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New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors
Peter Brantley
December 15, 2008
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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.
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Report: 300,000 Sony Readers Sold
Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008
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The e-reader guessing game may be in its final stages. According to theBookseller, Sony confirms it has sold 300,000 Readers globally since 2006:
So far three million books have been downloaded from its online library, which is home to 57,000 titles. The electronics giant said it planned to grow its online library to 100,000 titles by the end of the year.
The Reader is available through a variety of channels, including U.K. retailers. The Kindle is currently sold only through Amazon to U.S.-based buyers.
Sony is prepping a wireless-enabled Reader to compete against the Kindle, but theBookseller says there's no firm release date. The third-generation Reader -- a faster model with more storage but no connectivity -- was announced in October.
(Via Walt Shiel's Twitter stream.)
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Slides from "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow" Webcast
Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008
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Laura Dawson has made her slides available from the recent TOC Webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow." A complete recording of the event will be posted here soon.
[TOC Webcast] Social Media for Publishers
Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008
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Tools of Change for Publishing will host "Social Media for Publishers," a free webcast with presenter Chris Brogan, on Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific).
Webcast Overview
So much of what we hear about blogging, podcasting, social networks, and the rest of the social media toolkit seems to be arbitrary, overly time-consuming, pie-in-the-sky. We might hear the occasional good strategy, but rarely do we understand how to put it into action. And how much will any of this cost you in resources and money? Meet with Chris Brogan for a not-too-techy and not-too-light dive into the world of social media from the mindset of a publisher.
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Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time
Joseph J. Esposito
December 12, 2008
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To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Digital media are useful to publishers only insofar as they serve one of these aims. (A separate matter is using digital media to drive down costs and boost profits, but that is not growth in the defined sense.) Using digital media to redistribute market share may be costly and not lead to the expected gains, as a publisher's rivals are likely to use the very same tactics: anyone can publish for the iPhone and Stanza, anyone can get books onto the Kindle. But with market share battles there is no relief; it is an arms race, and a publisher can no more forego publishing in digital form than it can stop seeking new and creative authors. For a publisher pursuing growth, alas, it's new markets or nothing.
Digital media do not necessarily lead to new markets, and in some situations, digital media may actually serve to shrink markets. For consumer or trade publishing in the developed world, finding a new market can be challenging. Our lives are full, our calendars are snug, and our attention is spread over a seemingly infinite number of media choices, ranging from old-fashioned books to social networks, music, movies, museums, and countless other things. To find a new market here requires opening up a crack in a broad, seamless facade.
Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with IMs and music and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That's a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive.
This point was brought to mind by a mailgroup post by O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas, who commented that he was stuck for an hour in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out his iPhone and check out mail, alerts, and Web sites. But he could have been reading, if publishers had provided formal material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for") to slip between the interstices of Andrew's day.
An hour is a big crack in the day; to become a true interstitial publisher, you would have to aim smaller. How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing? Daydreams don't count -- because ultimately the aim of every media business is to colonize your mind's every moment. (Dust off that old copy of the science fiction classic "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth for a satiric vision of imperial marketing.) If you had something to read that you could sip in draughts of five minutes at a time or perhaps 10, you would participate in the growth of the new market for interstitial publishing. And this is genuine growth, as at this moment the total sales in the interstices is zero or close to it. The goal is to go from zero to 60 in five minutes.
For interstitial publishing to work, you need a handy device (PDA, iPhone, or something like that), which you carry with you all the time so that you can take advantage of the cracks in the day. For this kind of thing, a Kindle or any dedicated ebook reader won't work, as it is more of an effort to pull such a device out of your bag as you wait in line in the supermarket. So if it's growth you want (as distinct from market share), forget the Kindle. A smart phone is a different matter, however: How many times do you see someone yank a Blackberry from a belt clip and glance at incoming email? Instead of email, that could be the twenty-third chapter of the new micronovel by William Adama. The proper device is critical, and the software that runs on it must have sophisticated bookmarking capabilities.
You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting "Moby-Dick" for interstitial publishing simply won't do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it's entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in. Sorry, Tolstoy and Grisham, even William Gibson, but we need a new breed of writer, who is born digital, who is born in the interstices.
Often interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what McLuhan meant by "understanding media": it's not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology.
Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.
Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end--and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.
For "five-minute fiction" to catch on, we will need creative people who probe the nature of the interstitial medium. It's easy to forget (or never to have known) that the linear narrative as we think of it today was in fact invented once upon a time when writers were faced with books that were inexpensively manufactured and distributed to wide audiences for the first time. Publishers will need to seek out writers who comprehend the new medium, who can engage a reader for fie minutes, who can make the many pieces of the work congeal in the reader's mind. These writers will study readers, PDAs or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin. In all of this publishers will see growth.
The aim of digital media should not be (or should not only be) to substitute a screen for a printed page but to reinvent the text on the screen and, in so doing, to bring new readers into the marketplace.
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The Inevitability of Newspapers' Downturn
Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008
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In a post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky takes issue with the newspaper industry's slow adaptation to digital and its propensity for playing the victim:
I'd only arrived on the net in '93, a complete newbie, and most of my opinions about newspapers came from talking with Gordy Thompson of the NY Times and Brad Templeton of Clarinet. Instead, what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.
Google, eBay, craigslist, none of those things existed when I wrote that piece; I was extrapolating from Lycos and it was still apparent what was going to happen. It didn't take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine. [Emphasis included in original post.]
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Magazines Now in Google Book Search
Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008
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Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog:
Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet.
Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google Book Search results. Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for. For now you can restrict your search to magazines we've scanned by trying an advanced search.
The Associated Press says Google will share advertising revenue generated by Google ads with magazine publishers. Embedded advertising from the original print editions remains intact as part of the overall archive. It'll be interesting to see how Google and magazine publishers coordinate on ads if/when publishers seed current editions into the service.
In recent months, Google also released a similar newspaper archive through Google News and a large collection of photos from LIFE magazine.
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History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008
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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?
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Book Publishing's Scale Issue
Mac Slocum
December 9, 2008
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In a post looking at the future interplay of content, gatekeepers and consumers, David Nygren touches on a key issue for large book publishers: scale.
Mega Publishing Conglomerates Go Bye-Bye: Or at least they will look very different than they do today. Their scale is not sustainable. The partial implosion we saw in the publishing industry last week was just the beginning. The profit margins that will come from publishing will not be great enough to satisfy shareholders who expect revenue growth of 7%+ annually. No can do.
But there will still be major publishing houses that handle the superstars, the sure (as you can get) bets. That is what they do best, after all. But for the vast majority of readers, the big houses will not longer be the gatekeepers. Good. [Formatting included in original post.]
Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream
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[TOC Webcast] Essential Tools of an XML Workflow
Mac Slocum
December 9, 2008
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Tools of Change for Publishing, in conjunction with StartWithXML, will host "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow," a free webcast with presenter Laura Dawson, on Thursday, Dec. 11 at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific).
Webcast Overview
This webcast is for those publishers who have made the decision to pursue digital channels for their content. What tools are out there? What do all those acronyms mean? How can publishers implement new strategies without disrupting current workflows? Here we'll explore the alphabet soup of digital publishing, sort out the tools that are most useful, and help publishers find some solid ground.
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Penguin 2.0 Mashes Up Essays and Short Texts
Mac Slocum
December 8, 2008
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Penguin's new project -- dubbed "Penguin 2.0" -- incorporates elements of customization and remixing found in Web content. Jeff Gomez, Penguin's senior director of online consumer sales and marketing, discusses the program with the New York Observer:
... in 2009 the company will introduce a program that allows customers to choose from a variety of short stories, essays, and other short standalone texts and combine them into custom-made collections. Mr. Gomez said the program is part of Penguin's effort to incorporate elements of so called 'Web 2.0' into publishing without abandoning print ...
... He cautioned, however, that he "would never want to break apart an entire book" and thereby render the full-length volume obsolete the way iTunes has done to the 74-minute LP.
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800 Newspapers Coming to Iliad E-Reader
Peter Brantley
December 6, 2008
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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.
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Webcast Video: What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization
Mac Slocum
December 5, 2008
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Below you'll find the full recording from the recent TOC Webcast, "What Publishers Need to Know about Digitization," with Liza Daly.
Slides from "Making the Case for POD" Webcast
Mac Slocum
December 5, 2008
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Brian O'Leary had made his slides available from this week's TOC Webcast, "Making the Case for POD." A complete recording of the event will also be posted here soon.
Publishers: Let the Containers Go
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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In a guest post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky says publishers who focus on book lovers rather than readers are setting themselves up to fail:
Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else. Can you imagine a 25-year-old telling a publisher "To get my business, you should stick to a single, analog format? Oh, and could you make it heavy, bulky, and unsearchable? Thanks."
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