I overheard this debate by some teenagers as we walked home: Why buy a CD when you're just going to rip it into MP3s. If you're going to buy something, buy an analog recording. If you want digital, download it. This of course started the is pirating a bad thing debate, which apparently is an ageless debate.