Entries tagged with “books” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Coverage of StartWithXML
Laura Dawson
January 15, 2009
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Turns out I was not the only one on Twitter for the StartwithXML Forum on January 13th. Joe Bachana was tweeting as well. Kind of interesting to see the posts side-by-side. David Rothman of Teleread also has some great things to say, as does Richard Curtis over at e-reads.
We also got nice coverage from PW, as well as Publishers Lunch.
Slides will be up soon!
iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season
Andrew Savikas
January 7, 2009
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Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well:
- If the iPhone App by itself had been a book, it would be a top 10 seller in BookScan for Computer Books this holiday season, based on just 17 days of sales
- The print version appears to have been unaffected, retaining a solid position in the top 3 for Computer Books in BookScan
- A full 1/3 of those buying the app are outside the US, mostly in countries where the print book is not readily available
There are certainly some who don't care for the book-as-app approach, preferring the library model (where one app enables reading multiple titles). It's also clear there's substantial customer interest in both options, and we strongly believe that offering a variety of options and letting customers choose is the right approach. This is a time for experimentation, and we'll be doing quite a bit more of it (format, pricing, content) in the digital -- and especially mobile -- space in the coming months.
History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008
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A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative.
The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly that they let Apple run away with control over digital distribution and the future of their industry.
It looks like the book publishing industry is about to do the same thing.
Publishing industry: The book isn't the paper. It's the content! Why don't you understand your own product?
Publishers: Let the Containers Go
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:
Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."
Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution
Bill McCoy
November 24, 2008
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Last week my friend and International Digital Publishing Forum board colleague Peter Brantley, Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, published a thoughtful article on TOC arguing that "digital book DRM is bad bad bad."
I rashly volunteered to offer a counterpoint. Now, let me say up front that I don't think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, ...). Peter's post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it's better or worse than the likely alternative.
To me, it's pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty -- so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.
Read more…Change Always Leaves Someone Behind
Mac Slocum
November 11, 2008
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Seth Godin discusses the realities of digital change and free distribution in an interview with HarperStudio's The 26th Story:
... the market and the internet don't care if you make money. That's important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It's not "how can the market make me money" it's "how can I do things for this market." Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It's entirely likely that many people in the chain WON'T make any money. That's okay. That's the way change works.
(Via Differences & Repetitions and Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter Stream.)
What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry
Mac Slocum
November 4, 2008
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The similarities between the music and book industries tend to diverge when you examine the smallest possible component of each format: unlike songs, book chapters aren't usually self contained.
But recipes are a different matter. A recent story in the New York Times looks at the upcoming Web site, Cookstr, which aims to catalog recipes from top chefs:
Cookstr, which will be supported by advertising revenues, will aggregate recipes from published cookbooks. All of the authors will have their own pages, with biographies, links to recipes and books, and in the case of restaurant chefs, links to their locations on Google maps.
Cookstr isn't blazing new trails here: All Recipes, Epicurious, Big Oven, FoodNetwork.com and other Web outlets have built their sites around aggregation of individual recipes. But there's still a silo-based mentality in play because recipes are only free to roam within the boundaries of each site. This is equivalent to a record company only making songs available through its own proprietary service. As we've seen with the success of iTunes, YouTube and most recently through Hulu, users flock to platforms that replace traditional boundaries with massive catalogues of material. Shoehorning content and users into a specific channel rarely works on the Web (iTunes is the exception), so the record labels eventually moved toward wide distribution across multiple platforms.
There are key differences between songs and recipes -- paid downloads vs. free text content most notable among them -- but a variation on the song model might work for recipes: sell advertising against publisher-owned recipe pages; allow standalone recipes to disperse with attached branding and pull-back opportunities; and use increased attention from wider distribution to deliver related products with built-in scarcity, such as traditional cookbooks, custom books, curated collections, cooking classes and events.
Where's the IMDb for Books?
Mac Slocum
October 27, 2008
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Over on the TOC Community, David Henley expands on recent discussions around publisher and author brand building by drawing an interesting connection to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb):
Not everyone chooses a film because of who directs it or who the screenwriter was, but some of us do, and now with databases like IMDB we can easily find lists of films containing the actors we like, or directors and discover more things we might like to watch.
I think books can be the same. Currently I don't get to know who edits each book, or acquires the rights, but if I did I might start to follow their work. Authors need not be the only brands. Publishers can establish a brand identity the way imprints used to. Most will have to start over as they've diluted any meaning they ever had.
Open Question: How Can Publishers Capitalize on Hot Topics?
Mac Slocum
October 15, 2008
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You can't fault Newsweek and Amazon for cashing in on pre-election interest with a series of Kindle-only candidate biographies. There's certainly nothing wrong with profitable aggregation of content, either. But the efficiencies gained from ebooks, e-readers and print on demand raise secondary questions I'd like to explore with the TOC Community:
- Can long-form content (print or digital) effectively capitalize on trendy subjects?
- Is there still a market for quickie books? Can they compete with Web content?
- Should publishers use Web/digital as a testbed for hot topics, then provide long-form content down the road? Or, will this technique spread them too thin?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
When it Comes to Search, How Low Can You Go?
Brian O'Leary
October 13, 2008
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I came back mid-week from the American Magazine Conference, where I heard Paul Saffo talk about the future of content, including what search tool might eventually trump Google. He introduced the term "quantum of search" - the lowest level or most granular search possible - and used it to say that the future of search will depend on your ability to return the precise results needed for each and every search.
While Saffo counseled editors and publishers in attendance to develop the lowest level "quantum of search" possible, he stopped short of saying something that is in my mind directly related: publishers have a tremendous advantage in defining what good search looks like.
Figuring out how to accurately respond to a narrow search requires intimate knowledge of both content and market. Search informs an increasingly niche-driven publishing model, a prediction that Mike Shatzkin and others have advanced, but good search is more than just an alogorithm. As we migrate to a more richly defined, "semantic" web, content that has been given meaning through well-designed editorial processes will not only be more easily sold and repurposed; it will be more easily found by the people who are most likely to benefit from finding it.
So, publishers worried about a content glut have at least two opportunities to define themselves and redefine their role. The first opportunity comes in organizing around audience-valued content niches. Generally, lawyers don't go to Google to find legal information, and in a more niche-driven world, vertical content plays will be increasingly preferred. Even if I try Google first, the trusted vertical niche with deep content should be high on the list of returned links. As publishers, we need to make sure we are there.
The second opportunity comes in using the tools we are examining here - structured content, appropriately tagged - to capture the editorial insight and rich meaning that is lost when we render content to print books and magazines. Investing now to keep that meaning and provide it in a form linked to the content will help publishers demonstrate primacy in defining Saffo's "quantum of search." The discipline of XML-driven workflows can capture that insight.
Publishers Rush Economic Crisis Books
Mac Slocum
October 10, 2008
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The Economist says book publishers are rushing to cash in on the economic turmoil bubbling up across world markets:
Like any good bank in the pre-crash days, some publishers are splashing out to secure talent. Penguin's American arm has been particularly eager, bagging four inky-fingered "stars" in the past month, reportedly at a cost of over $2m in advances.
The Economist notes that long publishing deadlines may prevent book publishers from capitalizing on the current flush of consumer interest (and worry), especially if the situation stabilizes. But traditional publishing's burden is Web publishing's gain: Beet.TV says The Wall Street Journal's impeccably timed Web redesign coincided with record traffic, and there's been a surge in interest for NBC, BBC and Reuters Web properties.
The Confusion Between Content and Containers
Mac Slocum
October 6, 2008
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The digital realm allows content and containers to exist separately, but their old bond is still tough to break. An article in yesterday's New York Times education section illustrates this point:
Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom...
... But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up a book, many more will skip the text and go straight to the game. Others suggest that video games detract from the experience of being wholly immersed in a book.
The problem with this thinking is that it only assigns "literacy" value to books. Certainly, books are an essential learning tool and students should be exposed to them early and often, but if the goal is to improve literacy -- i.e. "being able to read and write" -- then the argument against games falls apart. A game-based project that boosts reading and writing skills in even a small percentage of children is still worthwhile, especially if it's one initiative amidst a broader literacy effort.
The anti-game contingent noted in the Times piece is falling into a familiar trap: assigning value to a container instead of content. The container trap was innocuous in years past because the audience (consumers, students, etc.) was limited to passive acceptance of a few choices. Now that digital delivery empowers audiences to naturally gravitate toward material they deem worthwhile, shoehorning people into a particular form diverges from bigger goals. If you want to accomplish something -- be it literacy improvement or creation of sustainable revenue streams -- you need to go with the audience grain, not against it.
Storytelling Through Book Spines
Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008
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The Sorted Books project puts book spines to work as storytelling devices:
The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies -- a cross-section of that library's holdings.
I'd love to see a mash-up combining Sorted Book projects, outsourced book cataloging, and a customizable Web interface.
(Via Boing Boing and Shelf Awareness)
What Does Esquire's E Ink Cover Mean for Print Publishing?
Mac Slocum
September 10, 2008
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I've been noodling on the implications of Esquire's E Ink cover (video available here), and for the life of me I can't see how this is anything more than a small change in a mature technology. It's on par with terrestrial radio's embrace of HD Radio and the music industry's attempts at super-high-fidelity discs (SACD and DVD-A).
Esquire deserves credit for experimenting with E Ink, and I certainly think E Ink itself has a variety of uses (Kindle and Sony Reader owners would agree). But the merging of E Ink displays and traditional print formats garners the same level of interest as National Geographic's hologram covers: neat idea ... nice execution ... but beyond the publicity and potential newsstand sales, what's the long-term point?
Future E Ink screens are projected to be ultra-light, interactive and updateable via Web connections (the Kindle offers a variation on this), but millions of consumers already own mobile devices with the same functionality. Even if these features come to pass, why would I purchase a print-digital hybrid or a separate digital-only device when I have easy access to content on a device I already own?
Bolting digital elements onto an analog medium may yield new ideas -- and there's value in that -- but there's something to be said for adaptation within a format. Radio has survived by adapting its content. Television, newspapers and magazines are in the midst of their own adaptations, and what these formats become will be influenced by the content they deliver, not the technological add-ons they incorporate. E Ink may someday emerge as a vital aspect of print material, but only when it furthers the essential elements of storytelling, information delivery and clear consumer value.
What's your take? Do you see opportunities in the merging of E Ink and print material? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
Open Question: Do You Re-Read Books?
Mac Slocum
September 8, 2008
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Proponents on both sides of the ebook debate point to the archival/re-read nature of their chosen format, but I'm curious to see if re-reading is a common activity or one of those things we'd all like to do but can't find the time. Here's a few questions toward that end:
- Do you re-read books?
- If yes, how often? (i.e. You re-read 1-2 titles per year.)
- Which titles or genres do you re-read?
- Does a book's format -- print or digital -- make you more or less inclined to re-read a title?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
Books Fail to Crack Top 100 in iTunes App Store
Mac Slocum
August 15, 2008
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Over at Radar, Ben Lorica analyzes sales and category data for the iTunes App Store and makes an interesting discovery about the store's book section:
The Book category is comprised mostly of ebooks and while there are over 150 such "apps", it was the only category not represented in the Top 100 rankings ...
As Ben notes, most of the applications in the App Store's book category are individual ebooks -- most drawn from Project Gutenberg -- wrapped up as stand-alone software packages. The user reviews attached to these ebook apps fall into two camps: critics who cry foul over public domain titles repurposed with a price tag, and advocates who see value in the applications' low cost (most are $0.99) and easy access.
Amazon's Non-Media Products Show Growth
Mac Slocum
July 24, 2008
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New financials show a slight dip in the total percentage of Amazon's revenue generated by books, DVDs and other media. From MarketWatch:
Amazon is also relying less on sales of media products such as books, DVDs and music, which has been its historical strength. In the second quarter, media sales accounted for 59% of the company's total revenue compared to 64% last year.
Media sales grew 31% from the prior year. Sales of electronics and other general merchandise jumped 58% over the same period, totaling $1.5 billion for the second quarter.
The 59 percent brought in from media sales represents a huge chunk of revenue, but many publishing-centric Amazon discussions often neglect the non-media product categories that make it easier for Amazon to gamble on the Kindle and Web services.
"Lost" Builds Community through Book Club and Web Games
Mac Slocum
July 14, 2008
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Producers of ABC's "Lost" often sneak books into the fabric of episodes so die-hard fans can hunt for clues (or red herrings) in external literary sources. Seeing an opportunity, ABC is launching the official "Lost Book Club" through ABC.com and iTunes. From UPI:
Also available on ABC.com will be a message board to discuss the titles, a synopsis of each book, along with when and how it was referenced in the show, and an introduction by co-creator/executive producer Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse, ABC said.
Two years ago, Hyperion published Bad Twin, a book "written" by one of the passengers on "Lost's" ill-fated flight Oceanic 815 (if you're a fan of the show, you'll recognize the author as the guy who got sucked into the engine moments after 815 crashed).
Response to Bad Twin was tepid, but the universe beyond "Lost" episodes has been successfully mined through a number intricate alternate reality games that reveal clues about the show's secondary mysteries. Speaking as a full-fledged "Lost" junkie myself, I know of a number of folks who spent dozens of hours playing these games.
Book publishers with mythology-laden source material may want to take a note from "Lost," "Harry Potter," "Star Wars" and other series. These franchises create organic affinity communities that thrive on interactivity and story expansion, and they can be fostered through forums, social networks, and real-world meetups at related events. Outside observers and casual viewers may not understand the impulse to dress like Boba Fett or write "Lost" fan fiction, but the ardent enthusiasm of a dedicated community presents opportunities that should not be tossed off.
Open Question: Will Genre Fiction Die Off With Traditional Readers?
Mac Slocum
July 8, 2008
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In a recent Washington Post column, Jonathan Karp outlines a theoretical scenario where the convergence of technology, self-publishing and consumer taste will force traditional book publishers out of the "disposable book" market. Karp writes:
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it's hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle. [Emphasis added.]
On first blush this "generational" point makes sense: multitasking and abundant entertainment options don't mesh with the languid pace and time investment required to enjoy genre fiction. But -- playing devil's advocate here -- are hyperactive tastes a defining characteristic throughout a person's lifetime? Isn't it possible that today's texting teen will, at some point in his/her life, gravitate toward the long-form storytelling found in genre fiction?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
Books and Ebooks Will Find Their Place
Mac Slocum
June 30, 2008
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Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson offers a measured, middle-of-the-road response to ebook worriers and enthusiastic analysts:
... just as there are certain books you would rather listen to than read (and vice versa) and some movies you'll rush to the theater to see, there is room in the world for another way to enjoy written narrative. Put it another way: there will always be books you can read in pixels, and others you'll still want to read in the bathtub.
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