Entries tagged with “platforms” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Sulzberger: "Be of the Internet, Not on the Internet"
Peter Brantley
October 23, 2008
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Arthur Sulzberger Jr. indicates he is willing to consider radical change to continue the New York Times' relevance in the digital age. From News.com:
Sulzberger would brand this not as a crisis, but rather as change that requires adaptation. "It's important for traditional companies to adopt strategies that enable us to be of the Internet, not on the Internet," he said. "There must be an institutional commitment to engage in reinvention, especially as the information revolution picks up steam."
That's why, he said, the Times has undergone some digital initiatives unusual for the print media business. It launched bookmarking and sharing service TimesPeople earlier this year. Soon, it will launch TimesExtra, which integrates acquisition Blogrunner onto the publication's home page to provide related links from across the Web. And it has also announced an API for developers to work with one of its most popular online features, the "Most Emailed" list.
News Roundup: Digital Text App Uses Facebook, Subject/Author Sites Better than Brands, Saying Goodbye to Audiobook Cassettes
Mac Slocum
August 1, 2008
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App Mashes Up Digital Text on Facebook Platform
Digital Texts 2.0 is an interesting application for Facebook that lets you group and share digital material. It's intriguing to see cutting edge development occurring in this space. From the Digital Texts 2.0 about page:
Digital Texts 2.0 was undertaken by Dr. Stéfan Sinclair as an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm of electronic texts. We intend to preserve and expose all of the existing qualities of digital texts (rich hypertextual associations, refined encoding practices, analytic affordances, etc.), while enhancing them with additional characteristics provided by Web 2.0 and social networking. Thus, it is a preliminary attempt to better understand the phenomenon of social networking and how it might be adapted to benefit the ways in which humanities scholars interact with electronic texts.
Build Sites Around Authors and Subjects, Not Publisher Brands
Michael Cairns at PersonaNonData expresses a desire to see publishers include a more comprehensive picture of authors and works:
Publishers are best placed to build author-centric and subject/theme-oriented websites -- not sites oriented around a "brand" that isn't relevant, but those that focus attention on segments of the business that remain relevant to consumers. Envision the Spiritual segment at a site supported by Harpercollins which has a unique, appropriate and relevant focus far apart from the current 'corporate' approach. All segments are valid candidates for more of a silo approach to marketing publishers' products. And I would go further in recommending that publishers consider marketing within these silos all titles available, rather than just those produced by the publisher. What better way to condense a market segment and become a destination site for Self-Help, Spirituality, Mysteries, Computer and any number of other book-publishing segments. Consumers aren't dumb. Amazon's main attraction is that all the titles in any one segment are available in one place. As long as publishers continue to ignore this fact, they will under-serve the market and under-perform given the investment in their sites.
Last Days of the Audiobook Cassette
In the wake of Hachette's last cassette-based audiobook, the New York Times eulogizes a format many thought was already long gone:
Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.
Cloud Computing's Potential Impact on Publishing
Mac Slocum
July 22, 2008
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If you use Google Docs or access email via a Web browser, you're already versed in cloud computing. Access to Web-based material is taking the place of downloads.
Cloud computing focused in the early going on software as a service (SaaS) applications, but Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others are now tapping the cloud for content delivery (some of these companies focus on streaming entertainment, while others focus on content creation/management).
An interesting conversation about the cloud's impact on content publishers popped up recently on Peter Brantley's Reading 2.0 list. Peter, by way of an an article link, noted that Amazon is moving some of its video distribution business into the cloud. From Last100:
Not only is Amazon utilizing streaming in order to deliver "instant" playback but it also means that content doesn't have to be permanently stored on a user's hard drive. As a result, Amazon is able to offer another potential benefit to customers: a virtual video library of previously purchased content, stored in the 'cloud' (on the company's own servers) ready to be streamed as many times and to as many compatible devices as the user has access to. While this will initially consist of PCs running Mac OSX or Windows, along with select TVs from Sony, in the future this could extend to many different devices, either through specific partnerships like the one currently forged with Sony, or by utilizing browser-based standards or any other technology or protocol Amazon chooses to support.
Expanding on Peter's post, Mike Shatzkin said the centralization of cloud-based content raises issues around digital rights management (DRM) and other access limits:
The cloud changes everything in terms of piracy and copyright. We are living in a transitional period where computer storage is decentralized. When that period is over, and the time is now not far off, everything is accessed from the cloud and it will be a relatively easy matter for rules about content access to be enforced by the content originator or distributor.
As others on the Reading 2.0 list pointed out, cloud computing brings up additional questions around copyright and ownership. Toss in concerns about system reliability, open vs. closed clouds, and the potential for lock-in (or lock out) and you can see this rabbit hole growing deeper.
Cloud adoption may also represent an important moment in book publishing's digital transition. Publishers have enjoyed the past luxury of learning digital lessons from the media, music and film industries, but the wait and see approach may not work this time. If consumers come to expect access to their content -- all their content -- anywhere/anytime, publishers will need to meet that expectation ... or risk watching an unaffiliated company or industry step in.
TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
July 10, 2008
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Ebooks and the Iphone (Publishing Frontier)
So by selling books as $5 iPhone books instead of $7 paperbacks, the publisher makes $0.90 per book. And, of course, if the publisher charged $6.99 for the iPhone book, the numbers would be $4.89 received from Apple - $0.70 royalty - $0.05 PPB [printing, paper, binding] - $0.40 art, promotion, etc = $3.74, or a profit of $2.09 over the paper book.
Wikipedia gets fictional (Seth's Blog)
A consistent rule on Wikipedia has been to rely on edited print publications (the mainstream media) as well as physical or unchanging materials (like the DVD of a TV show). This made sense five years ago, but as the world abandons print reference (which Wikipedia largely relies on for verification), are we biasing the entries in favor of Abraham Lincoln (plenty of printed facts available) and TV series characters (we can prove that George [Costanza] worked for Vandalay Industries)?
The difference between media and comms (The Equity Kicker)
The challenge for socnets [social networks] is that people are getting bored of accumulating friends and profile hopping and there is no obvious new entertainment service to build. Hence the platform strategy.
Google Book Search: It's All About the Index
Mac Slocum
June 30, 2008
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Adam Hodgkin says the grand design of Google Book Search is aimed at creating a massive index, not an all-encompassing, locked-down reading system. From Exact Editions:
Some of Google's critics suppose that the aim of the GBS [Google Book Search] project is to capture, corale [sic] and deliver to readers the whole of the world's literature in a readable format. But perhaps the business goal has all along been to produce a complete searchable index of literature, not the monopolistic reading medium. [Bold text included in original post.]
Google's initiatives have always focused on the creation and expansion of digital content platforms rather than individual content products. The public's mistaken focus on Google products -- rather than Google platforms -- was noted in Wired's recent story about Google's mobile project, Android:
Those hoping for a new gadget to rival the iPhone finally understood that Google had something radically different in mind. Apple's device was an end in itself -- a self-contained, jewel-like masterpiece locked in a sleek protective shell. Android was a means, a seed intended to grow an entire new wireless family tree. Google was never in the hardware business. There would be no gPhone -- instead, there would be hundreds of gPhones.
I can understand where the confusion comes from: The creation of a gargantuan reading service seems to be in Google's wheelhouse because they're one of the few companies that can actually attempt such a project. But as we learned with Android, Google isn't a product-centric company -- all those individual tools and services plug into bigger platforms. Development of a searchable full-text book index that can be distributed across all sorts of devices is more in line with Google's history and its focus.
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