| CARVIEW |
Recently by Peter Brantley
New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors
Peter Brantley
December 15, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen 
A new form of hybrid book is coming on the market -- and the inventor consults with Apple. From the Guardian UK:
Lyndsay Williams -- who has already developed the PC sound card, SmartQuill, and SenseCam -- is now working on SenseBooks, and the first of a series will be published next year.
SenseBooks are a hybrid of paper and computer intelligence, and will have MP3 quality audio from an ARM processor and a gigabyte of storage. Williams says SenseBooks "will know when the user picks up the book and looks at a page":
A proximity sensor detects this and can light up pages or make music. What is also useful is the book has sensors to know what page it is on, can send a wireless message to a PC and open up a web page with more information on. Current applications include children's teaching books, music books, cookery books etc.
Related Stories:
History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative.
The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly that they let Apple run away with control over digital distribution and the future of their industry.
It looks like the book publishing industry is about to do the same thing.
Publishing industry: The book isn't the paper. It's the content! Why don't you understand your own product?
Related Stories:
800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader
Peter Brantley
December 6, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
iRex Technologies scores scores of newspapers for its new iLiad e-reader. From E-Reads:
Digitally delivered news is gaining momentum and as we turn the corner to 2009 it's gotten a rocket boost from the Dutch firm iRex Technologies, which announced it has made a deal with NewspaperDirect to deliver 800 newspapers on iRex's Digital Reader 1000 ...
The iRex/NewspaperDirect partnership will undoubtedly cause some headaches for Amazon.com, too. A visit to Amazon's Kindle newspaper web page shows 28 listings. The 800 titles to be carried on the iRex 1000, dubbed 'Kindle Killer' by some, will obviously dwarf Kindle's offering. Of course, many of them are foreign language papers like Le Figaro and Die Welt. But 800 is 800 and that's good news for the environment.
Related Stories:
Random House Expands Ebook Offerings, Embraces EPUB
Peter Brantley
November 25, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
Random House is pursing digital with a vengeance, recognizing a growth market. From the Huffington Post:
The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months; excerpts can be viewed online through the publisher's Insight browsing service.
Also notable, Random will make all current and future ebooks available in EPUB format.
Related Stories:
Report: Wall Street Journal Grabbing High-End Ads from New York Times
Peter Brantley
November 21, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Silicon Alley Insider and others are reporting on Bloomberg's notice that the Wall Street Journal is grabbing high-end luxury advertising revenue from the New York Times:
As if the New York Times wasn't having enough trouble keeping up with an ad recession and the Internet crushing its print business. Now the newspaper is facing increasing competition for print ad s... from Murdoch's Wall Street Journal ...
... And then there's the stats: The WSJ has a paid circulation of 1.4 million, up 2.4% y/y. The NYT: 859,000, down 5.5%. With more readers, the WSJ can charge more for ads, $264,426 for full page color vs. $193,800 at the NYT.
Related Stories:
EFF Attorney: Google Book Search Settlement Weakens Innovation
Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
In an editorial in The Recorder, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says Google's settlement with publishers and authors signals an implicit abandonment of Google's legal team working on behalf of innovation across Silicon Valley:
.. By settling rather than taking the case all the way ... Google has solved its own copyright problem -- but not anyone else's. Without a legal precedent about the copyright status of book scanning, future innovators are left to defend their own copyright lawsuits. In essence, Google has left its former copyright adversaries to maul any competitors that want to follow its lead.
Google will doubtless be considering the same endgame for the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube. If Google can strike a settlement with a large slice of the aggrieved copyright owners, then it solves the copyright problem for itself, while leaving it as a barrier to entry for YouTube's competitors.
But when innovators like Google cut individual deals, it weakens the Silicon Valley innovation ecology for everyone, because it leaves the smaller companies to carry on the fight against well-endowed opponents. Those kinds of cases threaten to yield bad legal precedents that tilt the rules against disruptive innovation generally.
Related Stories:
Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM
Peter Brantley
November 20, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (20)
|
Listen
There is increased interest among trade publishers in pursuing some sort of "interoperable digital rights management" (DRM) for digital ebooks. There are many unlikely allies, who think that achieving a little DRM encourages publishers to move into digital spheres, and gives them breathing room. I think this is a really bad idea, and I wanted to publicly detail a few reasons.
What I've compiled is largely a list of counter-arguments; there are many affirmative defenses for unencumbered content that could be promoted. I've also numbered these paragraphs; on re-reading, they more often than not meld and intertwine as a potlatch of thoughts, and have not taken to my weak organization very well.
In a separate post, my friend and colleague Bill McCoy from Adobe will attempt to establish his own conclusions about whether an ebook DRM standard is a useful compromise, or a fool's errand. (Note 11/24/08: Bill's post is now available here.)
Read more…PC Magazine Goes Web Only
Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
PC Magazine's January 2009 edition will mark the end of its print run. A reduced staff will focus on the PCMag Digital Network. From paidContent.org:
The magazine, which was started in 1982, has a storied history, but its print base eroded over the years as its core brand of journalism -- news you can use while shopping for computers -- moved online. It cut back from bi-weekly to monthly earlier this year. PCMag, which literally invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews, at one time during the '80s averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even the 600-page marks, according to this Wikipedia history.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball says this is likely an ever more frequent transition as the recession deepens. Both U.S. News & World Report and the Christian Science Monitor have announced plans in recent weeks to end/reduce print editions.
Edit - 11/20/08 - John Gruber's name was misspelled in the original post.
Related Stories:
- Washington Post: "U.S. News & World Report To Shift Operations to Web"
- Christian Science Monitor: "Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy"
- News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"
- Could a Young Newspaper Company Still Succeed?
- Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation
Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
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.
Related Stories:
- The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
- Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation
- Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
- How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?
- Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development
Ebook to iPod to Hard Copy Purchase
Peter Brantley
November 18, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
Hugh McGuire is loving Stanza, the free ereader app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. From the Book Oven Blog:
40,000 ebook dowloads-a-day. I've got 35 of them sitting on my iPod. If you are a publisher, think long and hard about that number.
The reason I have 35 books downloaded onto my Stanza is: a) it is easy, b) it is free.
What does this mean for your business model? I don't know, but I assure you that when I finish War & Peace, I'll be buying a hard copy. And I also assure you: I love reading on that little thing.
Related Stories:
APIs, New "Transactions" and the Google Book Search Registry
Peter Brantley
November 13, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Listen
At PersonaNonData, Michael Cairns discusses the Google Book Search registry, and muses whether it might support certain types of transactions through an API:
How the registry may be formed is anyone's guess, but for sake of argument I envision a pyramidal structure. The identifier segment forms the pointy top layer, bibliographic data the second layer, content the third and the 'transaction gateway' the bottom tier. Then again maybe it's a cube and I should be adding subjects, a retail/library segmentation, and transactional details like rights information. Regardless, it seems to me combining each of these segments into a registry might engender significant opportunities to improve the publishing supply chain. But more than that, the combination I suggest works better for the on-line world than the off which is the failing of the current crop of ISBN databases (including Amazon.com) ...
... The most obvious application enabled via the 'transaction gateway' would be purchase but a 'transaction' can be many things: views, queries, checkin-out, use rights, syndication and may more. An open service architecture would enable development of third party API's that could result in all kinds of new applications but existing ones would also benefit as well. Worldcat and Copyright Clearinghouse applications are good examples where users could find the physical content in a library or attain usage rights from CCC.
Related Stories:
Android Barcode App Connects to Google Book Search
Peter Brantley
November 12, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Listen
Google has released a nifty Android app that permits the scanning of a book's barcode, enabling the linkage with the corresponding work in Google Book Search. From E-Reads:
"Google has announced a book-text search tool called the Barcode Scanner that works with an Android-powered cellphone. According to Google Book Search engineer Jeff Breidenbach, when you download the software into your Android and point your phone camera at a book's barcode, "it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN - without you even needing to click the shutter...You'll then have the option to search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away"
Related Stories:
Election Interest Signals Print's High-End Future
Peter Brantley
November 10, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Following the sell-out of post-election newspapers, Ed Nawotka looks at the collectable future of print. From Beyond Hall 8:
One immediate consequence of Obama's victory was the boost in sales for newspapers. So now we have confirmation that print is not dead -- at least as far as collectors are concerned.
This merely reinforces my belief that the long-term future of books lies in bifurcated markets: Half in cheap or reasonably priced e-books and the other half in high cost collectable volumes (be it what it may - art, photography, or even leather bound volumes of fiction).
Related Stories:
The Barack SlideShow
Peter Brantley
November 8, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
President-elect Obama has been very vocal about embracing an open government policy, and so far the signs are promising. See, for example, this page linked off Obama's public transition Web site, which lists resources reserved for incoming presidential teams -- it is both interesting and amusing to read texts discussing these essential change-of-governance issues along the lines of "Helping make your transition into government as easy as possible." It's historically rare to get a glimpse of national government continuance aided, as it must inevitably be, by the institutional bureaucracy's production of documents akin to a special issue of Make on "How to be President of the United States."
Equally interesting is the set of images of Barack Obama and his family backstage on election night, and proceeding into his acceptance speech. What's notable is that the images are fairly informal -- and they are on Flickr. This kind of photostream -- not unique in itself -- would previously, a generation ago, have been highly curated, entitled "The new presidential family waits for news," and published the week following in Life or Look magazine. However, the Obama pictures appear less curated (or at least have that air), were published nearly instantly, and do not involve the mediation of traditional media. In fact, whether these are eventually printed or not as official administration photos is secondary, because they are available freely and publicly online.
Without benefit of any mainstream media publicity, the pictures were so popular that they brought down Flickr. Thus, this is an event worthy of notice: an expectation of democratic transparency in a federal government combined with a mere decade plus-old publishing infrastructure jointly craft a community around the globe. In a sense, the limited access of the photographer on that election night make this a callback to the effect of TV in the 1950s, when monolithic media broadcast a culture that was shared and discussed in the conversations of millions. Yet the means of this publication, and the premise of sharing, are profoundly different.
I think there's one other interesting point to note. Up until this presidency, documentation such as the photoshoot routinely went en masse into archives, where it later established the basis for the Presidential Library. However, existing Presidential Libraries such as LBJ's or JFK's are faced with the challenge of reaching back into their collections to digitize materials and make them widely accessible, and they face significant policy, logistical, and funding challenges in doing so. The Obama administration will be publishing a great deal of material outbound -- a digitally native presidency -- at a magnitude far beyond any of its predecessors.
When archives are built incrementally on top of access, instead of access being born of hard labor from accumulated storage, the nature of the archive is transformed. The possibilities for an Obama Presidential Library -- built from today and onwards -- are transformative.
Related Stories:
Philadelphia Closing 11 Library Branches
Peter Brantley
November 7, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
The financial crisis is having a huge negative impact on many public sector services, including libraries. From Publishers Lunch (subscription required):
As municipalities across the country face large gaps in their budget, Philadelphia is taking "drastic new steps" to face the "economic storm" that include closing 11 of the 54 branch libraries that comprise the Free Library of Philadelphia. Three other branches will have Sunday hours eliminated. Mayor Michael Nutter said the branches were chosen "after careful review of building conditions, utilization and distance to other libraries in the Free Library system." Cutting 220 jobs throughout the city government, approximately one third of those layoffs will come from the library staff.
Related Stories:
Vanishing Paper in Higher Education
Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Christopher Conway has a thoughtful essay at Inside Higher Ed on the seemingly inevitable trend towards digital text consumption:
It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? Say you are teaching David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and you had a choice between an excellent paper-and-binding edition by a major academic press, with useful footnotes and front matter, and an electronic edition that students could download to their handy e-book readers, along with selected secondary articles you have selected for them to read? What if their e-book readers had a stylus and/or a network that enabled the class to annotate those assigned texts, and share them over the class network? I don't think anyone's nostalgia for paper-and-binding can replace the pedagogical value of my not-so-fanciful or far-fetched e-book scenario."
Related Stories:
EFF's Concerns About the Google Book Search Settlement
Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Listen
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes that the Google Book Search settlement accomplishes a degree of access that litigation might have taken years to develop, but it also observes areas of concern: fair use, innovation, competition, access, public domain and privacy.
Innovation: It seems likely that the "nondisplay uses" of Google's scanned corpus of text will end up being far more important than anything else in the agreement. Imagine the kinds of things that data mining all the world's books might let Google's engineers build: automated translation, optical character recognition, voice recognition algorithms. And those are just the things we can think of today. Under the agreement, Google has unrestricted, royalty-free access to this corpus. The agreement gives libraries their own copy of the corpus, and allows them to make it available to "certified" researchers for "nonconsumptive" research, but will that be enough?
Full analysis available at EFF.org
Related Stories:
Another Sci-Fi Publisher Opts Out of DRM
Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Night Shade Books has joined Baen's WebScription service. It's interesting how sci-fi is one of the genres leading the way into DRM-free ebooks. From a Galley Cat:
"Baen has successfully led the industry into the future with its DRM-free electronic publishing program," said Night Shade editor-in-chief Jeremy Lassen in a press release announcing the move. "This canny insight into the e-book market is just one of the many reasons Night Shade has chosen to partner with Baen for the launch of its e-book line."
Related Stories:
- Cory Doctorow: "Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet."
- The Analog Hole: Another Argument Against DRM
- "Spore" Backlash: Is DRM Officially Bad for Business?
- First Frontlist O'Reilly Ebook Bundle (Including EPUB) Now Available
- Charting the Pitfalls of DRM
Connecting the Dots Between Google Book Search and Android
Peter Brantley
October 31, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Listen
Ed Nawotka of Beyond Hall 8 discusses the possibility that the Google Book Search settlement permits them to envision product delivery through Android-capable devices:
Perhaps most important of all is how this cements Google as the industry leader in the distribution of digital books. Sure, there's Amazon with its Kindle...and the Sony E-reader...each with hundreds of thousands of titles available. But what happens when Google links its open source Android operating system -- now powering cellphones -- to the Google Book Search? You will, quite literally, have a library in the palm of your hand.
Related Stories:
New York Times Movie Reviews Released as API
Peter Brantley
October 30, 2008
| Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Listen
The New York Times has released an application programming interface (API) to its movie reviews, which is a rather significant feature. From the Times' Open blog:
Finally -- and this is the key -- we're giving you access to our Movies search feature, containing all 22,000 reviews indexed by title, reviewer's name, director's name, names of the top five actors, and plot keywords. So, if you'd like to build a list of what The New York Times thinks of Pedro Almodóvar or Lindsay Lohan, we've got you covered. And this is only the beginning: in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out better lookup and search features that will let you call up reviews based on publication date or the movie's release date, just to name two.
The Times also released campaign finance and metadata APIs earlier this month.
Related Stories:
- Stay Connected
-
TOC RSS Feeds
News Posts
Commentary Posts
Combined Feed
New to RSS?
Subscribe to the TOC newsletter. 
Follow TOC on Twitter. 
Join the TOC Facebook group. 
Join the TOC LinkedIn group. 
Get the TOC Headline Widget.
- Search
-
- Events
-
Social Media for Publishers
Dec. 16, 1PM (eastern) - Chris Brogan explores blogs, podcasts and social media from the mindset of a publisher. Register now.
StartWithXML One-Day Forum
Jan. 13, 2009, New York - StartWithXML is an industry-wide project to understand and spread the knowledge publishers need to move forward with XML. Learn more and register to attend.
Tools of Change for Publishing Conference
Registration is open! TOC 2009 will take place Feb. 9-11, 2009 at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. Early registration discount available until Dec. 18.
- TOC DVDs
-
TOC 2008 Tutorial DVDs
Now available. These tutorials dive into the necessary skills and tools critical to the future of publishing.
- Tag Cloud
- TOC Community Topics
-
Tools of Change for Publishing is a division of O'Reilly Media, Inc.
© 2008, O'Reilly Media, Inc. | (707) 827-7000 / (800) 998-9938
All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners.
O'Reilly Media Home | Privacy Policy | Community | Blog | Directory | Job Board | About
