Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data

Peter Brantley
January 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their models of data storage and access:

Users just make changes to their data (contacts, calendar, mail, etc.), and Palm's webOS handles committing those changes to whatever canonical data source it is accessing in the cloud. And herein lies the most important difference between the webOS and Apple's iPhone OS: the iPhone was originally designed under the assumption that the canonical source of a user's data (contacts, calendar, music, tasks, etc.) is a Mac. Palm's webOS, in contrast, presumes that cloud-based services are the canonical source for your data (with the possible exception of media, which we don't know about yet) ...

Palm's webOS does not presume any sort of tether at all. The company has totally ditched the idea that you will use this phone in conjunction with a specific "main PC" that contains the canonical, authoritative repository of your data. Instead, webOS draws seamlessly on a variety of data services--not data repositories, but cloud-based services that actively feed the device both data and critical context.

This is a deep, fundamental break with both the iPhone and previous, repository-based smartphone usage models, and it's important enough that other smartphones are bound to follow.

Related Stories:

• Open Question: Digital Ownership vs. Digital Subscriptions
• Cloud Computing's Potential Impact on Publishing
• The battle for the cloud
• Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM
• Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution

Format Comparison: PDF, EPUB, and Mobi Downloads from Ebook Bundles

Andrew Savikas
January 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

We've been selling PDFs of our books on oreilly.com for several years, but this summer began selling "ebook bundles" of many titles, which include PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket versions. Here's some weekly data (I can't share the vertical scale) on the relative breakdown of actual downloads from those bundles (PDF, Mobi, and EPUB are Light, Medium, and Dark respectively). PDF is still the format of choice for most people, though EPUB is getting respectable usage, with Mobi in third:

The numbers at the bottom are weeks (200901 is the first week of 2009). This is only among titles offered in all three formats -- the majority of our ebooks are currently still only available as PDF, though we expect to release several hundred more in bundle form over the next few months (not that you should wait to buy of course -- you'll get all the formats as they come available ...).

An important point to note, via Allen Noren, our VP who runs oreilly.com, is that a substantial portion of our electronic sales come from overseas, where getting a print version is often difficult or cost-prohibitive:

I know you've heard me say it before, but we became an international publisher, in a way we were not previously, when we started selling books in digital format. We're in a unique position vs most publishers, who only have US or NA rights, but it's worth nothing.

Duly noted.

Related Stories:

• O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs
• Ebook Format Primer
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)

Google Doesn't Have Answers for Newspapers

Peter Brantley
January 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Fortune Magazine has an interesting interview with Eric Schmidt about Google's relationship with newspapers:

Maybe their time [newspapers'] has just come and gone?

No. They don't have a problem of demand for their product, the news. People love the news. They love reading, discussing it, adding to it, annotating it. The Internet has made the news more accessible. There's a problem with advertising, classifieds and the cost itself of a newspaper: physical printing, delivery and so on. And so the business model gets squeezed.

So what else can Google do?

We have a mechanism that enhances online subscriptions, but part of the reason it doesn't take off is that the culture of the Internet is that information wants to be free. We've tried to get newspapers to have more tightly integrated products with ours. We'd like to help them better monetize their customer base. We have tools that make that easier. I wish I had a brilliant idea, but I don't. These little things help, but they don't fundamentally solve the problem.

Related Stories:

• Newspapers Pursued New Tech with Wrong Intentions
• Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
• News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"
• Politico Expands Content Sharing Service
• The Media Industry's Perspective Problem

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

Andrew Savikas
January 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well:

• If the iPhone App by itself had been a book, it would be a top 10 seller in BookScan for Computer Books this holiday season, based on just 17 days of sales
• The print version appears to have been unaffected, retaining a solid position in the top 3 for Computer Books in BookScan
• A full 1/3 of those buying the app are outside the US, mostly in countries where the print book is not readily available

There are certainly some who don't care for the book-as-app approach, preferring the library model (where one app enables reading multiple titles). It's also clear there's substantial customer interest in both options, and we strongly believe that offering a variety of options and letting customers choose is the right approach. This is a time for experimentation, and we'll be doing quite a bit more of it (format, pricing, content) in the digital -- and especially mobile -- space in the coming months.

Related Stories:

• iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes
• O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs
• Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza
• Open Question: Standalone iPhone Ebooks vs. E-Readers

Newspapers Pursued New Tech with Wrong Intentions

Mac Slocum
January 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

In a column at Slate, Jack Schafer says newspapers' overcommitment to form and content lock-in led to the industry missing Web opportunities:

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

Related Stories:

• Steve Yelvington: "Early to the game but late to learn how to play"
• Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
• News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"
• Guccione: Print Downturn Traces Back to Pre-Internet Era
• How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times

Conversation is the New King

Mac Slocum
January 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Kate Eltham calls out publishers who blog through a PR lens and points the way to publisher blogs that fully embrace the medium:

It used to be common wisdom that content is king. But the popularity of social media has demonstrated that what internet users are really seeking is connection. A blog may be a cheap and easy way of publishing web content but its biggest strength is that it is a platform for conversation. [Emphasis included in original post.]

Related Stories:

• Kate Eltham: "Publisher as brand?"
• How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?
• Webcast Video and Slides: Social Media for Publishers
• Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
• Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation

TOC Editor Note: Light Posts Through Holidays

Mac Slocum
December 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The O'Reilly offices are closed through the remainder of the year, so TOC blog posts will be light until January 5, 2009.

We're thrilled with the interest and enthusiasm we've experienced throughout 2008, and we look forward to more coverage, projects and events in 2009. We hope everyone in the TOC community has a restful and enjoyable holiday season!

-- The TOC editors

iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes

Andrew Savikas
December 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year in electronic format. Notably, even at the promotional $4.99 price, it is the highest-priced app among the top 50 paid book apps. While $0.99 pricing clearly moves merchandise, it's unlikely that kind of pricing is sustainable for most Apps, including books (for more, see this excellent post from Andy Finnell on app pricing).

Yesterday brought news that several other major publishers are rolling out iPhone Apps of popular titles, including the Twilight series (which right now is priced at $10.99), via an app development company out of New York, ScrollMotion. I haven't tried their reader, but the annotation feature shown in the screenshots looks pretty neat. We've been very pleased with how our books render in Stanza, especially for computer code, cross references, and tables -- all of which are quite common across our catalog.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the news of more iPhone book apps, most vocally TeleRead blogger (and TOC Conference panelist) David Rothman:

Some consumers may want hundreds of books on their iPhones. Should publishers put such a crimp on their purchases? And will apps be the easiest things to organize into libraries? I'm open minded about the O'Reilly iPhone guide as an app, given its connection with the machine. But please don' make an app of every book!

While I share David's concerns about format lock-in (a big reason we offer many of our books in a variety of DRM-free formats), I think his distaste of standalone book apps is misplaced. Yes, it's true that right now the iPhone can only hold 148 apps. But given the nature of the device, I don't think it's likely that most customers will begin using it to manage/consume large numbers of books they intend to keep for long periods of time. Books on the iPhone likely serve the same function for readers as games do -- temporary entertainment, likely to be replaced by the next cool thing that comes along. I've deleted dozens of apps myself, at least a few of them ones I paid for.

But regardless of where your personal opinion lies on that issue, if you're a publisher there are several things to keep in mind as you consider the App Store as a distribution channel:

• Apple has tremendous power in this relationship. They're taking 30 percent right off the top, and they alone decide if and when your app appears. For many of your potential customers in this new market, that's just fine. They don't care about you or your other products. They care about entertaining/amusing/informing themselves.
• The App Store is a vibrant and thriving marketplace, but it's still in its infancy. There is a lot to learn about how to price and promote books this way. For example, here's a list of sites that promote new apps. Some are pay-to-promote, which sounds kinda gross, but isn't much different from co-op. Here's more from the same site on pricing.
• While this depends a lot on the types of books you publish, it's likely a small but very active segment of your audience feels the same way David does, and will reward you for offering standards-based, DRM-free versions of your books that they know will outlast you, the device-of-the-month, or the DRM format you're using.
• Speaking of DRM, stop worrying about piracy. One of our best selling books in electronic form this year is Real World Haskell, which was written out in the open, and is still available in its entirety from the book's website. For free. This is not an isolated case, and this book has been a commercial success not in spite of its open availability but because of its open availability.

If you're interested in reviewing the iPhone Missing Manual App, and are willing to share your review on your blog and in the App Store, drop me a line at andrew AT toc.oreilly.com. I have a limited number of promo codes for free access to the App, and it's first-come, first-served.

Related Stories:

• O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs
• Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza
• Open Question: Standalone iPhone Ebooks vs. E-Readers
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
• Q&A; With Co-Creator of Classics iPhone E-Reader

O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs

Andrew Savikas
December 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (18) | Listen

While there will always be a demand for printed books, few of those books will have a life entirely disconnected from the wider digital Web. In that sense, all publishing is becoming digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the Web. That's a big shift, and it will take time for the existing players to make the transition (and we'll almost certainly lose some along the way). For now, here's a roundup of where things stand for us at O'Reilly on the ebook front:

• David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual is now available as an App in the iPhone App Store. It's available for a limited time at an introductory price of $4.99 (the regular price will be $9.99). The App was built by Lexcycle, creators of the popular Stanza App, so you get the same rich reading experience (including live linking and cross references) as when you read our other books on Stanza. More titles will follow in the coming weeks.
  
• More than 130 titles, including many of our best sellers, are now available as ebook bundles, which can be read on a variety of ebook devices and systems, including Stanza on the iPhone, Bookworm, Amazon Kindle, and the Sony Reader. A full list is available at oreilly.com/ebooks, and includes the following:
  • JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5ed
  • Learning Python, 3ed
  • High Performance Web Sites
  • Rails Cookbook
  • Beautiful Code
  We're working to release the bulk of our backlist as ebook bundles during the next 90 days.
• All of our in-print Head First books will be available for purchase as PDFs within the next 24 hours (two of them already are via the Rough Cuts program). Those of you familiar with our Head First titles know their layout would not translate well to reflowable formats like EPUB. We regularly evaluate alternatives, but in the interim, we're happy to finally deliver something a lot of customers have requested--the option to purchase Head First books in digital form.
• In total, more than 700 of our books are currently available for sale as DRM-free PDFs or Ebook bundles (and even more are available through Safari Books Online). As more Ebook bundles become available, those are included as free updates for anyone who's already purchased just the PDF from oreilly.com.
• Our "Media Management" account pages for customers who have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com are now much more mobile-device friendly, and are accessible from oreilly.com/e. A screenshot from my iPhone below:
  

In the coming months we'll be working to make more of our new book content mobile-friendly, better integrate our book content with the Web, and continue exploring how to deliver our content in ways that take advantage of all that being digital has to offer.

If you're a publisher trying to figure out how to deal with digital, registration is open for our 2009 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. Lexcycle's Marc Prud'hommeaux and Neelan Choksi will both be speaking. New York area publishers should also check out StartWithXML, our one-day forum deep-diving into how and why to move to flexible formats for more nimble book content.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line through Get Satisfaction

Webcast Video and Slides: Social Media for Publishers

Mac Slocum
December 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Below you'll find the full recording from the recent TOC Webcast, "Social Media for Publishers" with Chris Brogan.

Chris has also made his presentation slides available:

Early Registration for TOC Conference Ends Tomorrow Today

Mac Slocum
December 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

The $200 early registration discount for the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, held Feb. 9-11 in New York, ends tomorrow today. Event information and registration details are available at the conference site.

The roster for the third annual TOC conference is nearly complete, and we're excited by the caliber of tutorials, sessions and speakers (and we aren't alone in that regard).

Confirmed sessions include:

• Keynotes from Tim O'Reilly, Jeff Jarvis, Sara Lloyd, Cory Doctorow, Jason Epstein, Nick Bilton, and Jason Fried
• Half-day tutorials covering ebooks, social media, community building, XML, print on demand, and copyright
• "Google Book Search and Copyright" with Jon Orwant
• "CEO Roundtable" with Eileen Gittins, Clint Greenleaf, Michael Hyatt and Bob Young
• "Building a Better Web-based Book" panel discussion
• "Managing the Human Side of Change" with Scott Berkun
• "What's Your Mobile Strategy?" panel discussion
• "The Rise of eBooks" panel discussion
• "The Long Tail Needs Community" with Gavin Bell
• "Greening the Book Industry" panel discussion
• "Success Stories and Failures in Digital Publishing" case study session

Additional speakers and sessions can be found at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference site. Be sure to register now to save $200.

The Realities of Big Web Traffic and Advertising

Mac Slocum
December 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Major news sites that rely on advertising as their primary revenue stream need to log hundreds of millions of page views per month to attract significant attention from advertisers, according to a new report from Lauren Rich Fine, research director of ContentNext.

From Advertising Age:

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes ...

... The report also looks at whether the [New York] Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.

(Note: Advertising Age cites ComScore Media Metrix figures that put the Times' traffic at 173 million page views in October, but the Times communications department says this figure is very low).

Traffic estimates in the hundreds of millions and billions are a shock to the system, but they're nothing new. Jeremy Liew analyzed the online media industry in early 2007 (a time when Web advertising was still enjoying double-digit growth) and concluded:

At large scale, without a great deal of targeting possible, a startup's "run of site" or "run of network" advertising might be able to get to the $1 RPM range (Revenue per thousand impressions, including CPM, CPC, and CPA models). To get to $50m in revenue you would need 50 billion pageviews in a year, or just over 4 billion per month.

This type of analysis -- which is certainly on target -- is why it's important for publishers to acknowledge the reality of Web advertising by addressing two deeper questions:

1. Can I reach sustainability faster by aggregating advertising across sites or building a smaller organization? -- Limited choice shoehorns audiences into large groups, but the Web disrupts channel lock-in by allowing individual consumers to find material on their own terms. Big organizations are in trouble because the transition from limited channels to distributed channels means audiences are smaller (ie: 1 million vs. 10 million, 100,000 vs. 1 million, etc). There's still significant value in reaching 1 million people, or even 100,000 people, but smaller audiences attract less advertising revenue. So the challenge is to either scale businesses down so audience size, advertising dollars and sustainability even out, or, aggregate advertising revenue from a large number of targeted sites. Both options are arduous, but both are also realistic. Finding and maintaining billions of page views per month is not (the New York Times being the exception here).

2. Can I diversify beyond advertising? -- Ad-only Web models are inherently flimsy because the thing advertisers want is the thing most Web sites can't attract: huge crowds. A lot of lip service has been paid to the Web's targeting argument -- and in Google's case, that's proven effective and lucrative -- but the analysis from Fine and Liew shows that advertisers still can't shake that "big crowd" mentality. So if that's the reality, advertising needs to become one revenue stream among others.

Folks like Mike Masnick, Clay Shirky, Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson have addressed these "other" revenue steams at length (all are recommended reading), but the abridged analysis of their work generally comes down to one word: scarcity. Digital content is not scarce. It's easy to find, distribute and copy (even if publishers lock it down). Because of this, audiences don't often equate "digital content" with "pay." Publishers can fight consumer expectation by creating artificial scarcity (DRM, pay walls for general content), but that same energy is better directed toward products that are naturally scarce: things that solve a problem (recommendations, education), offer an experience (readings, concerts, trips, conferences), grant access (consulting, POD for out of print titles), save time (curated information), and offer value on an individual basis (customization). All of these are outside publishers' comfort zones and none are guaranteed to catch on, but models that work in conjunction with the digital world offer a better shot at sustainability than those built on artificial limits and unrealistic audience sizes.

Related Stories:

• Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
• Kevin Kelly: "Better Than Free"
• The 26th Story: "Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry"
• Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations
• Finding Balance Between User Experience and Web Ads
• Levels of Quality and Revenue Streams
• Web Analytics Primer for Publishers

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:

• Manolis Kelaidis: "bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds"
• Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web?
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Tagging the Real World through Barcode Apps
• Mashable: 100+ iPhone Games That Use the Accelerometer

Report: 300,000 Sony Readers Sold

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

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.)

Related Stories:

• The Pitfalls of Publishing's E-Reader Guessing Game
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?
• The Oprah Effect and the Kindle
• Analyst: Amazon Downplays Rumored Kindle Sales
• Open Question: Have You Seen a Kindle in Public?

Slides from "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow" Webcast

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

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.