Entries tagged with “digital publishing” from Tools of Change for Publishing
New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System
Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2009
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O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs:
Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.
You can see the system in action at the site for our upcoming book Programming Scala.
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.
Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time
Joseph J. Esposito
December 12, 2008
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To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Digital media are useful to publishers only insofar as they serve one of these aims. (A separate matter is using digital media to drive down costs and boost profits, but that is not growth in the defined sense.) Using digital media to redistribute market share may be costly and not lead to the expected gains, as a publisher's rivals are likely to use the very same tactics: anyone can publish for the iPhone and Stanza, anyone can get books onto the Kindle. But with market share battles there is no relief; it is an arms race, and a publisher can no more forego publishing in digital form than it can stop seeking new and creative authors. For a publisher pursuing growth, alas, it's new markets or nothing.
Digital media do not necessarily lead to new markets, and in some situations, digital media may actually serve to shrink markets. For consumer or trade publishing in the developed world, finding a new market can be challenging. Our lives are full, our calendars are snug, and our attention is spread over a seemingly infinite number of media choices, ranging from old-fashioned books to social networks, music, movies, museums, and countless other things. To find a new market here requires opening up a crack in a broad, seamless facade.
Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with IMs and music and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That's a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive.
This point was brought to mind by a mailgroup post by O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas, who commented that he was stuck for an hour in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out his iPhone and check out mail, alerts, and Web sites. But he could have been reading, if publishers had provided formal material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for") to slip between the interstices of Andrew's day.
An hour is a big crack in the day; to become a true interstitial publisher, you would have to aim smaller. How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing? Daydreams don't count -- because ultimately the aim of every media business is to colonize your mind's every moment. (Dust off that old copy of the science fiction classic "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth for a satiric vision of imperial marketing.) If you had something to read that you could sip in draughts of five minutes at a time or perhaps 10, you would participate in the growth of the new market for interstitial publishing. And this is genuine growth, as at this moment the total sales in the interstices is zero or close to it. The goal is to go from zero to 60 in five minutes.
For interstitial publishing to work, you need a handy device (PDA, iPhone, or something like that), which you carry with you all the time so that you can take advantage of the cracks in the day. For this kind of thing, a Kindle or any dedicated ebook reader won't work, as it is more of an effort to pull such a device out of your bag as you wait in line in the supermarket. So if it's growth you want (as distinct from market share), forget the Kindle. A smart phone is a different matter, however: How many times do you see someone yank a Blackberry from a belt clip and glance at incoming email? Instead of email, that could be the twenty-third chapter of the new micronovel by William Adama. The proper device is critical, and the software that runs on it must have sophisticated bookmarking capabilities.
You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting "Moby-Dick" for interstitial publishing simply won't do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it's entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in. Sorry, Tolstoy and Grisham, even William Gibson, but we need a new breed of writer, who is born digital, who is born in the interstices.
Often interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what McLuhan meant by "understanding media": it's not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology.
Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.
Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end--and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.
For "five-minute fiction" to catch on, we will need creative people who probe the nature of the interstitial medium. It's easy to forget (or never to have known) that the linear narrative as we think of it today was in fact invented once upon a time when writers were faced with books that were inexpensively manufactured and distributed to wide audiences for the first time. Publishers will need to seek out writers who comprehend the new medium, who can engage a reader for fie minutes, who can make the many pieces of the work congeal in the reader's mind. These writers will study readers, PDAs or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin. In all of this publishers will see growth.
The aim of digital media should not be (or should not only be) to substitute a screen for a printed page but to reinvent the text on the screen and, in so doing, to bring new readers into the marketplace.
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
October 9, 2008
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The Future Is A Foreign Country (Timo Hannay, Nascent)
As with my journey to Japan, my personal response to all this internet-enabled weirdness was one of almost unadulterated joy. The fact that it is disrupting publishing is, I think, the single most important reason that I've come into the industry. How boring the last 550 years since Gutenberg have been. Until now.
Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up (Brad Feld, Feld Thoughts)
When I look back at the dotcom apocalypse that was 2000 - 2002, I realize some of the best companies I've ever been involved in were created during that time. In the midst of this, I remember the endless stream of "the Internet is over" and "the information technology business in now a mature business and there will never be innovation again." Yeah - whatever.
Watching Books (Richard Curtis, TeleRead)
As successive generations accustomed to being diverted by watching, rather than by reading, enter the editorial workforce, impatience with printed text is demonstrably increasing, as we can see in the sharp decline of newspapers and magazines. Books require a commitment of time and attention that we either don't have or aren't willing to give. The temptation to skip or skimp is strong. One editor confessed to me, "I tend to scan manuscripts on screen rather than read them the way I do a printed text." We must therefore ask ourselves whether instead of reading books on screen, we are watching them.
Game Re-creates Lost Oakland Neighborhood
Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008
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My hat's off to the release of a superb project out of the UC Berkeley Journalism School that re-creates a "lost" and once vibrant neighborhood of Oakland, 7th Street:
There's much more to be done -- developing a curriculum so grade school students can use the game to learn about 7th Street and the blues and jazz scene (we got a small grant to help with this); installing some computers we're buying for the West Oakland Senior Center and the West Oakland Library so folks there can access and play the game; getting older folks and young kids to play the game together as an experiment in cross-generational learning; building out the next phase of the game, in which the player will be challenged to organize the community to stop the projects that destroyed 7th Street, such as BART, the post office, the freeway and the public housing projects; and filling in more of the current game world by adding more characters and places the player can interact with.
How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2008
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News of a looming downgrade of NYT stock to "junk" status by Standard & Poor's sadly isn't all that shocking. I'm certainly glad I'm not an investor holding any NYT.
But there's something going on at the Times that probably won't make it to Silicon Alley Insider, much less the mainstream business press, and it's something that's starting to make me think the Times just might succeed in adapting to the changing rules of the media and publishing game (though there will almost certainly be many more casualties before it's over).
So what's the Times doing that's so important? They're hacking.
Not hacking in the nefarious sense, but in the original sense of experimentation, and curiosity, and solving interesting problems (as Paul Graham put it, "Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.") How many other publishers are running blogs about their work with open source software? Even fewer are developing and releasing their own high-quality open source software:
Quite frankly, we wanted to scale the front-end webservers and backend database servers separately without having to coordinate them. We also needed a way to flexibly reconfigure where our backend databases were located and which applications used them without resorting to tricks of DNS or other such "load-balancing" hacks. Plus, it just seemed really cool to have a JSON-speaking DB layer that all our scriptable content could talk to. Thus, the DBSlayer was born.
That is not typical newsroom conversation.
But this isn't just about open source software, or even about some developers building cool software to run backend system. The Times has put developers right in the middle of the newsroom. At a MediaBistro event in May, Aron Pilhofer from the "Interactive News Technology" group at the Times (sharing the stage with their Editor of Digital News, Jim Roberts), talked about how the Minnesota bridge collapse was when they realized they needed to develop their own tools to cover the news with the web, and not just on the web. Less than a year later, when Hillary Clinton's infamous public schedule was released, they had the people and the skills in place to crunch 12,000 PDF documents (containing images of scanned documents) through a text-recognition program, on to Amazon's "Elastic Computing Cloud" and finally into a Ruby on Rails Web application providing full-text search across all eight years of calendars.
Just this week, the Times' Derek Gottfrid gave a talk at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) titled "Processing Large Data with Hadoop and EC2" based on work he'd done on the Times' archives. Again, this is the kind of talk you're not likely to hear at most newspapers (or magazines, or book publishers) these days:
I was able to create a Hadoop cluster on my local machine and wrap my code with the proper Hadoop semantics. After a bit more tweaking and bug fixing, I was ready to deploy Hadoop and my code on a cluster of EC2 machines. For deployment, I created a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for EC2 that was based on a Xen image from my desktop machine. Using some simple Python scripts and the boto library, I booted four EC2 instances of my custom AMI. I logged in, started Hadoop and submitted a test job to generate a couple thousands articles — and to my surprise it just worked.
Earlier this month at FOO Camp I had the pleasure of meeting another hacker from the Times, Nick Bilton, part of the Times R&D lab -- the folks who built the impressive NYT iPhone App.
UPDATE: Nick Bilton points out via email that:
There were people from nytimes.com that were instrumental in building the NYT iPhone app also ... Is there anyway you can add a couple of words that the R&D Group 'worked with nytimes.com' to help build the iPhone app?
If you're worried about EBITDA and EPS, then you're rightly worried about the Times right now. But if you're worried about the future of journalism, and about the ability of established media companies to adapt to a digital world, there's also reason to be excited about the Times right now too.
Calling Google a Publisher Underestimates its Platform
Mac Slocum
June 19, 2008
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Google has never positioned itself as a publisher, but a recent News.com piece looking at Google's role in Web advertising says the company's 2006 YouTube acquisition moved Google into the publishing space:
Google itself is a publisher, at least in one sense: it offers countless videos through [its] YouTube service. So Google has more incentive than just its DoubleClick division to improve display advertising.
YouTube is certainly content-centric, but Google didn't pay $1.65 billion for all those videos. It shelled out big bucks for YouTube's audience and, more importantly, its platform.
Publishers tend to see the world through singular products -- books, newspapers, magazines, Web sites -- but platform companies, like Google, see these same products as an aggregated stream of general content that needs to be delivered. If you control the delivery mechanism, you can mine it for revenue -- something Google has already done through its AdSense and AdWords programs, which piggyback on Google's search tools to deliver contextual advertising. Now that Google has monetized and claimed the Web search market, the company is expanding its platform into harder-to-crack content spheres: books, TV, and radio. This is why Google Book Search isn't just an archive. It's a content pipe that plugs into Google's overall architecture.
Google clearly recognizes that its platform is only effective if it serves up useful material, as illustrated in this passage from the same News.com piece:
People are consuming more and more media on the Internet but paying less and less, [Google Chief Exec Eric] Schmidt said. "That's bad for Google. We are critically dependent on high-quality content," he said.
Publishers are experts at producing the content Google needs, but incorrectly labeling Google a publisher -- and, ostensibly, a competitor -- obscures the essential relationship between Google and actual publishers.
So, in an effort to keep publishers on target in the platform discussion, here are a few top-level items to consider:
Identify the platforms -- Platform companies are focused on distribution, both through their own Web properties and via underlying delivery technologies. They may own popular Web sites that generate revenue through some forms of content (e.g. YouTube), but their real interest lies in aggregating and disseminating material. Google is the big platform provider, but Facebook and Amazon are both making moves into the platform arena. Even if you ultimately dismiss a particular company, it's still important to competitively -- and correctly -- identify its platform moves.
Consider how your content can be delivered through available platforms -- Look at user patterns. Ask yourself: How do people use these platforms to find and consume content? How are other companies effectively delivering their material? The newspaper industry offers an important case study for this point: It initially relied on subscription models for its Web content, but in recent years many papers have removed subscription restrictions so each article can be discovered -- and mined for ad revenue -- through Google and other search platforms. The industry is finally working with user behavior, not against it.
Look for revenue streams -- We've recently harped on the importance of tie-backs and analytics in digital experiments, and those same warnings apply here as well. If you're going to distribute your material through a platform, you need to have revenue streams in mind. This could take the form of advertising, affiliate relationships, trialware, or links/call-outs to upsell products. It could also be part of a larger branding campaign.
Add open formats to the production process -- Google is a massive platform player, but the Internet's open and distributed infrastructure allows other companies to develop their own platforms. Publishers looking for platform-friendly positioning can take advantage of future platforms -- including those not yet envisioned -- by incorporating open formats (XML, HTML, RSS, EPUB, etc.) into their production processes. There's no reason to gamble on proprietary formats and exclusivity because the big platforms, and the smart platform companies, will use methods that have already been adopted by the widest possible audience. And if a closed format does reach critical mass (iTunes and AAC, for example), commonly used open formats will be incorporated into conversion tools and projects.
These general points require deeper contextualization for particular companies and initiatives, and the business threats presented by large platform companies need to be rationally examined and acknowledged (particularly, centralization and lock-in). Nonetheless, publishers need to recognize that misrepresentations are where the real threat lies. Incorrect platform assumptions limit the significant opportunities.
Reading Campaign Taps Web Trickery
Mac Slocum
June 4, 2008
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The following is for entertainment/information purposes only. Don't blame us when you get fired for reading Animal Farm on the job.
Read at Work is a Web site that displays a Windows XP overlay on your computer (in itself not all that impressive ... especially if you're on a Mac). But look closer and you'll see that the clickable desktop folders contain poems, short stories and novels -- all rendered in fake PowerPoint files complete with cliched PPT navigation and generic clip art. It's certainly not the best way to read a classic, but the increased job security should offset any formatting annoyances.
The New Zealand Book Council launched the site as part of a reading campaign. More info is available at BestAdsOnTV.com.
(Via BuzzFeed.)
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