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TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
August 7, 2008
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What's Really Killing Newspapers (Jack Shafer, Slate)
Other institutions do far better jobs at issuing social currency these days. What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency? And it's all social currency you can use! Like cocktail chatter, a Facebook posting--be it a link, a list, a photo, or travel plans--conveys the message, I am here. Listen to me. A well-executed Facebook presence, like a superb pontification at the bar or a great phone-in to sports talk radio, demonstrates one's status within one's existing social network. If skillfully wielded, a Facebook page can increase a person's status by attracting "cooler" or more influential friends. These days, you can't raise your status more than a bump by carrying the Wall Street Journal under your arm.
The Plight of Politico -- And Everyone Else (Ezra Klein, The American Prospect)
A year-and-a-half after launch, [Politico is] getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn't come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.
Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known (Mark Hurst, Good Experience)
Publishers and bookstores are in it for the money. But you, the author, can't be in it for the money - it doesn't pay enough. You should write a book because you believe in it. And that's the trouble: what you love isn't necessarily what publishers believe will sell. If you can find a topic that you love and that will sell in the market, well then, go forth and type. You're one of the lucky ones. [Emphasis included in original post.]
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Which Game is the Kindle Changing?
Mac Slocum
August 7, 2008
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Labeling the Kindle a game changer is premature, says Liz Gunnison from Portfolio:
... the Kindle's target buyer would be a person who reads so much that they have ceased instilling books and periodicals with nostalgic value...yet not so much that they are rarely far enough from a computer to really need a separate device.
To top it off, one can imagine a single device (and Amazon account) being used by an entire household. And we're talking only about those that choose a Kindle, of course, rather than a competing device such as Sony's portable reader.
So, all things considered, how many Kindles does that work out to? Two million? One million? Five hundred thousand? [Emphasis included in original post.]
Gunnison's analysis looks at the Kindle as a book game changer, but Gary Frost from futureofthebook.com says the device is actually a shopping disruptor:
The book reading function is a decoy to disguise a portable shopping device. The one click is a well known Amazon purchase feature. The connected Kindle device makes this relation portable and the format is just as accessible for a baby register or power tools as it is for books. Its also worth a mention that Kindle sells print books.
Frost is on to something. Amazon built its early business on books, but it eventually diversified with thousands of additional product categories. The Kindle might follow a similar path: sink the first mobile-buying/digital-consuming hook into early adopters with the Kindle, then expand.
(Via Jose Afonso Furtado's Twitter stream.)
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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.
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[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
Mac Slocum
August 5, 2008
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20 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:
Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.
What if Ebooks Were the Dominant Platform?
Mac Slocum
August 5, 2008
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I recently came across an old blog post from Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee that discusses the utility of the "technology flip test". McAfee writes:
At a conference years back I was sitting on a panel that was asked to talk about future of the book. As the discussion was heating up about the inevitability of the electric media, someone on the panel (I wish it had been me) proposed a flip test. He said "Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?" It's fair to say that comment changed the direction of the panel.
The ebook vs paper flip test is intriguing for a number of reasons:
- It inverts the offense and defense: Ebook advocates become defenders and paper-book supporters become disruptors. Shaking off the vestiges of a default argument is always a good idea -- think of it as a "debate cleanser."
- It amplifies the strengths of each format ... initially: When I ran through the flip test on my own, I at first honed in on the cost savings of ebooks (no paper, no printing, no shipping) and the sensory aspects of print books. But further review revealed deeper complexities to this debate. And that led me to ...
- It upends assumptions: Print's dominant position in the real world causes me to challenge pro-print arguments, most notably the tactile experience overreaction that often derails discussions. But placing ebooks in the hot seat gave me a new perspective on ebook defenses. For example, if my default reading environment was electronic and networked, would I want (or need) a disconnected outlet? Would I crave solitude and a languid pace? Does the upside of ebook economics supersede the other reading/storytelling experiences I'm looking for, or would I welcome a print alternative the way I now welcome an electronic option?
What's your take on the flip test? Does inverting the argument open the discussion, or is this a diversionary trick that detracts from the issues at hand? Please share your thoughts in the comments area.
(Original idea and McAfee link via Reading 2.0 list.)
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Report: Radiohead Experiment Yields Indirect Success
Mac Slocum
August 4, 2008
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Much of the analysis around Radiohead's "pay what you like" experiment focused on the average price paid for the band's 2007 release, In Rainbows. But a new research report (PDF) from the MCPS-PRS Alliance takes a different approach:
... did the project succeed in diverting traffic away from venues where the band receives nothing, and towards a venue where it could receive something, be it the currency of cash or (at least) an email address?
Will Page and Eric Garland, the authors of the report, offer a two-part conclusion. First, luring people away from their chosen outlets is a significant challenge:
The venue hypothesis suggests that even when the price approaches zero, all other things being equal, people are more likely to act habitually (say, using The Pirate Bay) than to break their habit (say, visiting www.InRainbows.com). The implication of this 'venue hypothesis' is that if you wish the customer to deviate from his habitual action (and try a new venue), then you must offer him an improved venue, at least in his perception. [Emphasis included in report.]
Second, the massive publicity Radiohead received from the experiment likely diverted some customers from file sharing sites. In this case, "some" traffic diversion is enough to claim success:
Let's break it down real simple and treat torrent sites like a local bar, where curious consumers can enter and leave a venue of their choice anonymously, and found 'In Rainbows' to be the guest ale at the time -- and popular it was too, more popular than going anywhere else, like visiting the brewery where it originated from. Whilst the stand alone brewery did lots of new business thanks to the promotion, all the bars up and down the country did even more business. Hence the twist to our answer -- in that it is possible to redirect traffic back to your site, as well as bring new addition traffic to the torrents.
It's a murky outcome, to be sure, but Eliot Van Buskirk from Wired's Listening Post says publicity from Radiohead's experiment and the exposure In Rainbows received via official and unofficial downloads helped propel the band's traditional album and ticket sales:
All of this torrenting of In Rainbows contributed to the album making such a big impression on a listening public that's bombarded with an ever-increasing amount of information. Without its album being so widely traded, would Radiohead's album have shot to the top of the charts? Would their worldwide tour be such a smashing success? ... Not necessarily, says the report, and we agree.
Sorting through these types of reports is an arduous process because the permutations and relationships within the file sharing universe work against firm conclusions. Nonetheless, there are key takeaways:
- Page and Garland's "venue hypothesis" is worth serious consideration in any file sharing experiment. Depending on the desired outcome (i.e. general publicity vs. trackable/marketable data), going where the people already are could be smarter than luring an audience to a new destination.
- A "rising tide lifts all boats" gameplan isn't ideal, but it's suitable when you're up against an inherently murky landscape.
- Finally, the quality of the content is, and always will be, the driver of interest. Alternative distribution boosted awareness for In Rainbows, but chart success and sold out concerts were the end results of good material. Put another way: attention is most valuable when consumers bond with the content.
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Web Community Management Tips
Mac Slocum
August 4, 2008
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Whether intentional or not, Bob Garfield from NPR's "On the Media" reopened an old wound when he questioned the need for user comments on newspaper Web sites.
The "comments issue" is polarizing. Die-hard community advocates believe comments are an integral part of the online experience. Detractors draw a straight line between user comments and the apocalypse. It's a contentious topic with very little middle ground.
For our purposes, there's no point in looking at all the arguments and counter-arguments. The comments debate has been going on for at least 10 years (much longer, if you count Usenet), and it will persist as long as trolls continue to lower the conversational bar. That's just the way it is.
However, this latest flare up offers an opportunity to redirect the focus to some of the time-tested best practices for managing Web communities. Derek Powazek (whom we recently interviewed for an unrelated piece) offers an excellent starting point with "10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments," and Cory Doctorow's "How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community" is also recommended reading.
I've also picked up a few bits of wisdom from my own experiences as a community manager:
- Nurture the Good -- The majority of people want to do the right thing. They want to engage in fruitful and fulfilling conversations. They want to build and protect special communities. These are the people you focus on.
- Push Trolls to the Margins -- All popular communities will eventually suffer through a troll infestation. The trick is the minimize a troll's impact by not taking the bait. Moderators should never engage in a public argument, and key community members should be encouraged via private messages and back channels to ignore troll attacks. A marginalized troll is a useless troll, and they know it.
- Share Ownership -- I focused on inclusiveness in my first community because I was unsure about my own voice and opinions. In a serendipitous twist, the "we're all equal and we're all in this together" perspective led to a shared sense of ownership. It took a while for folks to buy what I was selling, but a consistent focus on collaboration and equality eventually led to individual responsibility and effective self-policing. I've used this same technique on subsequent communities and the results have always been positive.
- Calm by Example -- Experienced community managers know that the Web is a fickle place; today's egregious opinion often evaporates within a matter of days. A measured community manager allows fiery debates to run their course without spilling out of control, and on those rare occasions when guidance is required, a calm force is far more powerful.
What community tips do you have? Please share your thoughts in the comments area (unless you're a troll).
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Processing the Deep Backlist at the New York Times
Liza Daly
August 1, 2008
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At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Derek Gottfrid of the New York Times led a fascinating session on how the Times was able to utilize Amazon's cloud computing services to quickly and cheaply get their huge historical archive online and freely viewable to the public.
How big is the archive? Eleven million individual articles from 1851 to 1980, or 4 terabytes of data (over 4,000 gigabytes). The Times got it ready for distribution in 24 hours, for a total cost of $240 in computing fees and $650 in storage fees.
As part of their original TimesSelect subscription service, the paper had scanned their entire print archive. Each full-page scan was cut into individual articles. Typical of newspaper format, the articles often spanned column or page boundaries, which meant that many articles were composed of several scans. In the original subscription-based program, whenever a reader requested one of these historical articles, the Times computer would need to stitch together all of the scans for a particular article before presenting it.
This on-demand process used significant computing resources, but because TimesSelect was subscription-based there was never much traffic. Once this archive was open to the public it was expected to generate greater usage, and the safest approach in those cases is to serve pre-generated versions of all 11 million articles. Using traditional software development practices -- with a single computer churning through one article at a time -- the processing could potentially take weeks and tie up Times servers that were needed for other tasks.
Gottfrid turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its two main products:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a form of "virtualization" where one very large computer is divided up into many virtual computers that can be individually leased out for use. Traditional hosting costs money whether the server is working or idle; in EC2 you pay only as long as the virtual computer is running. When it's no longer needed, it's shut down. This makes the service ideal for one-off processing jobs.
In addition, Amazon doesn't care whether you use one EC2 "instance" 100 times, or 100 instances all at once -- the cost is the same. The difference is when you can usefully divide a job into 100 concurrent tasks, because then it takes 1/100th the total time.
Amazon's other major AWS offering is the Simple Storage Service (S3), for large-scale file hosting. Like EC2, it is a leased model -- you pay only for the space that you use in a given time period.
Gottfrid leveraged these technologies in combination with a relatively new software library called Hadoop. Hadoop is written in the Java language and is based on work done at Google. It allows programmers to very easily write programs that can be run simultaneously on multiple computers.
Combining Hadoop concurrency with EC2 and S3, the Times was able to run a job that might have taken weeks of processing time and complete it in 24 hours, using 100 EC2 instances. They were pleased enough with S3 it became their permanent hosting platform for the scans. Hosting with Amazon or other cloud computing services is usually cheaper and has much better bandwidth than the average provider, although downtime can and does occur.
At last year's OSCON, the Times announced the formation of its developer blog, Open. You can read more about the original AWS project as well as TimesMachine, a project that became economically feasible due to the low cost of AWS.
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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.
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TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
July 31, 2008
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This is Not a Comment (Derek Powazek, Powazek.com)
Chastising all internet commenters for the actions of the loudest, craziest ones is no different that swearing off all newspapers because of Jason Blair.
Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship (Rebecca MacKinnon, RConversation)
The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes?
Once More With Feeling: The LATBR Publishes Its Last (Kassia Krozser, Booksquare)
... I still maintain that a book review section in a major newspaper should be reflective of the subscriber base, even if it's trying to maintain a certain level of discourse; you have to bring the larger audience in, even a little bit, if you want to expose your conversation beyond the choir.
Why I Joined the POD People (Richard Grayson, Quarterly Conversation)
Eventually, as print-on-demand technology improves in quality and costs shrink, trade publishers will probably rely on POD for all their books, just as some academic publishers have begun to do. Trade publishers waste a lot of money (and trees) by publishing copies of books, even bestsellers in fourth or fifth editions, that never get sold; no matter how many print runs, publishers always seem to have books left over. After my first book was remaindered I bought 400 copies of my first book for a nickel a copy, then discovered the cost of storing them was so expensive that I ended up throwing dozens of copies into a Miami dumpster.
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How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2008
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News of a looming downgrade of NYT stock to "junk" status by Standard & Poor's sadly isn't all that shocking. I'm certainly glad I'm not an investor holding any NYT.
But there's something going on at the Times that probably won't make it to Silicon Alley Insider, much less the mainstream business press, and it's something that's starting to make me think the Times just might succeed in adapting to the changing rules of the media and publishing game (though there will almost certainly be many more casualties before it's over).
So what's the Times doing that's so important? They're hacking.
Not hacking in the nefarious sense, but in the original sense of experimentation, and curiosity, and solving interesting problems (as Paul Graham put it, "Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.") How many other publishers are running blogs about their work with open source software? Even fewer are developing and releasing their own high-quality open source software:
Quite frankly, we wanted to scale the front-end webservers and backend database servers separately without having to coordinate them. We also needed a way to flexibly reconfigure where our backend databases were located and which applications used them without resorting to tricks of DNS or other such "load-balancing" hacks. Plus, it just seemed really cool to have a JSON-speaking DB layer that all our scriptable content could talk to. Thus, the DBSlayer was born.
That is not typical newsroom conversation.
But this isn't just about open source software, or even about some developers building cool software to run backend system. The Times has put developers right in the middle of the newsroom. At a MediaBistro event in May, Aron Pilhofer from the "Interactive News Technology" group at the Times (sharing the stage with their Editor of Digital News, Jim Roberts), talked about how the Minnesota bridge collapse was when they realized they needed to develop their own tools to cover the news with the web, and not just on the web. Less than a year later, when Hillary Clinton's infamous public schedule was released, they had the people and the skills in place to crunch 12,000 PDF documents (containing images of scanned documents) through a text-recognition program, on to Amazon's "Elastic Computing Cloud" and finally into a Ruby on Rails Web application providing full-text search across all eight years of calendars.
Just this week, the Times' Derek Gottfrid gave a talk at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) titled "Processing Large Data with Hadoop and EC2" based on work he'd done on the Times' archives. Again, this is the kind of talk you're not likely to hear at most newspapers (or magazines, or book publishers) these days:
I was able to create a Hadoop cluster on my local machine and wrap my code with the proper Hadoop semantics. After a bit more tweaking and bug fixing, I was ready to deploy Hadoop and my code on a cluster of EC2 machines. For deployment, I created a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for EC2 that was based on a Xen image from my desktop machine. Using some simple Python scripts and the boto library, I booted four EC2 instances of my custom AMI. I logged in, started Hadoop and submitted a test job to generate a couple thousands articles — and to my surprise it just worked.
Earlier this month at FOO Camp I had the pleasure of meeting another hacker from the Times, Nick Bilton, part of the Times R&D lab -- the folks who built the impressive NYT iPhone App.
UPDATE: Nick Bilton points out via email that:
There were people from nytimes.com that were instrumental in building the NYT iPhone app also ... Is there anyway you can add a couple of words that the R&D Group 'worked with nytimes.com' to help build the iPhone app?
If you're worried about EBITDA and EPS, then you're rightly worried about the Times right now. But if you're worried about the future of journalism, and about the ability of established media companies to adapt to a digital world, there's also reason to be excited about the Times right now too.
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Tech Publisher Asks "Are Ebooks Ready for Technical Content?"
Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2008
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Dave Thomas from the Pragmatic Programmers is mulling whether to make their books available on the Kindle, and encountering many of the same issues we faced here at O'Reilly regarding technical content and the limitations of current ebook devices:
In fact, we've had a prototype form of that capability for a while now, but we've always held back. Frankly, we didn't think the devices worked well with our kind of content. Basically, the
.mobiformat used by the Kindle is optimized for books that contain just galleys of text with the occasional heading. Throw in tables, monospaced code listings, sidebars and the like, and things start to get messy.
Dave's post has sparked a great conversation within the comments, including one from Shelly Powers, whose book Painting the Web was among those included in our pilot program:
I think that providing the package deal that O'Reilly does (with PDF, epub, and mobi), in addition to downloadable code is the way to go. If you sell Kindle books, you definitely need to make both your figures and your source available, separately. For instance, I have my Painting the Web figures in an online gallery and the examples are available at O'Reilly--takes care of a lot of issues related to Kindle. Another approach could be to make available (for no additional cost) a PDF of just the figures, or the figures and code.
Preparing a book for the ebook market may seem like a lot of work, but you have the potential to reach a new audience of book buyers. Buyers used to the internet and having access to immediate information; who may not want to order a book and wait a week for it to arrive, but who will buy a book if it means they can have access to it now. I wouldn't have considered myself an "impulse buyer" when it comes to books, but I have probably at least a dozen books I bought because the ebook format was cheaper (that's a key element), and I could get the book _right now_.
On one hand, merely working to replicate a print experience isn't the right way to exploit the benefits of the new platform; on the other hand, publishers (and as usual, I use that term quite loosely) should be able to expect at least minimal rendering of common elements like tables, along with support for at least the same core 14 fonts available in Acrobat (speaking of fonts, if you're looking for a laugh check out this mock "font conference").
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[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
Mac Slocum
July 29, 2008
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17 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:
- Courier Corporation
- Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library
- Goodreads
- Zmags
- Quark
Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.
Technology's "Killer" Distraction
Mac Slocum
July 29, 2008
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A new search engine, Cuil, is attracting the requisite "Google killer" coverage. Thankfully, Seth Godin provides some much-needed perspective:
I have no doubt that someone will develop a useful tool one day that takes time and attention away from Google, but it won't be a search engine. Google, after all, isn't broken, not in terms of solving the iconic "how do I find something online using my web browser" question.
I have no beef with Cuil itself (the handful of queries I ran worked fine), but this "killer" business is another matter. In the history of tech prognostications, has an upstart killer ever successfully terminated its target? More importantly, what possible benefit do any of us get from this type of analysis?
I can only imagine the useful commentary we would see if the killer oeuvre could be stricken from the record. The bombastic flavor-of-the-day cycle might be replaced with actual thoughts about the future of particular applications and their accompanying industries. Perhaps we'd even stop shoehorning lightning-in-a-bottle success stories into unrelated products (e.g. the Kindle/iPod comparisons). And maybe we'd finally see that the exciting developments -- the products and experiments that really stir things up -- come from people who focus on creation rather than dominance.
As Seth eloquently notes:
... success keeps going to people who build new icons, not to those that seek to replace the most successful existing ones.
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POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
Mac Slocum
July 28, 2008
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MagCloud is a new print-on-demand (POD) service targeting the magazine industry. In the following Q&A;, MagCloud consultant Derek Powazek -- co-founder of JPG Magazine and founder of Fray -- discusses the utility of POD and the evolving relationship between print and Web content.
How did you get involved with MagCloud?
I came into the project over a year ago -- it had been percolating in HP Labs for a long time before that, led by Andy Fitzhugh, Udi Chatow, and Andrew Bolwell. Andy is the one who brought me in. We had this meet and greet lunch to talk about the future of publishing and it turned out we had the same vision. He kept saying, "Right, now push that further."
When did you first encounter POD?
Years ago, when Heather [Champ] and I were exploring ways to make a photography magazine, Lulu was really the only game in town. We learned so much creating JPG there, and starting with a POD service allowed us to experiment, develop the voice and vision of the magazine, and build an audience. I think it's a very natural way to start a magazine.
How did you gravitate toward a POD model for magazines?
It's all about the Giant Pile. I've worked on a lot of newspaper and magazine projects, and they all had one thing in common: A huge print run, followed by the slow, terrible realization that you've gotta get rid of all that paper.
POD banishes the Giant Pile to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Because, with a POD system, you don't print it until somebody wants it. It avoids the pile. It avoids creating trash (70 percent of all magazines are never bought). It brings some of the elegance of the Internet to this very old industry.
But mostly it was just a financial decision. Heather and I weren't out to become publishing magnates. We just had an idea that we thought people would like. We wouldn't have been able to do it at all if not for POD.
What types of magazine publishers (large, small, individuals, etc.) are best suited for MagCloud?
I think that magazines are about nurturing a community. If you look at the most successful magazines (Rolling Stone in the '60s, Wired in the '90s, Make now), they've always been the ones that surfed the zeitgeist. They found a growing community of people and reflected it, and in that reflection, began to lead it for a time.
But if you tell people in the publishing industry that they're really in the community business, they'll say "shut up, hippy" and go back to monetizing their audience metrics.
So the trick is to find those niche audiences that need a voice. And there are a lot of them. And the truth is, they know who they are better than we do. So, with MagCloud, the idea is to open up the tools so that those communities can create their own magazines. We think they're going to make amazing things.
Do you see larger magazine publishers eventually moving to POD, or will this be a niche option?
Not only do I think that large magazine publishers will move to digital printing, but I think that the idea that we used to print millions of things that were exactly the same will someday be seen as a cute historical artifact. "You mean every copy of this magazine was the same for everyone, Grandpa? Weird!"
For the biggies, it's just a matter of economics. As soon as the price per page for printing on digital is cheaper than traditional offset printing, the biggies will move. The quality of POD is already the same or better than offset.
It'll start with smaller publications because they're the most agile, and they don't see the real price savings of scale anyway. Right now, if you're printing a few thousand copies, digital printing is the same cost as traditional offset. (I've been wrestling with this for Fray.com -- we're right at the cusp. Our first issue was printed via traditional offset, but issue two will be printed with MagCloud.)
And once magazines move to POD, they'll realize it opens up opportunities they never had before. When you can really tailor each issue for each subscriber, what will you do? Exciting, huh?
Book publishers often focus on the short-term elements of POD, most notably POD's higher cost per page. Some industry folks try to cite the long-range benefits, such as efficiency, higher retail prices via customization, etc., but the per-page discrepancy continues to be a sticking point. Have you encountered similar obstacles on the magazine side?
Magazines are a better fit for POD because, unlike books, they're usually all color and timeliness is much more of a factor. Plus, the price per page for digital print is falling fast, while the price per page of traditional offset has remained very steady. Still, the exciting part is all the opportunities digital printing enables. Ultimately, POD services like MagCloud will enable a degree of customization that is not only cheaper, but just plain impossible to do via traditional means.
Beyond strict numbers, what do you see as the upside to print editions? Does a print product carry a higher level of esteem for a writer or consumer?
I love the Web. I think it's still a publisher's dream come true. But, inconveniently, we humans are still real world creatures. And no matter how much connectivity blankets the planet, and how good our devices get, there will still be a role for print.
I don't say this because I'm some ancient technology fetishist. I don't own a tube amp. I sold all my CDs. It's just that print is a really good delivery mechanism for some kinds of experiences. Reading a physical magazine is a different experience than surfing hypertext online.
And, yes, I think the scarcity of print does give it a higher level of importance for its creators and consumers. On the Web, where every page is just a click away from any other, there's no relative importance communicated. But in a magazine, you know that a team of writers and editors picked this story to go here. That has a profound effect on how that media is consumed.
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