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Publishing News: August 2008
Tim O'Reilly: Social Networks as Infrastructure, Not Apps
Mac Slocum
August 27, 2008
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Using Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari as a jumping-off point, Tim O'Reilly stresses the need for social network interoperability. From Radar:
Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I'd love to see a firm commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network as infrastructure rather than application.
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The Myth of the Level Digital Playing Field
Mac Slocum
August 26, 2008
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In response to Kassia Krozser's post about authors and electronic publishing rights, Joe Wikert notes that the sources of digital content influence discoverability:
One of the myths of the e-publishing world is that all books are on a level playing field, so you'll sell just as many with publisher X as you will with publisher Y. This simply isn't true, at least not in most cases. This is very similar to the complicated world of Google search results. Just because you love chocolate and you launched a website all about chocolate doesn't mean you'll immediately climb to the top of the Google results for a search on "chocolate."
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Shopping Electronic Publishing Rights
Peter Brantley
August 26, 2008
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Kassia Krozser discusses why and how authors are getting savvy to retaining electronic publishing rights. From Booksquare:
As publishers like Random House try to redefine concepts such as "out-of-print", savvy authors and agents will be more diligent about defining tight deadlines for contracts (in fact, I'm a bit surprised this isn't happening more frequently). Firm deadlines allow authors to renegotiate terms, especially as the digital market grows and evolves. While publishers love the idea of locking someone into 2008 rules, it's a safe bet to say that this landscape will be vastly different in ten years.
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BookTour and IndieBound Make Author Events Hyper-Local
Peter Brantley
August 26, 2008
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BookTour, which provides author-generated pages and a listing of author tour events, has integrated their database with IndieBound. This is an interesting model, which obviously could expand in its breadth. From the BookTour blog:
... the trouble is neighborhood bookstores are all different (that's what makes them great). That made it hard to dump all their data into our hoppers in one go ...
Now, throughout BookTour, events taking place at IndieBound-represented bookstores will be added automatically to our database. Equally important, on both author and venue pages, when an event is taking place at an IndieBound-repped store, you'll have the option to purchase the book directly from that store.
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Amazon Acquires Shelfari
Mac Slocum
August 26, 2008
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Amazon is turning its investment in Shelfari, a book-centric social network, into a full acquisition, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Financial details haven't been released, but Shelfari CEO Josh Hug confirmed the acquisition on Shelfari's blog:
We've got some big plans ahead. With more resources and Amazon's expertise in building a platform where people come to share ideas, there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit each of you. In the meantime, you'll continue to have access to the great community and tools that you've always known and used on the site.
Amazon earlier this month acquired AbeBooks, which is a minority investor in Shelfari's chief competitor, LibraryThing. As the Seattle P-I notes, LibraryThing had a few choice words about Shelfari's business practices in 2007.
Update 8/26/08, 11:25 a.m. Tim Spalding from LibraryThing weighs in on the Shelfari deal. (Via the Reading 2.0 list)
(Via Jose Afonso Furtado's Twitter stream.)
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Analyst: Amazon Downplays Rumored Kindle Sales
Mac Slocum
August 25, 2008
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Recently reported Kindle sales estimates are off the mark, according to McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Tim Bueneman. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Amazon officials gave McAdams Wright Ragen analysts the impression that high-end estimates on Kindle sales reported by TechCrunch and a Citigroup analyst are not reasonable.
Amazon managers "told us that the Kindle is definitely selling very well, but they also said the analysts and reporters giving out these extremely high estimates 'did not run them by company,'" Bueneman wrote. [Links added]
TechCrunch is standing by the shipping estimates in its original story:
We're sticking by our sources on the estimates of units shipped from the factories in China. Amazon is correct that we didn't "run them by company" prior to publishing, but since they don't comment on non-public sales figures, it wouldn't have been a useful exercise anyway.
Harping on an old point -- if Amazon and Sony refuse to share e-reader sales, publishers are best served developing an overall digital gameplan rather than hedging bets on a particular device.
Also from the Seattle P-I: Bueneman says new Kindles are in development (release dates not revealed) and, as anticipated, Amazon sees opportunity for Kindle adoption among college students.
(Thanks to Tom Marhoefer for links.)
Related Stories:
- TechCrunch: "We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000"
- MarketWatch: "Amazon's Kindle could be next iPod, analyst says"
- The Pitfalls of Publishing's E-Reader Guessing Game
- Open Question: Have You Seen a Kindle in Public?
- Which Game is the Kindle Changing?
- Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights
- Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In
Validators: Asking for Donations to Pay for the News
Andy Oram
August 24, 2008
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How many ways can content (news, books, movies, etc.) be funded? There are really only a few ways throughout history. Unit sales (treating a movie or a book like a candy bar or a pair of shoes) are increasingly obsolete when information can travel the Internet. There are also subscriptions, advertising, and various kinds of subsidies (a category that also covers academic positions for people who do research).
The New York times has a short article on community-funded journalism, in which the public pays a journalist in advance to cover a topic. I'm blogging this because, in the first place, it suggests a way technical information could be developed, and in the second place I anticipated the idea a year ago in my short story Validators.
Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence
Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008
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In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance:
Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing industry fought off the paperback and was skeptical of the book club -- which was effectively a technology-driven invention that used the new science of direct marketing and the mail to change the business. Now there are innovations like Amazon and Audible [Note: Amazon acquired Audible in January '08]
Effectively, from my perspective, these disruptions -- along with Superstores -- changed a relatively aristocratic product into a mass market product. A lot of these disruptions have allowed increasingly middle class and lower middle class people to have access to books, which were traditionally for rich people.
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Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008
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A fairly significant ruling came down Wednesday in Lenz v. Universal, a rather infamous case where Universal Music Publishing Group issued a takedown against a YouTube video of a young child dancing to a song in the background -- a song in which Universal maintained some rights. Universal later acknowledged that this was a fair use of the music, an incidental use, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pursued the aggressive use of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns. The court ruled in the EFF's favor, and it should have significant outcomes. The EFF writes:
Universal moved to dismiss the case, claiming, among other things, that it had no obligation to consider whether [Stephanie] Lenz's use was fair before sending its notice. The judge firmly rejected Universal's theory:
" [A] fair use is a lawful use of a copyright. Accordingly, in order for a copyright owner to proceed under the DMCA with "a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law," the owner must evaluate whether the material makes fair use of the copyright."
Universal had insisted that copyright owners could not efficiently police copyright infringement if they had to consider whether a give use was fair. Not so, said the judge:
"[I]n the majority of cases, a consideration of fair use prior to issuing a takedown notice will not be so complicated as to jeopardize a copyright owner's ability to respond rapidly to potential infringements. The DMCA already requires copyright owners to make an initial review of the potentially infringing material prior to sending a takedown notice; indeed, it would be impossible to meet any of the requirements of Section 512(c) without doing so. A consideration of the applicability of the fair use doctrine simply is part of that initial review."
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Going Digital Gives Publishers Safety Net
Mac Slocum
August 21, 2008
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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.
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Short Fiction Renaissance Enabled by Digital
Peter Brantley
August 20, 2008
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Gary Gibson makes a good observation about the forms of fiction enabled by e-readers. From The Digitalist:
There's a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn't previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading was done through the medium of collections by well-known sf [science-fiction] authors that would be deemed financially unworthy in the modern age.
Yet without the requirement for printing, binding and shipping, it would be nice to think that short fiction collections could achieve some kind of rebirth in the age of the ebook. Although there are certainly authors such as Beckett and quite a few others with collections out, these tend to come from smaller, specialist presses and thereby both cost more, have smaller print-runs and are harder to find. Ebook publication, I think, places such collections in a better position to be found by the right audience. It certainly means an extra potential revenue source for any author who's had, say, a dozen or so stories professionally published and would like to be able to bundle them in an e-format.
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Report: Pre-Roll Video Ads Not all that Bad
Peter Brantley
August 20, 2008
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Given how "unacceptable" we were told this would be to viewers, it's rather remarkable how many people are now obviously accommodated to pre-roll ads in videos. From Beet.TV:
The vast majority of online video viewers are watching pre-roll and overlay ads, a study released today by Break Media and Panache shows. Completion rates for 15-second pre-roll ads were 87 percent, and 77 percent viewed campaigns with overlay ads for at least 15 seconds.
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EBay Wants You to Buy It Now
Mac Slocum
August 20, 2008
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EBay is moving into Amazon's territory. Citing reduced consumer interest in online auctions, eBay is refocusing on fixed-price "Buy It Now" products. From the New York Times:
Among the changes being announced Wednesday [8/20/08] is a new pricing plan for sellers who offer fixed-price items in eBay's "Buy It Now" format. Starting in mid-September, sellers will pay only 35 cents to list an item for 30 days, a reduction of about 70 percent in upfront fees. EBay also announced that it would no longer allow most customers to pay by check or cash, a change aimed at curbing fraud. Users will need to pay with a credit card or through eBay's PayPal online payment service.
Direct competition between eBay and Amazon is nothing new. Amazon tried to capitalize on eBay's success by launching its own auction business in 1999, but by 2001 it had scaled back its auction efforts.
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EFF Looks at the Big Questions Surrounding Digital Books
Peter Brantley
August 19, 2008
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At the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a post on what the future of digital books portends for pubishers and consumers:
Skeptics should remember that it wasn't long ago that many predicted that CDs would never replace vinyl, and later that MP3s would never replace CDs. You can still find great record stores that specialize in vinyl, but the trend towards digital music has been steady and unstoppable. And the music industry has paid a huge price for their failure to embrace the new technology. After first ignoring new technologies, they then proceeded to try to sue innovators, restrict users with DRM copy protection and then punish fans with indiscriminate lawsuits, none of which did a thing to stop online sharing of music. Sales are down, illegal filesharing is up, and no one has found a way to unite the industry around monetizing the sharing of digital music (though EFF has suggested a Better Way Forward).
Will the same thing happen to the publishing industry as books become digital? If the trend continues, with better devices promising longer battery life and better screen resolution, digital books will become a force to be reckoned with. Are we doomed to watch the publishing industry run through the same gamut of bad decisions that have plagued the recording industry for the last few years?
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The Crowdsourced Cat Book
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
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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)
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Infinite Permutations of the Digital Book
Peter Brantley
August 19, 2008
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James Bridle discusses the near infinite malleability of digital books. From booktwo.org:
Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass before the book tells the same story again.
The nature of the web makes such a book possible. Immediately, a simple reading of the user-agent to determine the reader's operating system and browser could be used to present each with a different version, breaking the narrative along several general pathways. Sections could be hidden or revealed by simple manipulation of the layout.
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Sports Illustrated Offers Ad Space through Web Bids
Mac Slocum
August 18, 2008
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Sports Illustrated is using a Web-based bidding system to sell advertising across its online and offline properties. From Advertising Age
Executives at the Time Inc. title, the first one to try an online auction, said the move was partly to recruit those advertisers that aren't in close touch with the sales force anyway.
"There are many advertisers out there that would like the opportunity to understand what the Sports Illustrated brand is about, what those offerings are, that we just physically can't get to," said Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated Group.
Ad auctions are already commonplace in Web-based advertising, most notably through Google's AdWords program.
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Twitter Faces Ramifications of Not Being Global
Peter Brantley
August 15, 2008
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Twitter, the microblogging service, has had an uneven rollout of an economic model, and was never able to come to good terms on payments for instant messaging (SMS) through its application with mobile carriers abroad. Consequently, it has limited its instant message functionality to North America. On his blog, White African, Erik Hersman talks about the ramifications when you try to be global, and then can't:
In our globally connected world, if your service can't cover the globe, then you need to open it up for communication between similar services. What we really need is a platform that allows Twitter-like applications to "talk" to each other globally. If I set up a similar platform in West Africa then there should be a way for Twitter users in the US to also accept my updates. Closed gardens in this case create single points of failure. (I'm interested in the less restrictive Identi.ca platform.)
This global contraction by Twitter creates opportunities for others. Jaiku, recently purchased by Google, now has the ability to grow deeper into other regional markets. And, if nothing else, Twitter has done us all a favor by launching a global pilot project that proves out the usefulness of this type of service. Launching country- or region-specific clones of this same type of service is now a real option. [Links included in original post.]
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Pirates Convince Game Developer to Drop DRM
Mac Slocum
August 14, 2008
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"Why do people pirate my games?"
Game developer Cliff Harris recently posed this question on his blog and the onslaught of responses caught him (and his blog host) by surprise. Harris offers some interesting conclusions, but most notable is this passage on digital rights management (DRM):
People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.
Harris says his company will no longer use DRM on its games.
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A Vote for One-Use Gadgets
Peter Brantley
August 14, 2008
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Jeff Gomez, in his series on owning a Kindle, voices a preference for multiple gadgets each doing one thing well:
One thing that I don't mind about the Kindle is that it's an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device -- one thing that did everything -- and that I wouldn't want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You don't pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I don't use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I can't read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.
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