Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing

Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a post by Clay Shirky:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change -- take a book and shrink it -- was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

I'll second Tim O'Reilly's reaction to the piece:

This is a piece that anyone concerned with the future of publishing simply MUST read.

It's a long post, but well worth a close read (and re-read). Though Clay's talking about newspapers, much of what he has to say applies to book publishing in particular, as well as media in general.

More on Shirky's post from Mark Bertils (@mdash) over at indexmb.com:

Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.

Related Stories:

• Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
• The Confusion Between Content and Containers
• It's Time to Accept an Ambiguous Digital Fate
• News.com: "NYT's Sulzberger: 'We can't care' if newspapers die"

Jakob Nielsen: Kindle Content Must be Kindle-Specific

Mac Slocum
March 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Jakob Nielsen offers an in-depth look at Kindle formatting best practices:

For Kindle, it's certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can't repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures. [Link included in original post.]

(Via Joe Wikert's Twitter stream)

Related Stories:

• How to Read any Type of Document on the Kindle (Almost)
• Optimizing Web Content for the Kindle Browser
• Kindle Formatting: "Formatting Tips"
• Jakob Nielsen: "Kindle 2 Usability Review"

Is Print a Preference or a Habit?

Andrew Savikas
March 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Over on the O'Reilly Radar blog, Dale Dougherty posted on students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music:

[Jonathan Berger] has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

I remember wondering what audiophiles were up to, buying extremely expensive home audio systems to play old vinyl records. They put turntables in sand-filled enclosures with elaborate cabling schemes. I wondered what they heard in that music that I didn't. Someone explained to me that audiophiles liked the sound artifacts of vinyl records -- the crackles of that format. It was familiar and comfortable to them, and maybe those affects became a fetish. Is it now becoming the same with iPod lovers?

It sounds a lot like the complaints leveled against digital books, which often turn into litanies of the sensate qualities of print: touch, feel, smell, sound. I hear those comments all the time, unsurprisingly from people for whom printed books have been their primary means of reading for most of their lives. But in about 30 years, no one who's not eligible for AARP membership will remember a world without the Web. Print will always have a place, but by then I doubt it will be a primary format for many, many readers.

What do you think?

Related Stories:

• Ebooks and Print Books are Not Mutually Exclusive
• Reinventing the Book and Killing It are Separate Things
• Open Question: When Will Digital Books Overtake Print Books?

O'Reilly Ebooks Now In Stanza Online Catalog

Andrew Savikas
March 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?).

To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15.

If you have Stanza on your iPhone or iPod (it's free -- click here to get it), here's how to get to the O'Reilly Ebook Store. From your Stanza Library, click the Online Catalog link:

From there, select "O'Reilly Ebooks" to browse by Bestsellers, New Releases, or All titles:

Select the title you want to see a description:

Press "Add to Cart" to buy the ebook, which will take you through to the O'Reilly shopping cart to complete the transaction (you'll need to create an O'Reilly account if you don't already have one). We're working to make the purchase experience a bit more mobile friendly, but wanted to roll this out right away. There is an awkward step when you'll see what appears to be some gibberish in a confirmation dialog -- go ahead and click download:

We're working with the Stanza folks to try and make that a little cleaner.

If your download is interrupted -- or if you ever want to re-download an ebook you've already purchased -- you can always return to your purchased ebooks by visiting the "My Bookshelf" link from the O'Reilly Catalog in Stanza (or by pointing your iPhone to oreilly.com/e or visiting members.oreilly.com from any web browser):

We'll be adding new titles, free samples, and more ways to browse, search, and sort in the coming weeks.

Kindle Comes to the iPhone

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

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:

The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.

Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a gap filler: nibble on book content while waiting at the airport, in line, at a restaurant, etc., but settle in for deep reading with the original Kindle (or, presumably, the printed edition). Toward that end, the Times says Amazon is using a bookmark feature that keeps a reader's spot as they switch devices.

Reaction to the Kindle iPhone App

I'll be adding to this list over the next few days as more coverage appears (I highly recommend following the real-time Kindle trend on Twitter). Please share additional links and your own Kindle/iPhone analysis through the comments area.

Hands on: Kindle for iPhone a great Kindle companion
(Chris Foresman, Ars Technica)

Clicking on the "Get Books" button on the Home screen instructs users to got to Amazon's Kindle Store via a computer for "the best shopping experience." And they aren't kidding; while there is a link that will open the Kindle Store in MobileSafari, browsing and buying books this way is just plain frustrating. The Kindle's own integrated buying is far simpler in comparison. Apple presumably has this restriction in place so that developers don't abuse the App Store system, giving away free apps on Apple's dime and then selling content elsewhere. Perhaps Amazon can build an iPhone-browsable version of the Kindle Store and display it via an embedded browser, or better yet, perhaps Amazon and Apple can come to some sort of agreement to allow in-app purchasing.

First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone
(Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD)

... it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon's servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.

Kindle for iPhone Review
(Perrin Stewart, 148Apps)

... it's worth having the app on your device for the access to Amazon's virtual library alone. In many cases, the pricing on Kindle versions of books are much cheaper than other ebook stores (compare the Kindle version of "The Graveyard Book" for $9.99 to the Fictionwise version which is $17.99 and the stand-alone iTunes store app which is $17.99, for instance), and they often have books that other stores do not.

Excerpting Best Practices Hinge on Intent

Mac Slocum
March 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A piece in the New York Times reignites the fair use debate by asking: How much excerpting does fair use cover?

It's a reasonable question, particularly since Google News, the Huffington Post and countless other sites rely on excerpt aggregation to drive traffic and sell ads. But the rules of excerpting are also -- to steal a line from Steve Jobs -- "a bag of hurt."

Fair use is a doctrine, and as much as editors, bloggers and other with an excerpting bent wish for structure (word count, percentage used, image size, etc.), it's not going to happen. Fair use is contextual and case-by-case. That's why Henry Blodget, co-founder of Silicon Alley Insider, has the right perspective:

"To excerpt others the way we want to be excerpted ourselves."

Intent is the key to proper excerpting. If your intent is to single out someone else's work, and drive attention and its associated benefits and detriments to the creator of that work, then excerpts will be short and filled with outbound links. But if your intent is to fool Google, boost your traffic, and use someone else's material to further your own efforts, then excerpts will be long and link-free -- or they'll contain links to your material.

Excerpting is an extension of white-hat vs. black-hat search engine optimization. The white hats understand that search engines are the essential utility on the Web. Gaming them for personal gain erodes value and reduces opportunities for everyone. Black hats care only about short-term efforts, so they do anything they can to turn attention into quick advertising revenue. What black hats don't realize -- or care about -- is the impact their actions have on the structure of the Internet. They're jackhammering the foundation they're standing on.

Sites that push the boundaries of excerpting are engaged in the same self-destructive behavior. They may see short-term traffic and revenue spikes, but the source sites will eventually cry foul and enact their own Draconian countermeasures. Long-term, this doesn't benefit anyone. Sites that rely on excerpted information will lose access, and originating sources will lose attention. To be effective, excerpting needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship that provides value to everyone involved. The only "rule" is intent.

Related Stories:

• Portfolio: "When Fair Use Seems Unfair"
• Webcast Video: Why Publishers Should Care About SEO
• Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: "Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader's Guide"

Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game

Mac Slocum
February 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:

According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.

The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.

Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.

Related Stories:

• What Does Esquire's E Ink Cover Mean for Print Publishing?
• France Telecom E-Reader Includes Subscriptions
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?

TOC Twitter Visualization Contest Winner

Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The winner of our impromptu contest for best visualization of the TOC Conference Twitter activity is Stephen Smith for his tag clouds and stats over at toctweet.com:

Congrats to Steve, who gets a free full pass to TOC 2010! (With an honorable mention to @thewritermama for banging out 720(!) tweets during the show.)

Indigo's Shortcovers Launched Today: A Good Start, But Room for Reader Improvement

Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

The Shortcovers website and companion iPhone and Blackberry apps launched today (we posted a sneak preview back in January). Put simply, it's a website for buying ebooks. But there's a few interesting twists that (for now) set it apart.

Though most of the current content is books, the primary unit of the service is the "shortcover" -- things like an article, a blog post, and a book chapter. That means publishers have the option of making individual chapters available for sale (or as free samples). But perhaps the more interesting consequence of that is something they're calling "mixes," where readers can combine multiple shortcovers into a single "mix" (think iTunes playlist), and share that with other readers. Though my search was admittedly brief, I wasn't able to find any for-pay content available for inclusion in a mix.

They also definitely understand the social aspect of reading. Beyond the mixes, readers can also upload their own content, rate content, and share content (via Twitter or email).

On the downside, right now although some content is downloaded locally to the iPhone, most of the service only really works when you're online. Also, the navigation within books isn't very intuitive, and the interfaced doesn't drop away while reading (the navigation and settings bars at the top and bottom remain on screen while reading).

And (sadly unsurprisingly), the reader appears to have trouble displaying complex content like lists and tables, and computer code (the ones I looked at either didn't display the code at all, or displayed it in regular variable-width font). I've sent a note to the Shortcovers folks to try and learn more, but I'm continually surprised with how poorly many of these reading systems (including the Kindle, until very recently) have handled kinds of content that have been part of standard HTML for well over a decade. Here's some screenshots of the problem:

I'd be more sympathetic if the iPhone SDK didn't already include the WebKit framework for rendering HTML. Sigh.

But overall it's a decent start, and an impressive first real entry into the mobile reading space from an existing print retailer.

Several more iPhone screenshots are below:

Hallway Video from TOC Conference: Tim O'Reilly on Open Publishing

Andrew Savikas
February 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The folks from the RIT Open Publishing Lab have posted a short video talking with Tim O'Reilly in the hallway of the TOC Conference about Open Publishing:

Taxonomies and Starting With XML

Laura Dawson
February 25, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (11) | Listen

This is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote last week on taxonomies and chunking.

Last October, the StartWithXML team wrote a post called "To Chunk or Not To Chunk," where we discussed tagging and infrastructure issues, and a discussion ensued about what happens when you don't know what you'll be using chunks for. How do you tag those?

Later, in our StartwithXML One-Day Forum, we included a presentation on tagging and chunking best practices, where it was pointed out that no taxonomy for chunk-level content currently exists.

We have taxonomies for book-level content. These include formalized code sets such as theLibrary of Congress subject codes, the BISAC codes, the Dewey Decimal System, among others. There are also informal code sets, like the tag sets on Shelfari or Library Thing. There are proprietary taxonomies at Amazon and B&N.com that enable effective browsing.

But nothing like this exists for sub-book-level content. It's never been traded before. We've never really needed a taxonomy for it before.

Other industries that traditionally distribute "chunks" have their own taxonomies that might prove useful in building a book-chunk schema. These include the IPTC news codes, which identify the content of a particular news story -- that's the closest analogy I can find for small gobbets of content that require organization.

Industries have proprietary taxonomies to identify certain concepts -- culinary arts, music, agriculture, engineering, the sciences, literature and criticism, education, and on and on and on. But these do not necessarily identify concepts within a book.

Some might argue that we don't necessarily need taxonomies -- why can't we use natural-language search and the semantic Web to "bubble up" the "right" concepts? I'd argue that words don't always mean what we think they mean. A classic example from my library days is the term "mercury." That could mean the planet, the car or the element. Proponents of semantic search would say that the context in which "mercury" is mentioned should take care of defining that term. I'd say that's true in about 50 percent of all cases but not definitively true enough in 75-100%.

My original post gets into more detail about why taxonomies are important search tools, and how the digitization of books requires a good taxonomy ... and who should do it.

Related Stories:

• Beyond the Tag Cloud
• Simplifying Semantic Tagging
• Library Uses Tags to Link Online-Offline Recommendations

Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free

Peter Brantley
February 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7) | Listen

At Dear Author, a post stating that not all content should be expected to be free; rather it must be provided, free or not, in a realistic understanding of consumer needs and expectations, which might mean changing the way you do business.

What content providers must realize is that a changing business model wherein revenues are no longer captured in the same way does not mean that content is not without value or that people will not pay, in some way, to use that content. I think many people recognize that in order to have worthwhile content, we must pay in some way for it. Consumers have reduced the value of the album, but have not determined that music itself is without value. Consumers might believe that digital books have reduced cost given the costs of production, distribution and warehousing; but it is not our belief that books are without value altogether or that all books must be provided for free. I think what consumers are looking for is a fair trade. Content creators provide the best content they possibly can and for a fair price allow the consumers to utilize it in the way that it fits into their lives.

Related Stories:

• Joe Wikert: "iPhone App Store Price Sensitivity"
• Essential Points in the Free Debate
• Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks
• How Do Publishers and Authors Get Paid in a "Free" World?
• Piracy is Progressive Taxation ...

Virginia Open Sourcing Physics Textbook ("Flexbook")

Andrew Savikas
February 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

I was part of a brief Twitter exchange recently with Cengage's Ken Brooks about the cost of textbooks:

kenbrooks: @doctorow #toc That depends entirely on the type of book. A K-12 reading program costs $millions.

andrewsavikas: @kenbrooks not necessarily. See ck12.org

kenbrooks: @andrewsavikas Talk to McGraw Hill or Pearson about basal reading programs. The intricacies are staggering. #toc

I like Ken a lot personally (and respect him a ton professionally), and I have no reason to doubt that it does take millions to develop many educational programs. But my reference to ck12.org (whose founder, Neeru Khosla, keynoted at TOC 2008) was because if it does cost that much, then something's wrong with the system, and that's not likely to change without the work of groups like ck12.

In fact, Virgina is already in the process of developing an open-source "flexbook" for physics using the ck12 platform:

Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra and Secretary of Education Tom Morris today announced the selection of thirteen individuals to form a core team to pilot the development and release of an open–source physics "flexbook" for Virginia. This electronic material will focus on high school physics and contain contemporary and emerging 21st century physics and modern laboratory experiments.

The Virginia Physics "Flexbook" project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth by allowing educators to create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open–source format that can be used to strengthen physics content. The Commonwealth is partnering with the Palo Alto, California–based non–profit, CK–12 on this initiative as they will provide the free, open–source technology platform to facilitate the publication of the newly developed content as a "flexbook" — defined simply as an adaptive, web–based set of instructional materials.

"We need transformational ideas to ensure all Virginians are educated to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy," said Secretary Chopra. "This pilot initiative is a step in the right direction to introduce our students to contemporary physics topics and lab materials at no additional cost to the taxpayers or students," added Secretary Morris.

There is certainly a place for the investment-intensive educational publishing programs that only a firm with the resources of Cengage or Pearson or McGraw-Hill can provide. But there's also enormous opportunity to try new models that take advantage of the kind of collaboration that underpins all of academia to develop and distribute quality learning material for students at lower costs. (BTW, ck12 is hiring.)

OMG. Best. TOC. Wrapup. Ever.

Andrew Savikas
February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Every single thing on Kat Meyer's Tiger-Beat-style cover from her TOC wrapup cracked me up:

I think we may have a new cover design for our printed program for TOC 2010. Well done, Kat.

Full Text of Jason Epstein's TOC 2009 Keynote

Andrew Savikas
February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7) | Listen

Few can claim the depth of experience with publishing that Jason Epstein brought to the stage at the TOC Conference. Among my favorite moments of the conference this year was the chance during a break to hear Jason talk with Tim O'Reilly about their respective views on the past and future of publishing.

Several attendees asked for the full text of Jason's keynote, and he was kind enough to oblige:

Speech given by Jason Epstein at the 2009 O'Reilly Tools Of Change for Publishing Conference

I don't have to tell anyone here that we are at the end of the Gutenberg era; at the threshold not only of a new way of publishing books but of a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg's, assuming we survive our financial calamity, our 20,000 nuclear weapons, and our melting ice cap, all of them by the way unintended consequences of the western civilization that Gutenberg's technology made possible.

Five centuries ago Gutenberg's dream was to print a uniform prayer book on his new press to be distributed to all the churches of Europe and in this way unify the catholic faith which was fractured by schisms, especially in Germany where Gutenberg made his living selling trinkets at religious fairs. Instead, to what would have been Gutenberg's dismay had he lived to see it, the printing press spawned our modern world with all its wonders and woes -- the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and for better and worse, our skeptical, secular, experimental civilization. Whoever believes that books are simply another form of entertainment has missed the point.