Tools of Change for Publishing: Search Results

A Classic from the Archive: Tim O'Reilly interviewed in 1994

Andrew Savikas
October 7, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Unfortunately I don't remember who pointed me to this (it was a few months ago via Twitter I think), but I came across it while cleaning off my Mac desktop. It's open government maven Carl Malamud interviewing Tim O'Reilly (mp3 link) from a weekly series (something that 10 years later would properly be called a "podcast"), and a lot of what's covered is eerily prescient (especially around the role of the Web in publishing).

Well worth a listen.

(Some other notable names in the interview series include Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle.)

Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper

Andy Oram
June 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (38) | Listen

Bookbuilders of Boston, a nonprofit membership organization for publishing professionals, held a panel on June 11 about open publishing. It attracted an usually large number of attendees--about 60--revealing the curiosity its members have toward the potential changes created by this movement.

I was one of the panelists, along with managers from MIT Press and Harvard University Press. In addition to a discussion of the core topic of open publishing--that is, distributing documents free of charge, often under a license that permits free alteration and distribution--I laid out a larger vision that places the publisher in a context where contributors hold conversations online and share large amounts of material freely among themselves. That vision is the center of the following remarks.

When trade publishers are invited to speak, we seem to be expected to follow a certain script. We must stress the importance of finding new ways to distribute and market our material online. We have to point out that only 15% of a book's cost goes to shipping and printing. We champion the importance of supporting authors financially, shed a tear or two for our sister industry, journalism, and so on.

When staff from O'Reilly Media are invited to speak, we defy expectations by throwing out all of that stuff, talking instead about the excitement exploring new technologies that can change people's lives, about working together to educate each other, about how sharing information in communities can help us all grow. This is the open source movement in a nutshell, as it were.

Tonight I'll take a somewhat in-between position: I'll talk about business models, but from the standpoint of open online content.

The bedrock principle in this environment is that the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper. Anything can go online to be linked to, rated, berated, or anything else people want to do with it. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

Sound nice--but that puts us in a real quandary, because the elements of quality we have seized on so proudly over the decades no longer matter as much. We have to recognize the new environment we're in and find new meaning for ourselves.

This is a classic application of the principles from The Innovator's Dilemma, the classic book by Clayton M. Christensen, where he talks about changes caused by disruptive technologies. In our case, disruptive social norms are just as important.

In many areas of publishing--including certainly my own, computer books--there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Much of the material can be edited and redisplayed instantly, particularly on wikis. That is the context in which we have to define the publisher's new roles.

I won't discuss marketing in this talk because I'm not a marketing person and because the rules are changing so fast that I'm afraid of making any predictions about what works. Focusing instead on content production, I've divided the roles publishers play in adding quality into four parts. For each one, I'll discuss how we're affected by the presence of so much online material.

Proofing for grammar, syntax, and consistency of usage

Publishers spend a lot of time making documents look professional and enforcing standards. We're obsessed with getting every comma and semi-colon right, ensuring that capitalization is consistent, and so on.

I think this as a valuable contribution to quality. Sometimes someone reading an article will stop and as me, "Here's an abbreviation spelled two different ways--does it refer to the same thing or two different things?" And sometimes I'll read a sentence that's missing a word, and have to go over it two or three times to see how the parts fit together. Proofreading can resolve real problems in comprehension.

But many modern readers don't value proofreading, because it comes at a cost. This cost, of course, is the extra time proofreading adds to publication. The modern reader would rather have the document right now, so he can get his tweet out before his colleague does. First tweet wins.

Proofreading is also like cleaning the Aegean Stables. I've found myself in the situation where I edit a whole book and get it looking really professional, then find that someone goes in the files the next day to make some updates--and there goes all my hard work.

But publishers can still offer professional proofreading. The time this is useful is when an organization needs a professional looking document--for instance, when it wants to print an online book in order to show off the organization's capabilities to a potential client. In the same situation where you take off your T-shirt and don a pants-suit, you want a professional-looking text. And publishers may be able to get revenue in such situations.

Fact-checking

A more significant contribution publishers make to quality is fact-checking. Many newspapers and magazines hire staff to do it; technical journals and book publishers such as O'Reilly pay outside experts a few hundred or couple thousand dollars to perform the same service.

Few authors and readers online hold the view expressed by a blogger in last Sunday's New York Times who said, "Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap." But there is an attitude among responsible bloggers--which I adopt myself--that if you've gathered enough of the facts to propound a valid opinion, you can go ahead and put the opinion out for debate. If other people see errors or have evidence that weakens your argument, they can cite them in comments. If you write a wiki, they can edit it. In any case, you're encouraged to express yourself so long as you're sure you're heading in the right direction.

This approach is more limited than many of its adherents think, though. In the computer field I work in, especially, a lot of online participants hold to an essential philosophy of logical positivism. They believe that if enough facts are brought to bear and enough people comment, we will all converge on the truth. If this were the case, most of the articles in Wikipedia would be perfect by now.

But if course this is not the case, because new information, new opinions, new interpretations get added all the time, and with them new errors are introduced as well.

So there may be a role for publishing professionals in fact checking. It will probably not be a large part of our work, though because in the Internet age fact checking is a lot easier than it used to be. Just don't rely on Wikipedia.

Editing unclear and ambiguous passages

This task is probably where publishers create the most value, and where they can make some of their biggest contributions to Internet content. I find it sad when I read a document by someone who is clearly brilliant and knows his material well, and come across a passage that doesn't make sense because no editor said, "You have to work on this."

And every editor knows the work involved in making text comprehensible by ripping up paragraphs, rearranging points in the proper order, introducing connecting or transitional material, and even adding facts that the author took for granted but that the editor knows have to be explicitly told to the reader.

I've noticed that the give and take of modern online media compensates even for poorly argued text. If someone doesn't understand a point, she can just post a question. The author can come back to cover it in more detail, and after a couple rounds of discussion they work out the meaning. Other people can join in to offer explanations.

Still, I look at these exchanges and think, "A lot of people could have saved a lot of time if someone had just edited the document." And some projects are recognizing the value of having an expert eye look over a document, something few amateurs know how or take time to do.

Integrating facets of a large-scale text

We all know the difference between reading an anthology of diverse articles for different audiences, written from different points of view in different tones of voice, and reading a 250-page book so well integrated that you start on page 1 and can't put it down till you reach the end. Achieving this quality is where publishers shine, and I haven't found any process or mechanism in collaborative, online document production that can carry it off.

But even this has diminished value in the Internet world, because hardly anyone reads a 250-page book at once. No one has time. If we read chunks of a few thousand words at a time, we could just as well read documents the way they usually appear on the Internet: many small contributions by different people scattered among different web sites. (This very article, topping 1,500 words, is about as long a text as most people would tolerate.)

That doesn't mean the problem of integration has disappeared; it has just shifted. Now the public needs help finding their way among the different documents. Hints are needed as to what to read first, where to go when they encounter a new concept they need to learn, and how to harmonize documents that use different terms or approach a problem from different angles.

I think publishers can play a major role helping to organize content culled from around the Internet. But the process is a lot different from organizing material into a book. It requires a new online tools and a type of different interaction between experts and those tools. I will leave you with a pointer to an article I wrote proposing some tools, and another pointer to my collection of articles about community educational efforts.

In summary, publishers still have roles to play when we are no longer gatekeepers. But we have to renew our relevance in environments where enormous amounts of information are put online by different participants, with ample facilities for commenting and linking. These new technologies and norms force us to look at every area where we traditionally boast of adding quality, and to find new ways to apply our skills.

Tags: community crowdsourcing documentation education peer production publishing training wealth of networks wisdom of crowds

Neat TOC-Inspired Videos on the Future of Learning

Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Last May, Rutgers Univeristy English Dept. Chair Richard E. Miller sent in a nice note about how the 2008 TOC Conference had inspired him and his colleague, Paul Hammond:

The conference that my collaborator, Paul Hammond, and I attended in New York this winter was transformative for us. We returned to the university with a very clear sense of what we needed to be doing to bring the humanities to the table for discussions about the future of higher education.

Richard sent me a follow-up note recently, and though regrettably he won't be attending this year, he's posted a delightfully optimistic video discussing the present and future of writing, reading, learning, and publishing:

I am sorry that Paul and I won't be attending TOC this year. Last year's event was one of the most influential, transformative experiences I've had at a conference. Alas, in a story I'm sure you're hearing everywhere, the collapse of the economy and the state of New Jersey's educational budget makes it impossible to fund the trip this year.

The most recent work that Paul and I have completed reflects how much TOC has influenced our thinking about the future of academic publishing. I presented this at the Modern Language Association's national conference late in December. Paul and I have presented it together at Apple's national sales meeting in November and will be presenting it at national meetings of Apple CIO's in February and in April. We'd love to know what you think of it.

It's called "This is How We Dream."

Part 1:

Part 2:

(Here's Part 1 and Part 2 if you can't see the embedded videos.)

Tags: academic publishing toc '09 toc conference

Webcast Video: Essential Tools of an XML Workflow

Mac Slocum
January 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Below you'll find the full recording from the TOC webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow," with Laura Dawson.

Tags: authoring tools publishing toc webcast tools webcast xml

"None of this is good or bad; it just is"

Mac Slocum
January 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing:

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But [Lisa] Genova and [Brunonia] Barry and [Daniel] Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Tags: authors digital publishing revenue self publishing self-publishing web content

Spots Still Open for TOC Roundtables

Andrew Savikas
January 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Despite a grim few months for the industry, attendance for the 2009 TOC Conference has remained consistently ahead of last year's numbers (and remember -- we sold out last year, so reserve your spot now). Last year's show made it clear New York was the right place to be, and this year's program and speaker lineup are shaping up to be an amazing three days (I'm admittedly partial, so don't just take my word for it).

One of the best things about a conference like this is the chance to connect in person with people you've perhaps only met online or follow via a blog or Twitter. It's also a chance to get key players at the same table to agitate for new standards or practices. We added Roundtables this year to the program to give you a chance to schedule informal meetings of like-minded attendees. For example, there's a great panel scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on the universal standards that goes beyond just typical sales and distribution -- a companion roundtable to try and flesh out some concrete next steps would certainly be of interest to a lot of attendees. Sound like something you'd sit in on? Sign up to lead it.

There's limited slots open for the Roundtables, which are scheduled for Tuesday evening, Feb. 10. Plan to grab a drink at the sponsor reception, check out a few of the lightning demos, and then take a seat at one of the Roundtables.

Tags: conversation publishing roundtables toc '09 toc conference

Coverage of StartWithXML

Laura Dawson
January 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Turns out I was not the only one on Twitter for the StartwithXML Forum on January 13th. Joe Bachana was tweeting as well. Kind of interesting to see the posts side-by-side. David Rothman of Teleread also has some great things to say, as does Richard Curtis over at e-reads.

We also got nice coverage from PW, as well as Publishers Lunch.

Slides will be up soon!

Tags: books publishing startwithxml xml

Conversation is the New King

Mac Slocum
January 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Kate Eltham calls out publishers who blog through a PR lens and points the way to publisher blogs that fully embrace the medium:

It used to be common wisdom that content is king. But the popularity of social media has demonstrated that what internet users are really seeking is connection. A blog may be a cheap and easy way of publishing web content but its biggest strength is that it is a platform for conversation. [Emphasis included in original post.]

Tags: blogging blogs digital content marketing publishing social media

Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time

Joseph J. Esposito
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Digital media are useful to publishers only insofar as they serve one of these aims. (A separate matter is using digital media to drive down costs and boost profits, but that is not growth in the defined sense.) Using digital media to redistribute market share may be costly and not lead to the expected gains, as a publisher's rivals are likely to use the very same tactics: anyone can publish for the iPhone and Stanza, anyone can get books onto the Kindle. But with market share battles there is no relief; it is an arms race, and a publisher can no more forego publishing in digital form than it can stop seeking new and creative authors. For a publisher pursuing growth, alas, it's new markets or nothing.

Digital media do not necessarily lead to new markets, and in some situations, digital media may actually serve to shrink markets. For consumer or trade publishing in the developed world, finding a new market can be challenging. Our lives are full, our calendars are snug, and our attention is spread over a seemingly infinite number of media choices, ranging from old-fashioned books to social networks, music, movies, museums, and countless other things. To find a new market here requires opening up a crack in a broad, seamless facade.

Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with IMs and music and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That's a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive.

This point was brought to mind by a mailgroup post by O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas, who commented that he was stuck for an hour in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out his iPhone and check out mail, alerts, and Web sites. But he could have been reading, if publishers had provided formal material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for") to slip between the interstices of Andrew's day.

An hour is a big crack in the day; to become a true interstitial publisher, you would have to aim smaller. How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing? Daydreams don't count -- because ultimately the aim of every media business is to colonize your mind's every moment. (Dust off that old copy of the science fiction classic "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth for a satiric vision of imperial marketing.) If you had something to read that you could sip in draughts of five minutes at a time or perhaps 10, you would participate in the growth of the new market for interstitial publishing. And this is genuine growth, as at this moment the total sales in the interstices is zero or close to it. The goal is to go from zero to 60 in five minutes.

For interstitial publishing to work, you need a handy device (PDA, iPhone, or something like that), which you carry with you all the time so that you can take advantage of the cracks in the day. For this kind of thing, a Kindle or any dedicated ebook reader won't work, as it is more of an effort to pull such a device out of your bag as you wait in line in the supermarket. So if it's growth you want (as distinct from market share), forget the Kindle. A smart phone is a different matter, however: How many times do you see someone yank a Blackberry from a belt clip and glance at incoming email? Instead of email, that could be the twenty-third chapter of the new micronovel by William Adama. The proper device is critical, and the software that runs on it must have sophisticated bookmarking capabilities.

You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting "Moby-Dick" for interstitial publishing simply won't do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it's entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in. Sorry, Tolstoy and Grisham, even William Gibson, but we need a new breed of writer, who is born digital, who is born in the interstices.

Often interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what McLuhan meant by "understanding media": it's not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology.

Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.

Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end--and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.

For "five-minute fiction" to catch on, we will need creative people who probe the nature of the interstitial medium. It's easy to forget (or never to have known) that the linear narrative as we think of it today was in fact invented once upon a time when writers were faced with books that were inexpensively manufactured and distributed to wide audiences for the first time. Publishers will need to seek out writers who comprehend the new medium, who can engage a reader for fie minutes, who can make the many pieces of the work congeal in the reader's mind. These writers will study readers, PDAs or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin. In all of this publishers will see growth.

The aim of digital media should not be (or should not only be) to substitute a screen for a printed page but to reinvent the text on the screen and, in so doing, to bring new readers into the marketplace.

Tags: business models digital publishing ebooks interstitial publishing iphone kindle mobile publishing serialized

Book Publishing's Scale Issue

Mac Slocum
December 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In a post looking at the future interplay of content, gatekeepers and consumers, David Nygren touches on a key issue for large book publishers: scale.

Mega Publishing Conglomerates Go Bye-Bye: Or at least they will look very different than they do today. Their scale is not sustainable. The partial implosion we saw in the publishing industry last week was just the beginning. The profit margins that will come from publishing will not be great enough to satisfy shareholders who expect revenue growth of 7%+ annually. No can do.

But there will still be major publishing houses that handle the superstars, the sure (as you can get) bets. That is what they do best, after all. But for the vast majority of readers, the big houses will not longer be the gatekeepers. Good. [Formatting included in original post.]

Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream

Tags: book publishing digital content economics margins publishing revenue scale

Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM

Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (22) | Listen

There is increased interest among trade publishers in pursuing some sort of "interoperable digital rights management" (DRM) for digital ebooks. There are many unlikely allies, who think that achieving a little DRM encourages publishers to move into digital spheres, and gives them breathing room. I think this is a really bad idea, and I wanted to publicly detail a few reasons.

What I've compiled is largely a list of counter-arguments; there are many affirmative defenses for unencumbered content that could be promoted. I've also numbered these paragraphs; on re-reading, they more often than not meld and intertwine as a potlatch of thoughts, and have not taken to my weak organization very well.

In a separate post, my friend and colleague Bill McCoy from Adobe will attempt to establish his own conclusions about whether an ebook DRM standard is a useful compromise, or a fool's errand. (Note 11/24/08: Bill's post is now available here.)

Tags: digital rights management drm dvd ebooks google book search movies netflix publishing

Change Always Leaves Someone Behind

Mac Slocum
November 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Seth Godin discusses the realities of digital change and free distribution in an interview with HarperStudio's The 26th Story:

... the market and the internet don't care if you make money. That's important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It's not "how can the market make me money" it's "how can I do things for this market." Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It's entirely likely that many people in the chain WON'T make any money. That's okay. That's the way change works.

(Via Differences & Repetitions and Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter Stream.)

Tags: authors books digital transition ebooks free publishers publishing retailers revenue value chain

The Barack SlideShow

Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."

Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.

Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.

I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.

When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.

Tags: craft flickr libraries magazines Obama photojournalism publishing

Another Sci-Fi Publisher Opts Out of DRM

Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Night Shade Books has joined Baen's WebScription service. It's interesting how sci-fi is one of the genres leading the way into DRM-free ebooks. From a Galley Cat:

"Baen has successfully led the industry into the future with its DRM-free electronic publishing program," said Night Shade editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen in a press release announcing the move. "This canny insight into the e-book market is just one of the many reasons Night Shade has chosen to partner with Baen for the launch of its e-book line."

Tags: baen drm ebooks publishing scifi

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
October 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The Live Web (Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog)

The Web isn't just real estate. It's a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.

Putting the "book" back in Facebook (Dan Piepenbring, if:book)

Despite the presence of "book" in its title, few critics to my knowledge have construed Facebook as the ultimate electronic yearbook. They focus instead on its broader "social network" applications. That's all well and good, but what is Facebook if not the quintessential model of an electronic book done right? Like its conventional print brethren, Facebook chronicles the lives of a certain network's members. It's teeming with photos and groups; its wall posts are the digital equivalent of those slangy well-wishes from your friends and acquaintances (and maybe a stranger or two).

The Origin Of The CD-Keys, Part Three (Daniel James, Penny Arcade)

Nobody added your business to the list of protected species, despite what your lobbyists and lawyers say. Find a business model that's actually appropriate to the 21st century, and perhaps scale back your expectations of vast profits accordingly (oh, and fire some lawyers and lobbyists, too, please).

Tags: drm facebook live web publishing recommended reading yearbook

Going Digital Gives Publishers Safety Net

Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Sarah Lacy provides an articulate and approachable list of digital lessons for book publishers. Her passage on going "electronic from the get-go" is an important reminder about the vital efficiences of digital content:

You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version. The manuscript is FedEx'ed back and forth with Post-it Notes. If FedEx were to lose it, publishers lose months' worth of copy edits, legal edits, and other elements of the painstaking publishing process. There's not even a photocopy. No joke.

That makes publishing the book in other digital formats a challenge at the outset. Publishers would do well to keep the book electronic-- even if it's PDFs of typeset pages. That would help them blast teaser chapters around the world (engaging bloggers and the long tail of the press). Presumably it would help get the book on Kindle and other e-books from day one.

Tags: backups digital digital content editorial production publishing

The Crowdsourced Cat Book

Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog:

The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July 2008. To spend my time, I posted the following two tasks on MTurk:

1. What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write at least one paragraph about a funny, unbelievable or otherwise memorable incident involving your cat. This should be a real story that happened to you or your family.

2. Sketch a cat. With or without an environment and toys. The cat can be drawn in software or on paper. Do not upload photographs of cats. Have fun!

Before I got out of that terminal, it was already clear that the submissions were too good to keep to myself. My fiancee Tania suggested turning the stories into a book. So, after a few days of collecting, I selected about 25 stories and 20 images and spent an evening doing a nice layout for a Blurb book.

The book can be previewed here.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list and Boing Boing)

Tags: collaboration community crowdsourcing publishing self publishing web publishing

Using the Psychology of Free

Mac Slocum
June 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

A recent piece in the New York Times notes that Google and Yahoo have mined the combined power of "free" and "good enough" to challenge high-priced financial information services from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg:

Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg face common enemies in sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance, which offer a much lower level of sophistication and depth but are improving and are, after all, free. [Emphasis added.]

This passage touches on the psychology of free, which is one of the most interesting but under-examined aspects of the free meme. Getting something for nothing activates a human response that's different from a normal business transaction -- it just feels better. Perhaps it's the novelty of acquiring without a concession (financial or otherwise), or maybe we're just hardwired to love free stuff.

Understanding this psychology even in a basic way (which is all I claim to know) gives free models more lift. In simple terms: A free product comes with low expectations ("hey, it's free!") and neutral perceptions ("what's the worst that can happen?"). If that product proves useful, expectations are exceeded and perception elevates from neutral to positive ("it's free and it's cool/useful/interesting, etc.").

On the development side, a free product doesn't need to be deep, robust or even fully formed. For example: A high-priced pay-to-access version of Google Docs would have invited negative comparisons to established word processing programs, but free access allowed Google Docs to be accepted as a useful Web tool with a surprising number of features, particularly for a free application.

If you extend free psychology into the publishing realm ... a publisher can use free, no-frills content to build buzz around a particular author, title or topic. This could take the form of HTML-based books hosted on a publisher's site, or basic ebooks with minimal production. And if this free material offers readers even a modicum of enjoyment, neutrality turns to positivity and the overall impression of that author, title or topic grows stronger.

These rudimentary musings on free psychology might seem obvious, but the equation of free + good enough = improved chance of success is often obscured by concerns over reliable revenue streams and clear business models (which is understandable since both are in short supply in the free universe). But this equation -- and the opportunities that come with it -- is built on the deeper psychological aspects at play in free models, and it's these aspects that need to be examined before any free-related decisions are made. A project's real upside may lie in its ability to create emotional responses, and a free mechanism could be the catalyst for those reactions.

Tags: content free free models free products psychology publishing

Ebooks: False Sense of Security for Publishers?

Peter Brantley
June 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Michael Cairns says ebooks as we largely understand them may be a short-term fading generational segment. From PersonaNonData:

Today's publishers for the first time in their history have no confidence that their child's generation will be (or are) interested in their published output. It is not that publishers aren't making an effort; however, I have a disturbing belief that there is an preponderance of focus on forcing existing content into a format and delivery mechanism (e-books and e-readers) that is not ideal only to have that e-book content used by a market -- my and my parents' generation -- that is in long term decline.

In other words, migrating content so that it is available on an e-book may provide a false sense of security for publishers who believe this is enough to 're-launch' their content to the newest generations.

Tags: digital ebooks publishers publishing

O'Reilly Author and Editor Air Concerns on Industry Pressures

Andy Oram
June 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

My goodness, the Internet certainly brings transparency to every human interaction these days. One of my authors, Baron Schwartz, has posted a long blog about his personal experiences writing for O'Reilly, and a lot of it is scary. So I suppose I need to provide an editor's and publisher's perspective (developed over 15 rapidly changing years) to Baron's recorded experiences.

Over the past several years, many publishers and other content-centered firms have been feeling incredible pressures from the increasing speed at which information travels (and ages). Publishers inevitably transfer some of these pressures to the authors, who in turn sometimes react with frustration. Authors and publishers are at risk of a growing disconnection.

For instance, just a few days ago the Boston Globe printed an article highlighting the anxiety felt by successful novelists (those fortunate few). Many of their publishers are asking them for a new book each year. It's obvious how convenient this strategy is for budget-makers at the publisher, but the novelists are rarely happy with the expectation.

In the computer book industry, these universal pressures are felt mostly in terms of author motivation and the threat of books slipping, which can cause canceled orders or loss of relevance in a fast-moving market.

The key take-away in my response to Baron is that some books do slip a lot and have enormous, unpredictable demands -- but many don't. It's hard to know in advance. If you want to be an author, don't be scared, but be prepared. (In short, I pretty much endorse everything Baron says.)

I'll organize my comments under three categories: unpredictable time commitments, external market pressures, and staff responses. I've run these comments by Baron.

Tags: authoring authors publishers publishing

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