Orphaned Works Find No Home in House

Peter Brantley
October 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Wired's Threat Level blog notes that the orphan works bill is likely dead on arrival in the House of Representatives after a positive vote in the Senate, as a result of the wee little fiscal problem confronting the country:

The act changes the rules and reduces and sometimes nullifies damages for infringing uses of so-called "orphaned" works as long as there was a "diligent" effort to locate the copyright owner. Orphaned creative works are those in which the copyright holder cannot be promptly located.

Lobbyists have assured Threat Level that the House, which is mired in trying to broker an economic revival package, won't take up the measure, at least not until after the November elections.

Related Stories:

• Orphan Works Legislation and Copyright Conundrums
• Sorting through Layers of Copyright
• Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
• Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights

Balancing the Benefits and Costs of XML for Book Production

Andrew Savikas
October 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

O'Reilly engineer and XML guru Keith Fahlgren kicked off a lively conversation on an internal mailing list this week by asking whether (and how much) we're "eating our own dogfood" in terms of Tim O'Reilly's recent post about IT.

Along the way, XML.com editor Kurt Cagle weighed in with his thoughts on the importance of an XML workflow (specifically one that plays nicely with his needs running a destination Web site):

Overall, I'd like to see us move to an all XML pipeline, not because I'm the XML editor (I'm actually writing more economics articles of late than anything) but because I think that a cohesive XML workflow provides us with the cleanest implementations that we can have, and ironically it's the one type of flow that may actually make it easier us to work with the content without needing to break open the content to do tedious search and replace operations. It provides the best reuse story -- it's a relatively simple proposition to convert a DocBook publication into an embedded Web block, for instance -- and it integrates well with feed production.

O'Reilly Publishing Services Manager Adam Witwer responded, and included some critical lessons learned about the challenges with moving to XML:

Over the past year or so, we in publishing services have adopted an all DocBook XML pipeline for several of the main book series (Animal, Cookbook, Theory in Practice, In a Nutshell, etc.). Retraining staff has been a huge challenge. From a technical perspective, developing the XSL-FO has taken (and continues to take) lots of time and iterations. But the biggest challenge has been convincing others that the small sacrifices that come with an XML workflow are worth it. We have less control over things like page layout in a book, and certain style elements that are easy in InDesign or Frame are difficult to replicate with XSL-FO stylesheets. For us in publishing services, those things seem like small trade-offs for the gain of having a single set of source files that are much easier to reuse, most notably on Safari, and to update. This ceases to be an issue when the stylesheets get to be nearly indistinguishable from the InDesign/Frame templates on which they are based, so that's what we've tried to do, and we've transitioned away from the traditional page layout programs and general approach to book production.

It's worth noting that this all applies to what happens after we receive a manuscript, many of which are still being written in Word. There's a lot that can be done without ever opening the can of worms that is authoring and in XML.

Related Stories:

• Why You Should Care About XML
• Chunks and Verticals and Niches -- Oh, My!
• Can the Author Really Help?
• TOC Resource: XML
• See more StartWithXML posts

Open Question: Digital Ownership vs. Digital Subscriptions

Mac Slocum
October 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Two tips in Dear Author's recent post "10 Things Epublishers Should Do for Readers" caught my attention:

1. Eternal Bookshelf. An eternal bookshelf means that every purchase you have bought can be downloaded at any time. Most of the larger etailers have this feature but not all.

2. Mass Downloads. Along with the eternal bookshelf should be the ability to re-download all of your books. This is necessary in the case of a computer crash or some other computer related malfunction.

The focus on ownership is interesting, particularly since the concept of "owning" a digital file is inherently quirky. You can purchase and download books, music, TV shows, movies and software, but the tangible qualities of ownership don't apply in the digital realm. You don't categorize your digital movie collection on a DVD shelf and you don't thumb through a just-purchased ebook.

There's a weird dichotomy at play here. Many people (myself included) have come to terms with the ambiguous aspects of digital purchases, but a significant portion (again, myself included) gravitate toward digital ownership over digital subscriptions (e.g. the iTunes model vs. the Rhapsody model). The only clear difference between these models is access: purchased files are accessed from your local storage, subscriptions are accessed from a company's servers. But if your chosen material is available through your chosen device at your chosen time, does ownership really matter?

I'm interested in hearing how members of the TOC Community view the differences between ownership and subscriptions. Here's a few questions toward that end:

• Do you purchase digital content and store it on your own devices?
• Do you expect retailers to allow you to download additional copies of your purchased content?
• Do you subscribe to digital content?
• What would it take for you to switch from ownership to subscription?

Please share your thoughts in the comments area.

Related Stories:

• Commentary: Apple Could Own the Ebook Category
• Science Publisher Offers Digital Subscription to Books
• Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In
• The Kindle, the Cloud and Mixed Signals
• Cloud Computing's Potential Impact on Publishing

[TOC Directory] Recent Additions

Mac Slocum
September 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

22 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:

• RenderX
• Creative Byline
• Altova
• Filemaker
• Bookstand Publishing

Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.

A Plea for Passion in Museums

Peter Brantley
September 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

This is a great post about passion for when we talk about our profession, about what we are all trying to do, whether we are librarians, technologists, publishers, or work in museums. It speaks to why libraries and museums often feel "dead." From Museum 2.0:

Museums shy away from presenting passionate views. It's ironic that we expect visitors to fall in love with our artifacts and exhibitions without ever presenting Bela-like models for that kind of passion. I think there are many visitors who wander into museums the same way they'd wander into a foreign sporting event -- they don't know what's going on, why people care, and most importantly, why they should care. At a sporting event, there are little Belas everywhere yelling at refs and hooting with glee. By following the cheering, newcomers can start to understand what parts of the game are most valued, and get a window into the deep love some fans show for the sport.

Museums don't have a cheering section. As visitors walk through galleries, it's easy to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why is it here? Who cares? Museums do a decent job addressing the first two questions, but we rarely tackle the third. The use of an "objective" authoritative voice makes it hard for visitors to assign value or significance to items with which they don't already have a connection.

Related Stories:

• Rethinking Libraries and Museums as "Living" Structures
• Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations

Taking the Leap into All-POD

Mac Slocum
September 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

James Bridle has launched Bookkake, a print-on-demand (POD) publisher focusing on transgressive literature. From booktwo.org:

... Bookkake is not in the fortune-building or the fortune-breaking business. Print-on-demand and direct sales mean that we cut out much of the warehousing, distribution, and discounting costs that are currently causing so much trouble in the trade. Order a book from the Bookkake website and it is printed and shipped directly to you.

POD editions can be ordered in the UK and US with free shipping. In addition, all Bookkake titles are available as free ebooks in DRM-free PDF, EPUB and MIDP formats:

... I firmly believe that by supplying interesting readers with the best version of what they can get elsewhere for free, I'll be rewarded with customer appreciation and loyalty.

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization
• Open Question: What is the Best Use for Print on Demand?
• Budding Authors Use Espresso Book Machine to Publish
• Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks
• Treating Ebooks Like Software

10 Things Ebook Merchants Should Offer

Peter Brantley
September 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Jane at Dear Author has a wonderful list of 10 things ebook merchants should be providing as a matter of course. Here's just one example, but read the whole list:

Buy a for a friend. The only site that offers this feature is Fictionwise. Amazon does not even offer this for Kindle which makes no sense. When a reader wants to buy a book for a friend, she wants to buy a specific book. She doesn't want to send a generic gift certificate and hope her friend uses it for said book.

Related Stories:

• Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
• Q&A; with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit
• Ebook Format Primer
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development

Mac Slocum
September 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Audience fragmentation is an oft-cited source of mainstream media's ills, but two dissimilar publishers show that valuable attention can still be acquired.

Politico, an on-the-rise political publisher, is expanding while everyone else is contracting. In a recent interview with mediabistro's FishbowlNY, Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei said there's opportunity in niche content models:

I don't think our model can be easily replicated, at least on the print side (unless the federal government moves to another city). John [Harris, co-founder] and I do think there is a very robust future for niche sites online. The new media formula is pretty simple: If you can build a desirable audience that a class of advertisers wants to reach, you have a darn good chance at success. Advertisers want efficient ways of reaching their target audience, and niche sites offer it (if you can build a big enough audience). We have some thoughts on variations of Politico that might work elsewhere -- and we might have more on that next year.

A separate story about a successful hyperlocal initiative from Lost Remote's Cory Bergman reinforces VandeHei's optimism:

... My Ballard has exploded in popularity beyond our wildest expectations, surpassing the weekly neighborhood newspaper in monthly reach (unique users compared to the paper's physical subscription base.) We've even launched similar blogs in surrounding neighborhoods with the help of friends and friends of friends, forming a news blog network covering the core of Seattle's fastest-growing communities.

Politico is geared toward affluent decision makers and information-hungry political junkies while My Ballard is serving up local news to an engaged urban community, but both sites are employing the same simple model: target a promising market, serve it with compelling content, then adapt to the needs of the audience.

Old-guard companies who still believe audiences can be cornered are bound to fail because the exponential increase in distribution channels empowers audiences to form and shift on their own terms. Audience freedom has pushed the publishing industry into perpetual beta, and content firms that acknowledge this -- and work with it -- are best positioned to succeed. That's why there's so much value in the trails being blazed by Politico, My Ballard and other publishers -- including smart "old" companies. These publishers recognize that an ongoing cycle of "target-serve-adapt" is the best way to attract attention from on-the-move groups.

Related Stories:

• How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
• Guardian Blazes New Media Trail with paidContent.org Acquisition
• Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
• Photo Blog Shows Innovation Still Alive in Media Orgs
• Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One
• Web Community Management Tips

College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks

Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Seven college bookstores will soon offer movies and ebooks through in-store kiosks. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association.

A kiosk-based system targeted at college students will struggle to compete against digital options like iTunes and P2P networks, but Ars Technica says movies are the first step in a broader initiative:

... it's part of a plan to get electronic distribution channels up and running in advance of the availability of digital textbook material. If all goes well, the first digital textbooks and supplementary class material will appear there starting next summer. Left unsaid, however, was whether this material would be protected by DRM; it's a safe bet that it will.

Related Stories:

• Joe Wikert: "Bookstores vs. Online"
• Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations
• BookTour and IndieBound Make Author Events Hyper-Local
• Levels of Quality and Revenue Streams

Storytelling Through Book Spines

Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The Sorted Books project puts book spines to work as storytelling devices:

The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies -- a cross-section of that library's holdings.

I'd love to see a mash-up combining Sorted Book projects, outsourced book cataloging, and a customizable Web interface.

(Via Boing Boing and Shelf Awareness)

Related Stories:

• Ron Brinkmann: "Geeking out with books..."
• Tim O'Reilly: "Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?"
• Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
• Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games

Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo

Liza Daly
September 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Last week I was in New York for the city's first Web 2.0 Expo. I was a member of the program committee and one of our goals was to make it a uniquely New York event. This meant a real focus on measurable outcomes and integrating Web 2.0 principles into established business, in contrast with the more startup-friendly atmosphere of the San Francisco event. The fact that the conference ran during the week of the Wall Street meltdown only reinforced the need for pragmatism in tough economic times.

Naturally I was interested in applying what I learned to the publishing world. If you couldn't make it to the event, here were my big take-aways:

Web 2.0 is social software
Consultant Dion Hinchcliffe's tutorial on the Web 2.0 landscape summed it up best: Web 2.0 means software that gets better the more people use it. This is radically different from traditional software development, which gets better only when programmers add new features. (In the case of Microsoft Word, it generally gets worse.)

The best example in the publishing space is LibraryThing, which has a more accurate book catalog than Amazon.com, but also content found nowhere else. My favorites are the Legacy Libraries, which collect works associated with famous dead people. The Legacy Library project illustrates a related principle of Web 2.0: encourage unintended uses. LibraryThing was designed for individuals to catalog and rate their own books, but this user-driven initiative has added tremendous unexpected value.

Thinking outside the box
That is, outside of a single computer (geeks like to call them "boxes"). More Web applications are either being built on top of other services, or make use of so-called cloud computing. Amazon, Google and other providers now offer a wealth of ready-made software and infinite computing power to allow companies to leapfrog over problems of cost and scaling.

Only a few years ago when I was approached by a publisher to start a project, we would begin at the beginning: purchasing a computer, selecting a service provider, writing some HTML, crunching some data. With services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, there's no longer any need to buy hardware: instantly an application can be deployed on one computer, or a thousand, at very low cost. This makes experimentation much more feasible: if no users come to a new product, no expensive hardware investment has been wasted. If it's successful, a few keystrokes can add 10X the computing power.

Cloud computing has also created tremendous benefit for offline processing tasks, as shown by The New York Times when converting their digitized archive for use on the Web.

It's not just about people, it's about data
Finally, Toby Segaran's talk on "The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data" reminded me how much value publishers have. Toby explored clever ways of finding usually-expensive data for free (for example, rather than paying for Yellow Page listings of restaurants, he scraped the New York City health department Web site, which includes ratings of every food-service facility).

Diving deeper, he emphasized how much value can be added to digital services if they are already full of content. Wikipedia came preloaded with a public domain encyclopedia, as it's much easier to correct or update old content than to enter it wholesale. The more of your content that users can find and interact with (for example, by providing an extensive full-content backlist), the more engaged they'll be.

Speaker presentations for the conference are available here: Web 2.0 NYC presentations.

Related Stories:

• Tim O'Reilly: "What Is Web 2.0?"
• Cloud Computing's Potential Impact on Publishing
• Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
• Q&A; with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit
• Q&A; with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner

The Kindle, the Cloud and Mixed Signals

Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Adam Hodgkin notes a discrepancy between Amazon's cloud-computing efforts and the Kindle. From Exact Editions:

If Amazon decides to switch tack on the Kindle and treat it simply as a blank slate on which users can rent rather than outright buy titles, they will have the infrastructure in place to make this change. Amazon is a true believer in the 'cloud' for next generation computing, but it apparently thinks that digital books are different: droplets on the ground rather than nodes in the cloud network.

(Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream)

Related Stories:

• Cloud Computing's Potential Impact on Publishing
• The battle for the cloud
• Technology Review: "Craig Mundie's Cloud Vision"
• Google Book Search Listings Now Embeddable
• Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In

TOC Recommended Reading

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

Direct-To-Fan: Radiohead, Marillion And The End Of Labels (Robert Andrews, paidContent.org)

80s rock group Marillion, hardly a Top 10 draw nowadays, engages its fans so closely that they funded its latest album to the tune of £360,000. Erik Nielsen, who masterminded the strategy as MD of Marillion's Intact Records business arm, told our London EconMusic conference: "About a decade ago, we set out to release the bonds of the record companies over the artists. We worked out that we needed 5,000 fans to finance an album - when 12,000 did, we thought 'well, we can do this now'. We've continued to do that since 1999." By releasing the digital version of that album specifically on to P2P networks this month - "just to see what might happen, because we knew it was going to happen anyway" - the band has tripled its normal sales of physical deluxe copies.

State of the Blogosphere: The How of Blogging (Technorati)

One in four bloggers spends ten hours or more blogging each week. The most influential bloggers are even more prolific. Using Technorati Index data, we analyzed the posting and tagging behaviors of bloggers according to their Technorati Authority. Over half of the Technorati top authority bloggers post five or more times per day, and they are twice as likely to tag their blog posts compared to other bloggers.

Why the Financial Times can charge for metered content (Jason Preston, Eat Sleep Publish)

Those people who are just passing through and "joining the conversation" can be given free access, while those people who are your actual customers will be asked to pay for their content. By metering their content instead of simply throttling it like the New York Times did, FT is able to keep their content out from behind a wall while still charging for it. [Emphasis included in original post.]

Related:

• See more TOC Recommended Reading

Boston Globe Spins Off Weekly Sports Tabloid

Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Newspapers are turning to niches these days. The latest example is "OT," a new weekly sports tabloid from the Boston Globe:

The 24-page, full-color, oversize tabloid - called OT, which stands for "Our Town/Our Teams" ... costs 50 cents and will be published every Thursday ... The publication's goal is to provide coverage of professional sports teams that goes beyond daily news ...

... OT joins a growing roster of niche publications created by the Globe in the past two years. They include Lola, a monthly magazine targeted at young women; FB, a monthly with a name that stands for "Fashion Boston"; and Design New England, a bimonthly magazine about home and garden design.

The shifting media landscape has turned the Boston sports journalism market into a game of musical chairs in the last year. Reporters and columnists are bouncing between national outlets, the Globe, the Boston Herald, local television and radio stations, and upstart publications. Boston-based sports reporters used to be closely associated with their media organizations, but in recent years a handful have boosted their individual brands through simultaneous relationships with newspapers, broadcast stations, Web sites and personal blogs.

(Via Romenesko)

Related Stories:

• Politico Expanding Staff, Circulation and Ad Space
• The Rise of Freelancers
• Photo Blog Shows Innovation Still Alive in Media Orgs
• Photography Up, Photojournalists Down
• The Media Industry's Perspective Problem

Why You Should Care About XML

Andrew Savikas
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (16) | Listen

Since we began talking about the StartWithXML project, a few offline comments have come in suggesting that imposing XML on authors (and editors for that matter) won't work.

When framed that way, I'm in violent agreement. I would never argue that authors and editors should or will become fluent in XML or be expected to manually mark-up their content. I naively tried fighting that battle before, and was consistently defeated soundly. It is simply too much "extra" work that gets in the way of the writing process.

But there are several reasons why it's really really important for publishers to start paying attention to XML right now, and across their entire workflow:

• XML is here to stay, for the reasonably forseeable future. While it's always dangerous to attempt to predict expiration dates on technology, I think it's fair to assume XML will have a shelf life at least as long as ASCII, which has been with us for more than 40 years, and isn't going anywhere soon.
• Web publishing and print publishing are converging, and writing and production for print will be much more influenced by the Web than vice-versa. It will only get harder to succeed in publishing without putting the Web on par with (or ahead of) print as the primary target. The longer you wait to get that content into Web-friendly and re-usable XML, the worse.

Many in publishing balk at bringing XML "up the stack" to the production, editing, or even the authoring stage. And with good reason; XML isn't really meant to be created or edited by hand (though a nice feature is that in a pinch it easily can be). There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."