Entries tagged with “innovation” 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.
Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing
Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009
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While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a post by Clay Shirky:
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change -- take a book and shrink it -- was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
I'll second Tim O'Reilly's reaction to the piece:
This is a piece that anyone concerned with the future of publishing simply MUST read.
It's a long post, but well worth a close read (and re-read). Though Clay's talking about newspapers, much of what he has to say applies to book publishing in particular, as well as media in general.
More on Shirky's post from Mark Bertils (@mdash) over at indexmb.com:
Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.
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.
EFF Attorney: Google Book Search Settlement Weakens Innovation
Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008
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In an editorial in The Recorder, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says Google's settlement with publishers and authors signals an implicit abandonment of Google's legal team working on behalf of innovation across Silicon Valley:
.. By settling rather than taking the case all the way ... Google has solved its own copyright problem -- but not anyone else's. Without a legal precedent about the copyright status of book scanning, future innovators are left to defend their own copyright lawsuits. In essence, Google has left its former copyright adversaries to maul any competitors that want to follow its lead.
Google will doubtless be considering the same endgame for the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube. If Google can strike a settlement with a large slice of the aggrieved copyright owners, then it solves the copyright problem for itself, while leaving it as a barrier to entry for YouTube's competitors.
But when innovators like Google cut individual deals, it weakens the Silicon Valley innovation ecology for everyone, because it leaves the smaller companies to carry on the fight against well-endowed opponents. Those kinds of cases threaten to yield bad legal precedents that tilt the rules against disruptive innovation generally.
Can XML Help you Avoid a Disruptive Innovation?
Brian O'Leary
October 24, 2008
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This semester, I'm fortunate to spend my Wednesday nights teaching management to students who are part of NYU's M.S. in publishing program. Although a significant share of the course is given over to management fundamentals, the students are for the most part already working in publishing, so they also look for connections between lessons learned and their real-world application.
One recent class was given over to "managing in periods of change" (always relevant, seemingly more so this semester). Part of the lesson includes a discussion of disruptive innovation, a term coined in the mid-1990s by Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen to describe upstart innovations that grow to disrupt or destroy the business you are in.
Disruptive innovations typically start out as inferior ways to meet the needs of customers who are currently not served at all or who are over-served by existing options and are open to a simpler or cheaper option. Walking through this description, I was asked for a content-related example.
Maybe I do my best work on my feet (you'd have to ask the class), but I started to describe travel books. "People visit France," I said, "but not all of it. Maybe they want information on just the area around their hotel in Paris ... What's a good restaurant, a trendy bar, a place where you won't pay an arm and a leg for show tickets ...
"Today, you could get this information, but you might have to buy all of three or four different books to combine it. After that, you might go to the Web to get current information on the shows that are scheduled for the day you are in Paris. And then, you'd probably try to print maps to get you from your hotel to wherever you decided was interesting.
"Suppose instead, we created a travel database that you could search using criteria that mattered to you -- proximity to a hotel, a particular neighborhood, a time of year, your preference for trendy bars ... Zagats does this for its database, after all, and still makes printed guides. And maybe you'd buy just the parts you want, download them to your laptop or handheld and head to Paris, lighter, greener and better informed."
A structured approach to content development and management -- XML -- makes it possible to create and serve relevant searchable content.
Someone said, rightly, "But that would hurt (print) book sales." I had to agree. Disruptive innovations fundamentally disrupt the old model. If you're in a market that will be disrupted, the choice isn't whether you get disrupted; it's whether you are one of the firms that disrupts.
Ultimately, XML won't help you avoid a disruptive innovation. Depending on the type of book you publish, XML could provide the vehicle that sponsors the disruption. The choice you make in considering XML (or, to pre-empt my friend bowerbird, some form of structured content) may be between staying with your existing business model until it runs out, or hastening its demise in pursuit of a blended mix of new revenue opportunities.
Photo Blog Shows Innovation Still Alive in Media Orgs
Mac Slocum
August 6, 2008
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Alan Taylor, a Web developer at the Boston Globe, hit the sweet spot between immersive storytelling and simple technology with his photo blog, The Big Picture. Taylor discussed the genesis of the blog with Waxy.org in a June interview. Here's a few notable excerpts relevant to publishers:
I have an advantage in that my main role is as a developer here, so I could build all my own templates, format my own style, and so on. I sort of bulldozed some things through though, like extra width, few ads, and I made it simple internally by doing it mostly on my own, no requests for development time, marketing or promotion.
Taylor's photo selection process combines technology and editorial curation. He selects photos from Web searches, photography sites, and wire services. Then he uses custom scripts to extract meta data and resize images for the blog.
When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.
On his personal site, Taylor explains the simple ideas that brought The Big Picture together:
When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I'm glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com)
The Big Picture brought in 1.5 million page views in its first 20 days; phenomenal numbers for any upstart blog. More importantly, the site shows how tech skillsets and big media resources (those wire services aren't cheap) can catalyze innovation within a large publishing organization.
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.
Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games
Liza Daly
May 21, 2008
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Publishers are experimenting with an emerging form of interactive entertainment known as Alternate Reality Games (ARG). ARGs are mediated by the Web but they also extend into the real world, with players traveling to physical places and interacting with game characters via email, text messaging, Twitter, and even "old-fashioned" telephones.
I spoke to the founders of ARG design firm Fourth Wall Studios, the company that created the first publishing ARG, Cathy's Book. I wanted to know if ARGs are a viable form of commercial storytelling, if they can be packaged up after the experience has ended, and if they can engage with a wider audience beyond hard-core gamers.
Q: Do you think the high level of engagement required of an ARG limits the audience? Is there such a thing as a "casual" ARG, that can be enjoyed in the spare moments between soccer practice and dinner time?
A: Elan Lee, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Designer: ARGs up until now have been like rock concerts. Thousands (if not millions) of people come together at one point in time to collectively experience something incredible. They have a good time, sing along, maybe buy a t-shirt, but when they go home to tell their friends about it, there's no action their friends can take other than to hope they don't miss the next one. The traditional ARG is an experience that exists between the start and end date of the campaign, and if you weren't there at the right time, you simply miss out.
To continue the metaphor, think of our games [at Fourth Wall] as ARG "albums" instead of concerts: something you can play when, where, and how you want. Ultimately, it is only through this "album" approach that this new form of entertainment is going to evolve into a mainstream genre of storytelling.
Q: Many ARGs have been developed as promotional tools for other media: music releases, films, TV series, video games, and now books. Is there a perception that ARGs have to be in support of something else, rather than entertainment themselves?
A: Elan Lee: ARGs have had their roots in marketing because frankly, at this early stage, that's a great place to find money. Marketers have a tougher job every day of finding ways to get their message heard above the noise, and they have a lot of money to throw at the problem. It's a great situation for both sides: marketers get to engage their audience in a way that attracts, involves, and maintains an audience around a product. ARGs benefit in that we get to run wild and ground-breaking experiments as we birth this new art form.
Also, at least in the case of Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero and Cathy's Book, the ARG elements were not conceived as marketing, but as an inextricable part of the content. An album or a book was the spine of the experience, but the work of art itself was conceived as an interactive multimedia whole.
Q: Cathy's Book was targeted at a young adult (YA) audience. Do you think YA is a strong market for this kind of interactive entertainment? Would it be possible to engage even younger children?
A: Sean Stewart, Fourth Wall Studios Founder/Chief Creative: Cathy's Book and the new hardcover, Cathy's Key, are designed to be first and foremost a fun (and funny) adventure story. We've added a lot of "fourth wall" elements -- you can call Cathy's phone number and leave her a message, investigate clues she doesn't have time to investigate or write to email addresses you find in the book and see what responses come back to you. Cathy even hosts a gallery where readers can submit their own artwork -- the best of which will be published in the paperback of Cathy's Key. The basic impulse behind this series is to make books -- a traditionally passive, solitary activity -- something with an active, social component as well.
"Fourth Wall" fiction -- experiences that play out at least partly over your browser, your phone, your life -- feels somehow very right for this new age; it's a kind of storytelling that arises naturally from the world of three-way calls, instant messenger, text messaging, and shooting a friend an email with a link to something cool you saw on the Web. To that extent, it's going to feel the most natural to the people most comfortable with that kind of wired world.
When I was in New York last year, meeting with the publisher of Cathy's Book, my 12-year-old daughter emailed me a PowerPoint slide deck, complete with music and animations, explaining why I should get her a Mac laptop for Christmas. Yeah, I think her generation finds interactive entertainment more natural than mine. And yes, I think it would be not only possible, but really effective to build interactive, exploratory stories for even younger kids -- but to do that, we need to get away from the traditional ARGs willingness to be confusing. Most people like to have some clue what the heck they are supposed to do next. It won't surprise you to learn that this is another crucial design issue Fourth Wall Studios has set out to solve.
Q: Reading is usually a solitary pursuit, but there's an almost universal desire to "live" in some genres, whether it's idealized period romances, spy novels, or detective stories (murder mystery parties, especially popular in the 1980s, illustrate this). How important are traditional fiction genres in ARG? Can there be an element of role-playing involved? Are there genres that haven't been explored yet that have potential?
A: Sean Stewart: The first paid writing I ever did, actually, was for live action role playing games and murder mystery dinner parties in the '80s. I never would have guessed that writing for those things would turn out to be extremely important training for me, but in fact the intersection of writing and theater, where you try to find ways for the audience to participate in the story, lies at the heart, I think, of the next evolution in storytelling.
We believe that immersing yourself in a world is a fundamental part of what makes fiction fun. Any time I follow a character -- whether in a Jane Austen novel or a "Matrix" movie -- I am imagining what that must be like. One of the biggest pay-offs in an ARG is that you don't just imagine a fictional world, as in a book, or see it, as in a movie: you actually inhabit it. When I read a Harry Potter novel, I get to go to Hogwarts vicariously; when I play an ARG, I get to go myself. I am finding Web sites on my browser, I am talking to characters on my phone: the world of the fiction has reached out to me.
That proposition, by the way, shouldn't be limited by genre. ARGs have often had a thriller/science fiction slant to them, but even inside our games we've done romantic comedies, spy plots, documentary-style slice-of-life experiences, tragedies, and even Westerns. Fourth-wall fiction isn't about a given genre: it's a set of tools and approaches for letting the audience participate in any kind of story.
Q: What happens when the game is over? Is it possible to package up an ARG as a complete work (whether online or in print) to be experienced linearly? Or is the experience meaningless without real-time participation?
A: Elan Lee: Here's where I'm going to try to get as much mileage out of the "rock concert" metaphor as I can. There is no denying the electric energy present at a concert and there is absolutely no substitute for "being there." However, there are only so many available seats per venue, and only so many venues you can play before exhaustion sets in (both for the artist and the audience). For ARGs to evolve into a mainstream form of entertainment, they must create their own version of "albums" to complement the "concert." Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we have to find a way to put a package around these things and call it a day; I only suggest that both pieces of the experience must exist for the real potential of the form to be realized.
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.
Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?
Andrew Savikas
April 11, 2008
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Amid a post on what's wrong with venture investing, Umair Haque mentions publishing as a risk-averse industry unfriendly to innovation:
And so what's happening isn't surprising. The dynamics of old boy's clubs are almost deterministically predictable: they fight tooth and nail against risk, against the radical, against any kind of change to the status quo. They're great at "monetization" - cutting deals - but the last thing old boy's clubs are good at, unfortunately, is sticking up, come hell or high water, for innovation. From music, to publishing, to food, to autos, the outcome of locked-down boardrooms has been innovation stifled and suffocated. [Emphasis added]
I'll agree with Umair about music and about publishing applied to newspapers, but I believe that book publishing -- as-yet spared by a digitization tsunami -- still has time to embrace innovation. Which is not easy to do, because it tends to challenge a lot of fundamental assumptions on which careers have been built. For example, Techdirt notes a recent AP article on the perception gap between newspaper readers and editors:
Editors are against the idea of anonymous comments being allowed (only 30% thought it was okay). Yet 55% of readers felt that allowing anonymous comments was a good idea. 58% of editors didn't think that journalists should join in the online conversation and give out opinions, but only 36% of readers agreed. You can certainly see where the old school journalists are coming from -- having grown up in an era where journalist objectivity was everything, but it's becoming increasingly clear that people don't believe journalists are objective -- and they're much more upset by journalists pretending to be objective than those that are willing to be open with their views and willing to discuss them. Once again, newspapers need to start realizing that the very nature of journalism has changed.
Taking some license here, I'd revise that last line as: Book publishers need to start realizing that the very nature of publishing is changing while there's still time to change with it. While many in publishing are experimenting, I've also encountered a lot of industry folks who just want the world to wait while they figure out how to deal with it. For example, at a recent trade show, I heard the same gentleman ask in three different sessions when there would be a "solution" to the "problem" of file sharing of books. The answer I would have given? None of your readers think it's a "problem," so there is no "solution" forthcoming. The solution is to adapt to the reality of file sharing, and use free to your advantage. Nearly all of O'Reilly's books can be found online somewhere (sometimes with full blessing from us and the author), yet subscription-based access to digital versions of our books continues to be a strong growth business for us (Safari Books Online is our third-largest reseller, behind only Amazon and B&N).
I'll be at the London Book Fair next week (drop me a line if you want to connect: andrew AT oreilly.com), and am eager to gauge the sentiment there on these issues, particularly amid the latest Amazon dustups.
Harlequin as Innovator
Allen Noren
February 11, 2008
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An truly impressive talk, and I hope we can convince Brent to speak at the next TOC. Do yourself a favor and visit eharlequin.com. Study what they're up to.
The Future of the Book
Allen Noren
February 11, 2008
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There are also some clever marketing and community hooks embedded within the "books," such as the "stay in touch" feature towards the bottom of this page. Small things like this are the often overlooked but necessary features required to encourage ongoing participation.
If you're thinking about experimenting with books online, check the above sites out.
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