Entries tagged with “readers” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Undocumented Kindle "Clippings" Limit?
Andrew Savikas
May 20, 2009
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O'Reilly author Shelley Powers is a heavy user of Kindle's "clipping" feature, and has run into an apparently undocumented clipping limit imposed by Amazon:
I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.
Shelley also notes that the clipping limit applies to DRM-free books as well, which definitely doesn't make much sense.
The Coming Readers' Economy and Data Portability
Mac Slocum
January 23, 2009
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This is a guest post by Mark Bertils.
At the end of last year one event signaled a huge shift in how the book publishing industry will do business. It's not what you think. It was December's launch of Facebook Connect. A land grab for user identities followed. The Web's people economy is coming of age.
Facebook's Squid Tries to Eat the Internet's Whale
The Connect program wasn't new in December. It was announced in May 2008. It isn't even original. But it marks the coming-out party for Facebook's social graph. Users are now free to come and go from Facebook's walled garden. They can bring their Facebook-endorsed identity (and relationships) with them as they travel the Internet. It is a major development for the social Web. It is a further claim on the permanence and importance of these platforms. And it is the clearest marker yet that the social networking boom of the last five years has beget a new Internet-wide folks-economy.
Seemingly overnight online user identity (here I mean the entire Web -- every site, every service) became a battleground between Web giants. Google and MySpace are parrying. The OpenID foundation is the Red Cross. Everyone else is taking sides. Identity politics has never been so interesting.
But this is not simply about portable identities and the single-sign-on Web. It is a fundamental shift in the Web economy. It is a bold stride toward relationship monetization -- where user data exchange becomes the most important transactional unit on the Internet.
Readers Are The Most Important Asset
This is pivotal for book publishers and other creators of digital goods.
It is no secret that infinitely copyable products aren't worth very much, so naturally, value is moving up the food chain. As Softskull's Richard Nash recently wrote at the Harvard Business Publishing blog, in the future, monetizing and organizing relationships -- not products -- will pay publishers' rents.
To some degree this is happening already. O'Reilly Media have made conferences a large part of what they do. Harlequin's on-line role is largely to connect like-minded readers. And the reader economy is alive and well at the myriad of social networks for book lovers. But what of the other houses? How best to make this mindshift? How to redeploy the resources spent managing a supply chain of products to manage a supply chain of peoples' information?
BookDrop facilitates passing product info from one business to another. An analogue is needed for passing reader info between businesses. How is that going to happen? Who is going to do it?
Open Standards. Reader First.
The volunteers at Dataportability.org are already asking these questions. The group champions the unimpeded movement of user data around the Web. That includes user identities but it also extends beyond OpenID to include open address book standards, open calendar standards, and open standards for opinions, ratings and reviews. It is entirely grassroots and focuses on user-controlled, privacy-respecting data portability.
On their wiki, information specific to publishers and media organizations is thin but a need has been identified to standardize and provide guidance to publishers. The call is out for task-force volunteers to identify and report on the unique requirements within the generalized publishing domain.
To get the conversation started I have volunteered to be the interim chairman of the media publishers' dataportability task-force. I am hoping interested parties will step forward to fill the ranks of this group. The end goal is to publish a report that encourages the distribution and adoption of reader-friendly standards. If you, or someone you know, would interested in participating contact me at org.mark atgmail[.]com.
Mark Bertils is a grad student, reluctant technical writer, an aspiring technologist, and a book industry orphan. He maintains a blog at indexmb.com
Publishers: Let the Containers Go
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:
Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."
Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution
Bill McCoy
November 24, 2008
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Last week my friend and International Digital Publishing Forum board colleague Peter Brantley, Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, published a thoughtful article on TOC arguing that "digital book DRM is bad bad bad."
I rashly volunteered to offer a counterpoint. Now, let me say up front that I don't think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, ...). Peter's post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it's better or worse than the likely alternative.
To me, it's pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty -- so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.
Read more…Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation
Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008
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Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare:
It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books, they tune you out when you try to stay on message. If they wanted to rehash cover copy, they'd read the back of the book.
Google Responds to Some Book Search Questions
Mac Slocum
November 6, 2008
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Shortly after last week's Google Book Search announcement, Siva Vaidhyanathan posed a number of questions about the agreement's impact on publishers, libraries and consumers.
Google responded, and today Vaidhyanathan offers paraphrased answers and additional analysis:
The agreements with and about publishers, libraries, and the registry were all non-exclusive, as is the habit and tradition of Google's approach to competition in the Web business. The registry will be started with Google funds, but it will be an idependent non-profit that may deal with the Open Content Alliance and other services without restriction from Google. Generally, Google's lawyers don't see this service as presenting a "typical anti-trust" problem. There are so many segments to the book market in the world, including real bookstores, online stores such as Amazon.com, and used-book outlets that no one may set prices for books (even out-of-print books) effectively. There is always a competing source - including libraries themselves.
There's additional coverage in Vaidhyanathan's post.
Story Development Thrives in the Sports Department
Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008
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The Associated Press recently commissioned an anthropological study into how youth obtain news information. What struck me most was this reference to something a bit orthogonal to the report -- the elements of story development. From Ethan Zuckerman's My Heart's in Accra:
... the biggest thing I took from report was the connection between sports coverage and other news coverage. Dan Gillmor has observed that one of the reasons sportswriting is often so strong is that everyone already knows the score. Serious fans don't need to know that the Sox won last night - they want to hear about Tim Wakefield's frustrations with lack of run support, or Terry Francona's metrics for evaluating Wakefield based on quality starts and innings pitched rather than wins.
Ebooks and Print Books are Not Mutually Exclusive
Mac Slocum
July 16, 2008
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Ebook discussions invariably lead to the "tactile experience" counter argument. Many folks love the sensory associations of a printed book, and they'll defend those feelings vociferously -- even when no one is challenging them. The simple suggestion that an ebook could offer functionality beyond the scope of a printed book causes some book lovers to pull up the castle gates and light the moat on fire.
But here's the odd thing: A small group of bleeding edgers believe print's demise is imminent, but in many more instances the people taking a pro-ebook stance are also fans of printed books. They're not looking for printed books to go away, rather, they want to consume content in the best possible format for their particular needs.
I've witnessed a number of lively discussions in which the sensory argument overwhelms a broader analysis of future reading behaviors, and that's where the problem lies. In each case, the print defenders run through the "sensory checklist":
- Reading in bed
- Reading to your children
- Slowing down, sitting down, curling up ...
- Holding, feeling, smelling, experiencing ...
All of these are excellent print book defenses, but each is a counterpoint to debates that were never raised. The bigger conversation -- and something that often gets pushed to the back burner -- is about the reading ecosystem. Print books, ebooks, Web sites, mobile and whatever emerges down the road are merely conduits for content. Unnecessary defense of one format of another obscures the opportunity to customize and improve the reading experience on a title by title and consumer by consumer basis.
Sara Nelson summed up this same idea in a recent column:
... the e-worriers are, I predict, way wrong, just as those who worried that audiobooks would supplant "real" books, and DVDs would demolish cinemas were wrong. Sure, there is some cannibalizing and crossover, but just as there are certain books you would rather listen to than read (and vice versa) and some movies you'll rush to the theater to see, there is room in the world for another way to enjoy written narrative.
Open Question: Will Genre Fiction Die Off With Traditional Readers?
Mac Slocum
July 8, 2008
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In a recent Washington Post column, Jonathan Karp outlines a theoretical scenario where the convergence of technology, self-publishing and consumer taste will force traditional book publishers out of the "disposable book" market. Karp writes:
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction will die off, and the next generation will have so many different entertainment options that it's hard to envision the same level of loyalty to brand-name formula fiction coming off the conveyor belt every year. The novelists who are truly novel will thrive; the rest will struggle. [Emphasis added.]
On first blush this "generational" point makes sense: multitasking and abundant entertainment options don't mesh with the languid pace and time investment required to enjoy genre fiction. But -- playing devil's advocate here -- are hyperactive tastes a defining characteristic throughout a person's lifetime? Isn't it possible that today's texting teen will, at some point in his/her life, gravitate toward the long-form storytelling found in genre fiction?
Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
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