Entries tagged with “experimentation” from Tools of Change for Publishing
"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"
Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009
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A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:
In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.
Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.
One-Question Interview at BookNet Canada Tech Forum
Andrew Savikas
March 19, 2009
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Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2009 BookNet Canada Technology Forum in Toronto (motto: Even colder than you expected!), and Mark Bertils caught up with me on my way out for a quick video interview:
Two follow ups on what I said, now that I have my del.icio.us feed handy:
- The Peter Drucker reference is from his 5 Deadly Business Sins: "Cost-driven Pricing. The only thing that works is price-driven costing. The only sound way to price is to start out with what the market is willing to pay--and thus what the competition will charge--and design to that price specification."
- It was Mike Shatzkin (referencing Michael Cader) who made the recent point about the relative low cost of experimentation for publishers around pricing digital products: "You can't get rich or go broke whether you price the ebook 50% too high or 50% too low. Try everything. You'll never have a cheaper opportunity to experiment."
Photos from New York Times R&D Lab
Andrew Savikas
February 12, 2009
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Nick Bilton was a hit yesterday at the TOC Conference, and during his keynote he talked about what they're working on with content at the NYT R&D Lab. Nick was kind enough to give a few of us a private tour earlier this week, and here's some photos from the trip:
Good Company Culture Comes in Small Packages
Kate Eltham
February 5, 2009
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Common wisdom says that small companies are more nimble, responsive and adaptable than their larger cousins.
My personal experience reflects this. I've worked in large organisations -- FMCG corporates, international aid organisations and government -- and I've worked in small ones -- private consulting firms and small non-profits. In each case I've found that small enterprises outperform large ones when it comes to transformation. Smaller companies are faster to identify industry trends and respond to new business opportunities. They also punch above their weight on some forms of R&D, particularly business process innovation. Put simply, small companies are more fleet of foot.
But why?
We're seeing a lot of reports come through about how small publishers are responding to trends and opportunities. MediaBistro and The Christian Science Monitor have both reported small publishers are leading the charge when it comes to digitization. In his article, "E-book revolution favors the agile", Matthew Shaer said:
But it's not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest. Instead, some of the most extensive restructuring efforts are being undertaken in the independent publishing world, traditionally a hotbed for innovation and experimentation.
Soft Skull Press, Canongate, Akashic are all good examples. Shaer also points out that publishing is emulating the music industry in this pattern and, I'd wager, other industries as well.
Again, I ask why?
The obvious reasons are the ones people usually point to. Smaller companies are like the canary in the coal mine. They are first to feel the effects of major shifts within an industry and may need to move faster to find solutions. On the other hand, small publishers also have an incentive to exploit technological efficiencies that might even up the playing field against big competitors.
Small size also helps with changing direction. This week Wheatland Press announced it is taking a publishing hiatus in 2009:
What this means is that I will publish no new books during 2009 (including Polyphony 7). I will continue to fill orders on existing titles and will keep those titles available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com ... I will explore ways to put Wheatland Press on a firmer financial footing including, but not limited to, seeking external funding via arts councils, seeking partnerships with other presses, etc. I hope the break will allow me to return to a regular publishing schedule in 2010.
On one level this could be regarded as just another volley of bad news from a publisher affected by global economic conditions. But it's worth noting that only a small publisher could make this kind of decision. HarperCollins and Random House can't make the choice to stop publishing books for a year to sort out their business model and make necessary changes. They can cut costs through staff layoffs and tightening budgets, but their operational overheads are way too large to ever get off the treadmill of publishing hundreds of titles a year.
Underneath it all, though, the one thing that has the biggest impact on a company's ability to transform is the one thing that almost never gets talked about in the publishing industry: organizational culture. Paul Biba of TeleRead, quoted in the Shaer article, hints at this but doesn't quite nail it down:
"In general, I'd say the big publishers tend to be really dinosaurs, intrigued by e-books but afraid of them ... [Younger readers] have grown up with a whole different way of looking at the world, and I don't think many publishers understand this. They think people are just sitting down in leather chairs and reading hardcopy books."
I'm not sure this is a fair characterization of publisher attitudes today, but I do think it alludes to a bigger problem that is stopping large publishers from embracing new opportunities.
Big trade publishers are fighting a losing battle against their own organizational cultures. The history of business is littered with examples of companies that couldn't transition from one paradigm to the next, not because they couldn't see the necessity, but because they couldn't undertake the necessary internal change.
The larger a company is, the harder organisational change is to effect. The big trade publishers are now subsidiaries of the largest media companies in the world with thousands of employees, hundreds of offices and decades of crusted-on beliefs, traditions and systems. Small teams, by virtue of scale, can change their organisational culture quickly, sometimes through shifts in personnel, other times by the sheer force of personality from a charismatic leader. In any case, smaller teams tend to adopt a tenacious, can-do, try-anything culture because they have to.
Organisational culture is the bedrock of performance. This, more than any problem of physical infrastructure or technical or financial systems, makes big publishers slow to adapt. Too slow, I fear, to survive the speed of change within the cultural and economic ecology of which they are a part.
New experiments are popping up, such as HarperStudio, which could be the exception that proves the rule. Only by hiving itself off as a separate, entrepreneurial unit within HarperCollins, with its own small-team culture, has HarperStudio been able to achieve the clear-eyed perspective and momentum to try really different and new ways of publishing.
Paul Biba may have called it right by using the word "dinosaur." After all, it was the small dinosaurs, with modern-day descendants still thriving, who made the successful adaptation that evolution requires. The big guys fell hard and fast and it's increasingly rare to find any evidence of their impact on us at all.
New Project Examines Close Reading and Web Collaboration
Mac Slocum
October 31, 2008
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On Nov. 10, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook will be read and discussed by seven readers in a new experiment that explores "close reading" and the mechanisms of online conversation.
The project is the brainchild of Bob Stein, founder of Institute for the Future of the Book. Stein outlined the project's goals in an email announcement:
Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don't yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web's two-dimensional environment and we're hoping this experiment will help us learn what's necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible.
The seven readers will discuss the book through margin notes and a group blog, and a public forum will be available for others to join the conversation. Further details are available through the project site.
Overestimating the Home Page
Mac Slocum
October 13, 2008
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Brett Crosby from Google Analytics says a home page is often mistaken as the most important part of a Web site. From TechRadar:
Where are your visitors landing, bouncing, and viewing? It's often assumed user experience begins on the homepage, and this misconception drives many an ecommerce site to waste hours of design work in the wrong place. Search engines dig deeper into ecommerce sites, bringing visitors to not just 'electronics', but also televisions, MP3 players or sat navs. Analytics data will tell you where your real 'homepages' reside, so you can focus your design work there.
Crosby's point applies to content-based sites as well. Visitors often enter through an individual story page or blog post, not the home page. This is why there's value in serving up related posts, embedded links and call-outs to other features and tools on story-level pages.
Calling Out Risk-Averse Publishers
Mac Slocum
October 2, 2008
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Bloomsbury Academic is testing the theory that increased awareness from free distribution boosts book sales. The recently-launched imprint is releasing all of its titles online under a Creative Commons license while also selling print-on-demand editions. Discussing the rationale with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bloomsbury's Frances Pinter cites the unnecessary chasm between envelope-pushers and conservative publishers:
"I'm tired of the divide between open-access people who have nothing but disdain for publishers, and publishers who don't really know how to take a few risks and try some new models," she said. She would like Bloomsbury Academic to demonstrate that publishers can add editorial value to scholarship without having to choose between locking it down or giving it all away.
Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development
Mac Slocum
September 29, 2008
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Audience fragmentation is an oft-cited source of mainstream media's ills, but two dissimilar publishers show that valuable attention can still be acquired.
Politico, an on-the-rise political publisher, is expanding while everyone else is contracting. In a recent interview with mediabistro's FishbowlNY, Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei said there's opportunity in niche content models:
I don't think our model can be easily replicated, at least on the print side (unless the federal government moves to another city). John [Harris, co-founder] and I do think there is a very robust future for niche sites online. The new media formula is pretty simple: If you can build a desirable audience that a class of advertisers wants to reach, you have a darn good chance at success. Advertisers want efficient ways of reaching their target audience, and niche sites offer it (if you can build a big enough audience). We have some thoughts on variations of Politico that might work elsewhere -- and we might have more on that next year.
A separate story about a successful hyperlocal initiative from Lost Remote's Cory Bergman reinforces VandeHei's optimism:
... My Ballard has exploded in popularity beyond our wildest expectations, surpassing the weekly neighborhood newspaper in monthly reach (unique users compared to the paper's physical subscription base.) We've even launched similar blogs in surrounding neighborhoods with the help of friends and friends of friends, forming a news blog network covering the core of Seattle's fastest-growing communities.
Politico is geared toward affluent decision makers and information-hungry political junkies while My Ballard is serving up local news to an engaged urban community, but both sites are employing the same simple model: target a promising market, serve it with compelling content, then adapt to the needs of the audience.
Old-guard companies who still believe audiences can be cornered are bound to fail because the exponential increase in distribution channels empowers audiences to form and shift on their own terms. Audience freedom has pushed the publishing industry into perpetual beta, and content firms that acknowledge this -- and work with it -- are best positioned to succeed. That's why there's so much value in the trails being blazed by Politico, My Ballard and other publishers -- including smart "old" companies. These publishers recognize that an ongoing cycle of "target-serve-adapt" is the best way to attract attention from on-the-move groups.
Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence
Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008
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In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance:
Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing industry fought off the paperback and was skeptical of the book club -- which was effectively a technology-driven invention that used the new science of direct marketing and the mail to change the business. Now there are innovations like Amazon and Audible [Note: Amazon acquired Audible in January '08]
Effectively, from my perspective, these disruptions -- along with Superstores -- changed a relatively aristocratic product into a mass market product. A lot of these disruptions have allowed increasingly middle class and lower middle class people to have access to books, which were traditionally for rich people.
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.
POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
Mac Slocum
July 28, 2008
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MagCloud is a new print-on-demand (POD) service targeting the magazine industry. In the following Q&A, MagCloud consultant Derek Powazek -- co-founder of JPG Magazine and founder of Fray -- discusses the utility of POD and the evolving relationship between print and Web content.
How did you get involved with MagCloud?
I came into the project over a year ago -- it had been percolating in HP Labs for a long time before that, led by Andy Fitzhugh, Udi Chatow, and Andrew Bolwell. Andy is the one who brought me in. We had this meet and greet lunch to talk about the future of publishing and it turned out we had the same vision. He kept saying, "Right, now push that further."
When did you first encounter POD?
Years ago, when Heather [Champ] and I were exploring ways to make a photography magazine, Lulu was really the only game in town. We learned so much creating JPG there, and starting with a POD service allowed us to experiment, develop the voice and vision of the magazine, and build an audience. I think it's a very natural way to start a magazine.
How did you gravitate toward a POD model for magazines?
It's all about the Giant Pile. I've worked on a lot of newspaper and magazine projects, and they all had one thing in common: A huge print run, followed by the slow, terrible realization that you've gotta get rid of all that paper.
POD banishes the Giant Pile to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Because, with a POD system, you don't print it until somebody wants it. It avoids the pile. It avoids creating trash (70 percent of all magazines are never bought). It brings some of the elegance of the Internet to this very old industry.
But mostly it was just a financial decision. Heather and I weren't out to become publishing magnates. We just had an idea that we thought people would like. We wouldn't have been able to do it at all if not for POD.
What types of magazine publishers (large, small, individuals, etc.) are best suited for MagCloud?
I think that magazines are about nurturing a community. If you look at the most successful magazines (Rolling Stone in the '60s, Wired in the '90s, Make now), they've always been the ones that surfed the zeitgeist. They found a growing community of people and reflected it, and in that reflection, began to lead it for a time.
But if you tell people in the publishing industry that they're really in the community business, they'll say "shut up, hippy" and go back to monetizing their audience metrics.
So the trick is to find those niche audiences that need a voice. And there are a lot of them. And the truth is, they know who they are better than we do. So, with MagCloud, the idea is to open up the tools so that those communities can create their own magazines. We think they're going to make amazing things.
Do you see larger magazine publishers eventually moving to POD, or will this be a niche option?
Not only do I think that large magazine publishers will move to digital printing, but I think that the idea that we used to print millions of things that were exactly the same will someday be seen as a cute historical artifact. "You mean every copy of this magazine was the same for everyone, Grandpa? Weird!"
For the biggies, it's just a matter of economics. As soon as the price per page for printing on digital is cheaper than traditional offset printing, the biggies will move. The quality of POD is already the same or better than offset.
It'll start with smaller publications because they're the most agile, and they don't see the real price savings of scale anyway. Right now, if you're printing a few thousand copies, digital printing is the same cost as traditional offset. (I've been wrestling with this for Fray.com -- we're right at the cusp. Our first issue was printed via traditional offset, but issue two will be printed with MagCloud.)
And once magazines move to POD, they'll realize it opens up opportunities they never had before. When you can really tailor each issue for each subscriber, what will you do? Exciting, huh?
Book publishers often focus on the short-term elements of POD, most notably POD's higher cost per page. Some industry folks try to cite the long-range benefits, such as efficiency, higher retail prices via customization, etc., but the per-page discrepancy continues to be a sticking point. Have you encountered similar obstacles on the magazine side?
Magazines are a better fit for POD because, unlike books, they're usually all color and timeliness is much more of a factor. Plus, the price per page for digital print is falling fast, while the price per page of traditional offset has remained very steady. Still, the exciting part is all the opportunities digital printing enables. Ultimately, POD services like MagCloud will enable a degree of customization that is not only cheaper, but just plain impossible to do via traditional means.
Beyond strict numbers, what do you see as the upside to print editions? Does a print product carry a higher level of esteem for a writer or consumer?
I love the Web. I think it's still a publisher's dream come true. But, inconveniently, we humans are still real world creatures. And no matter how much connectivity blankets the planet, and how good our devices get, there will still be a role for print.
I don't say this because I'm some ancient technology fetishist. I don't own a tube amp. I sold all my CDs. It's just that print is a really good delivery mechanism for some kinds of experiences. Reading a physical magazine is a different experience than surfing hypertext online.
And, yes, I think the scarcity of print does give it a higher level of importance for its creators and consumers. On the Web, where every page is just a click away from any other, there's no relative importance communicated. But in a magazine, you know that a team of writers and editors picked this story to go here. That has a profound effect on how that media is consumed.
Time Inc. Prepping Mix and Match Magazine Service
Mac Slocum
July 15, 2008
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Time Inc.'s Maghound service sounds like the physical manifestation of an RSS reader. Launching in September, Maghound will allow customers to pick and swap magazine titles for a base monthly fee. From USA Today:
Customers will pay a monthly fee for home delivery of the publications they want. But unlike with subscriptions, which typically run for fixed terms, users can go online and swap one title for another whenever they want.
According to USA Today, baseline pricing will be set by the number of titles: around $5 per month for three titles, $8 for five, and $10 for seven. Some titles may incur higher charges.
In June, Folio reported that Maghound hopes to launch with 300 magazine titles.
Companies in the magazine space are showing a willingness to experiment. Barnes & Noble launched a digital/print magazine subscription service through BN.com in May, and MagCloud recently unveiled a print-on-demand system for magazine titles.
Magazine POD Service Looks to Help Publishers Experiment
Peter Brantley
July 3, 2008
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Folio interviews the founders of MagCloud, a print-on-demand (POD) service that provides the ability to aggregate magazine content from multiple publishers:
Large publishers are as challenged as anyone to reach niche segments efficiently, and likewise have no way to do the kind of hyper-targeted publishing that digital print can provide. We hope MagCloud can help in these ways, not just to enable niche publishing to flourish, but to enable traditional publishers to experiment with and find these new opportunities.
Release Early, Release Often: Agile Software Development in Publishing
Liza Daly
June 12, 2008
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"How do Web startups release three or four new versions of a product in the time it takes publishers to launch just one new feature on their online platforms?"
This question framed "The Agile IT Organization," a lively and well-informed discussion at the recent Society for Scholarly Publishing annual conference in Boston. As a software engineer, I've used both agile and traditional product development methodologies and I was interested to hear the perspectives of other programmers as well as publishers who've gone through the process.
Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef provided an introduction to agile development practices, which are concisely summarized in plain English by a core set of principles.
Summarizing even further, agile development means:
- Minimal up-front specification. A project has high-level goals (e.g. "make our back catalog searchable and available for print-on-demand purchase"), but is not fully described before development begins.
- Frequent, short-cycle releases. A project is broken up into mini-projects, each with a small set of features that take only a few weeks to implement. Every release ("iteration") has a specification, development and testing phase. This means that every couple of weeks the software is fully usable, although it may have very few features at the start.
- Change to the product design is accommodated and even expected. Market conditions, corporate re-organization or user demands may mean that new features are added or old ones are re-worked. Changes are treated as just another iteration.
The panel at SSP focused on two approaches: internal, IT-driven products, and those developed by a third-party vendor. Larry Belmont, manager of online development at the American Institute of Physics, gave an excellent presentation on the in-house approach. His organization ran its first agile project with a timeline measured in days rather than weeks or months.
Leigh Dodds, CTO of Ingenta, provided the vendor perspective, and described the principles of a formal type of agile development known as Scrum.
The panel was, to their credit, enthusiastic about the approach, but agile development requires commitment and is not right for every
organization or project. Some caveats that need to be emphasized:
- Short development cycles come with a price: you will be asked to review and comment on small pieces of the larger project, and be involved on an almost daily basis. Many publishers need vendors they can treat like plumbers: "I want a new sink put here, it should look like this, call me when it's done." If someone in your organization isn't prepared to think very hard every day about copper pipe fittings, agile isn't right for you.
- Project managers must be empowered to make decisions. Whether the project is in-house or vendor-driven, every day the PM will be asked to make calls without appealing to higher powers. When editorial buy-in is required, or when the product needs a larger review, consider a hybrid approach: appoint a single decision-maker with deep editorial knowledge to work on evaluating, testing and approving each iteration, but use a more traditional alpha/beta/gold release process for the wider group.
- Product features may change, but time and budget should be invariant. Hard deadlines might seem to be antithetical to the free-wheeling, change-friendly agile approach, but in my experience they're critical. They focus the entire team: key decision-makers cannot spend weeks in committee, IT personnel don't fear the "death march" project with no end in sight, and it's more difficult to introduce budget overruns that cause friction with management and vendors. If an agile project does run out of time, you will still have a launchable product that's been thoroughly tested and reviewed all the way down the line, not something just out of beta with weeks of QA ahead. Many agile methodologies use the hard deadline, or timebox, as the primary method of structuring the project.
"Release early, release often" can sound a lot like "throw whatever we've got out the door." This is one reason why the iterative approach has been so embraced by Web startups: each small release has been thoroughly tested and evaluated, and there's never a moment where the software doesn't work. It's possible to to go live with a project that might not be "finished" according to the original master plan, but might otherwise be caught up in insurmountable technical hurdles or tied up in editorial review.
If publishers are going to be ready for an "iPod moment," this kind of flexibility and responsiveness is critical.
Treating Ebooks Like Software
Mac Slocum
June 5, 2008
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Peter Kent, DNAML's senior vice president for U.S. operations, brings a software-centric perspective to ebooks. In the following Q&A, Kent discusses the merits of in-book transactions, affiliate marketing, and other digital initiatives that can benefit book publishers.
Q: In your presentation at last month's IDPF Digital Book '08 you discussed treating ebooks like software. Do you feel the software model is directly related to ebooks, or are there specific aspects of the software model ("try before you buy" trialware, download ebooks through multiple outlets, etc.) that are more in line with ebook/publishing goals?
Not sure of the distinction you're making here. I think that there's much about software distribution that applies to ebooks, and why not? Ebooks are, of course, pieces of software. In particular, providing ebooks in a trialware format makes a lot of sense, and is a proven model. That's why Amazon let's people view a portion of a book, that's why Barnes & Noble likes having people in their stores hanging out reading. And of course, download through multiple outlets makes a lot of sense, too. Why wouldn't you distribute your products as widely as possible? If trialware works -- and it does -- then you naturally want as many people as possible to get the books in their hands. The large, established publishers are going to have a shock when they see the new book-distribution world. It's no longer a gentleman's game in which everyone hands over their books to a bookstore, and then they all compete on the same level. In the future the more aggressive publishers are going to go out and find book buyers even before the buyers have thought about buying!
Q: Do publishers focus too much on the "book" aspect of ebooks? Would a shift toward a file/software perspective open things up?
Some do. The more advanced publishers understand what's going on, but I do think there's still a bias toward the old method of distributing books: give your books to a retailer who puts the books on shelves. Certainly up until recently most publishers have had the idea in their mind that in order to sell ebooks they have to create the ebooks and then give them to Amazon and other retailers to sell. Little thought has gone into new methods of distribution. What may save the publishers is that new distributors will come on the scene: distributors who understand the new landscape and go out and push the books.
Q: Are ebooks available through sites like Download.com, Tucows.com and other software-specific hubs? If not, should they be?
You can already find ebooks in many software download sites, though most do not yet have specific ebook categories. ZDNet's download site doesn't have an ebook category, for instance, though it does have an ebook "tag." Download.com has a music category and a games category, why wouldn't they have a book category? Of course they will eventually, as more and more books become available. But one thing holding back the creation of ebook categories is that only free books, or trialware books, will fit. Once books from major publishers are commonly sold as trialware, you'll see the download sites pay more attention.
Q: What about ebook availability through P2P sites/mechanisms, such as BitTorrent?
Trialware books are perfect for this form of distribution.
Q: In your conversations with publishers and others in the industry, do you feel most people understand the basics of internal ebook transactions and affiliate tagging? How do you describe these concepts to newcomers?
Most publishers haven't the slightest idea about this. When I ask publishers "do you know what affiliate marketing is?" I typically get a response such as "um, well ...". So if they don't understand what affiliate marketing is, they certainly don't understand affiliate tagging. This isn't true of all publishers; Harlequin, for instance, is really good at online marketing, and certainly understands affiliate-marketing well.
So, how do I explain these things? Well, by internal transactions, I mean that each ebook is its own shopping-cart system. You reach a point inside the book that you cannot get past without paying. You enter your credit card information into the book itself (though the actual form is retrieved from a server so, for instance, the book price can be changed at any time), and when you submit your card and it's approved, the server automatically unlocks the book, so you can continue reading.
As for affiliate tagging, this is the ability to add a code to each book you distribute -- one code for each specific distribution channel -- so the publisher or distributor knows where that book came from. If you distribute through Web Site A, 10,000 people download the book, and 500 buy it, you know that those 500 people came from Web Site A. If you put the book in a magazine insert, 100,000 people buy the magazine, 10,000 copy the book to their computers, and 500 buy it, then you know that those 500 customers came from that particular magazine insert. Thus you can pay the right company the required affiliate commissions.
So these two components, along with the ability to partially lock a book, allow you to create trialware books -- try-before-you-buy books -- that can be distributed widely, through many different channels.
Q: Is there an opportunity for competing publishers to generate affiliate revenue by selling other publishers' books?
Absolutely! Books can be bundled within books -- certainly our DNL format allows this -- so a publisher might bundle several locked books at the end of the book. Those books might belong to the publisher or, in appropriate cases, from another publisher. In particular, of course, small publishers could benefit from these sorts of relationships with other publishers.
Q: What is the upside of "try before you buy" in ebooks?
A try-before-you-buy book with built-in transaction processing, and built-in affiliate tagging, opens up a whole new world of distribution options. All of a sudden, the book can go anywhere. Sell computer books? Talk with computer manufacturers about putting your books on the desktop of every new computer sold, and talk to software manufacturers about bundling the books in their software downloads. Sell photography books? Put them on the software CDs inside digital-camera packaging. Sell wine books? Give away try-before-you-buy books on wine Web sites. Science fiction novels? Give books away on fan sites. Those three things -- try-before-you-buy, internal transaction processing, and affiliate tagging -- free books from ecommerce Web sites, and provide almost limitless marketing opportunities.
Q: What viral/social aspects does your company include in ebooks? (Email to a friend, etc.)
We include Email-to-a-Friend, of course. If you try a book, like it, and buy it, that book is now unlocked. But if you email it to a friend or colleague, when it lands on the recipient's computer it's now locked. Word of mouth is hugely important in book sales; it always has been. Email-to-a-Friend is essentially a modern-day word-of-mouth feature. We also allow people to share notes. Members of a book club could highlight areas of the books, add notes, then email the highlights and notes to each other. Members can import these things, and see who said what based on the name at the top of the notes.
Q: Are ebook giveaways useful?
Of course. Companies such as Harlequin use giveaways to build interest. I think, though, that these giveaways will get more sophisticated, as publishers learn more about try-before-you-buy books. For instance, if you're giving away a book, you're hoping that the reader will come to your site and buy another one at some point. But why not create a giveaway book, a single file, that includes a book for sale at the end of the free book? Or several books from which the reader can choose?
Q: Do you recommend user tracking and registration? How in-depth should this tracking/registration be?
Of course you want as much information as possible; we're in business, after all, so we need to create relationships with buyers. Amazon does this. I like to point out to publishers that someone owns the relationship, it's just not them. If you sell photography books and someone buys one of your books through Amazon today, tomorrow Amazon will start promoting other photography books to this buyer. Some of these books will be yours, perhaps, but most won't! So Amazon's tracking, and Amazon's benefiting. Publishers are going to learn to do the same for themselves, and some already are.
Essential Points in the Free Debate
Mac Slocum
June 2, 2008
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Expanding on "free"-centric discussions from Steven Poole and David Pogue, TechDirt's Mike Masnick argues that free experiments are only valuable if they're backed up by business models:
The basic problem is this: they hear about the importance of "free" and so they give something away for free. But they don't have a business model around the free content. They don't understand the economic forces at work. They just give stuff away and pray ... and then whine when nothing happens. As we've pointed out before, no one says that "free" by itself pays the bills. You need to have a more complete strategy than that -- and it involves a lot more than "give it away and pray."
Poole, Pogue and Masnick all support their cases (whether you agree or disagree likely depends on your overall take on free), but what I find interesting about some of these recent pieces is the tonal shift: there's an edge to them, and I'm not entirely sure where it comes from. It could be the alternative nature of free (giving stuff away is anathema to some), or maybe it springs from the odd mixture of frustration and opportunity that's swirling around the broader transition to digital. It could also emanate from ancillary topics like piracy and fading industries.
The problem with edgy discussions is that the edge generally overwhelms the core topic. And when you're dealing with an already ambiguous concept -- such as free -- distraction is even more disconcerting.
That said, there are a number of salient points within these recent posts, and each deserves to be called out:
- Free needs to be judged contextually. As Tim O'Reilly wrote in the past, free is more complicated than it initially seems, so it must to be examined amidst the goals of a particular company.
- A single experiment -- whether successful or not -- does not signify a trend. A variety of experiments need to be conducted to get a true handle on free's utility.
- Free requires an outcome. As Masnick notes, and as we've discussed here, an experiment without a strategy won't yield anything useful. Free needs to be part of a broader plan, and that plan should be thought out before giveaways begin.
- Free is one of many potential adaptations. As digital industries mature and revenue streams become more fruitful, additional models will likely form. These models deserve the same level of inquiry. Companies might find that an aggregate approach yields the best results.
- Finally ... free isn't fully formed. All viewpoints and trial runs deserve at least a passing glance.
Digital Experiments and Useful Analytics Must Go Hand-in-Hand
Mac Slocum
May 20, 2008
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Experimentation without analysis isn't worth much.
It's a succinct and obvious point, but this one phrase was my biggest takeaway from the recent IDPF Digital Book event. Leslie Hulse, vice president of digital business development at HarperCollins, drove home the experimentation-analysis relationship while discussing one of HarperCollins' free audio download experiments. Hulse concluded:
The marketing people would say this was very successful because it got all kinds of attention, but we really didn't see an impact on sales. It wasn't linked to registration, so we didn't feel we got much out of this in terms of something we could use down the road. What we learned from this experiment was: when it's free audio with no DRM and no registration, it's too easy to take it and run. So we need to tie it to registration or use DRM or use a watermark so that we can contact these people in the future or know more about how they're using it.
The merits of DRM are debatable, but Hulse's broader point is important to consider: An experiment launched without a measurement device isn't really an experiment; it's a blind giveaway.
As Hulse noted, a simple registration form can provide baseline metrics and contacts for future products. For more in-depth information, advanced analytics tools (even free ones) can be integrated into experiments to track downloads, page views, unique visitors, user-session times, geographic targeting, forwards/emails and other social components. Privacy needs to be considered in any tracking effort, but a little common sense and planning can easily find the sweet spot between consumer comfort and detailed data points.
"The key thing for us is that all these experiments must be measurable," Hulse said. "We're trying to do things where we can measure the results and move from there."
It's Time to Accept an Ambiguous Digital Fate
Mac Slocum
May 15, 2008
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"Digital transition" articles and discussions tend to fall into one of two camps:
- The "change is inevitable and/or positive" camp -- These pieces are typically marked by an enthusiastic tone and broad generalizations about the rosy future of digital industries, but firm numbers and case studies are in short supply. (I tend to write and gravitate toward this camp).
- The "path is murky; the money isn't there" camp -- Few of these stories fully embrace a sky is falling mentality, but they do plant themselves between the old rock (the current system is broken) and the new hard place (most digital business models aren't viable).
But lately I've noticed a third camp emerging amidst the discourse, and I think this one might hold the most promise: It's the "embrace ambiguity" position.
Chris O'Brien from Media Shift touches on this perspective in his report from the National Association of Music Retailers conference:
I listened hard for any obvious lessons or strategies that newspapers should consider, and I didn't necessarily hear any. Experiment wildly. Study the audience. Be platform agnostic. Embrace any format or device where users get their music. [Emphasis added.]
Not exactly a "Braveheart"-esque call to arms, but O'Brien's practical standpoint is thematically related to the forward-thinking "Valley of Death" concept developed by Michael Cairns from PersonaNonData:
The 'valley of death' is the graphic depiction of what will happen to your revenue line as you proactively make a transition from print to digital. If you are lucky, after 3-4yrs you will regain the revenue you had in the year before you attempted to transform your business. Ultimately, the business becomes stronger and more flexible in the manner in which the publisher can seek new markets and business development. It's just that the valley looks so horrible (and no one will make their bonus) that discourages the publisher.
I'm sure many people would place both of these excerpts squarely in the negative camp, but I see it differently. They share an undercurrent of reality -- a shoulder shrug toward acceptance -- that says, "If ambiguity is the best we can hope for, then ambiguity is what we'll work with." At this point, as Web revenue continues to find its footing and the path toward digital sustainability is still being built, an embrace of ambiguity is the best available option.
What Makes a Collaborative Writing Project Successful?
Liza Daly
May 13, 2008
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Penguin's collaborative writing experiment A Million Penguins was launched in February 2007 and completed in March 2007. This month saw its final scholarly assessment published in a research report out of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.
The results? Terrible, according to Gawker, echoing a consensus that the project failed as literature. As a study of online behavior, though, it's quite fascinating, and the research paper describes examples of all types of user contributions, from the grandiose and self-serving to the quietly constructive.
But if "every book needs its author," game-like fiction has been shown to be more amenable to collaboration. Each of Penguin's We Tell Stories pieces was co-written by interactive developers and a novelist. This month, the Guardian has launched a participatory interactive fiction project.
Although technically a type of computer game, interactive fiction has a long association with print authors, starting with the commercially successful adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984). In 2003 Adam Cadre (Ready, Okay!, HarperCollins, 2000) wrote the game Narcolepsy incorporating 12 dream sequences written by different authors (of which I was one). In a more experimental vein, the recent UpRightDown project released its first story, which generated submissions in multiple media, including some interactive works.
One lesson from these experiments is that while a work of fiction may not need a single author, it does need a single editor or authority to weave together disparate contributions and reject the obvious vandals. A unified final work has the potential to be a marketable product rather than a research project. (On the other hand, if the printed German Wikipedia sells, all bets are off.) Scale is important as well: two or even three dozen contributors are probably manageable; A Million Penguins had 1,700.
The Guardian's interactive fiction project is being managed using wiki software at textadventure.org.uk. The organizers are soliciting both programmers and non-technical writers. It is scheduled to run through at least the end of May.
BISG Study: Publishing Experimentation Catching On
Mac Slocum
May 12, 2008
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Results from a Book Industry Study Group (BISG) study on publishing experimentation were shared last week at a BISG event. Of particular note: 69 percent of surveyed trade publishers and 77 percent of nontrade publishers said their experiments resulted in new products.
With a majority of respondents already engaged in experimentation, the focus for many now turns to harnessing innovation and ideas. From Publishers Weekly:
[Michael] Shatzkin advised publishers to have a formulized process for encouraging experimentation and companies should put one person in charge of the process. That person, Shatzkin said, shouldn't come from the IT department, but rather should be someone from the publishing side with a background in business who understands the needs of the marketplace.
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