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September 2008
[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
Mac Slocum
September 30, 2008
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22 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:
Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.
A Plea for Passion in Museums
Peter Brantley
September 30, 2008
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This is a great post about passion for when we talk about our profession, about what we are all trying to do, whether we are librarians, technologists, publishers, or work in museums. It speaks to why libraries and museums often feel "dead." From Museum 2.0:
Museums shy away from presenting passionate views. It's ironic that we expect visitors to fall in love with our artifacts and exhibitions without ever presenting Bela-like models for that kind of passion. I think there are many visitors who wander into museums the same way they'd wander into a foreign sporting event -- they don't know what's going on, why people care, and most importantly, why they should care. At a sporting event, there are little Belas everywhere yelling at refs and hooting with glee. By following the cheering, newcomers can start to understand what parts of the game are most valued, and get a window into the deep love some fans show for the sport.
Museums don't have a cheering section. As visitors walk through galleries, it's easy to wonder: where does this stuff come from? Why is it here? Who cares? Museums do a decent job addressing the first two questions, but we rarely tackle the third. The use of an "objective" authoritative voice makes it hard for visitors to assign value or significance to items with which they don't already have a connection.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)
Laura Dawson
September 30, 2008
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Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for ... well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging -- all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."
So no wonder people get confused. Particularly people who are in the business of creating content, not formatting, categorizing, packaging and marketing it.
So what are we talking about when we're throwing around this term? It depends on what you do for a living.
If you're a writer, it might mean using Word a little differently, quite possibly according to specific author guidelines given to you by the publisher. It might also mean including lists of keywords along with your manuscript. It may mean including lists of keywords for each chapter.
If you're an acquisitions editor, an XML workflow may mean deciding whether you want a book to merely exist as a print product (as a single source of revenue), or whether it's also appropriate as an ebook, to sell by the chapter (as numerous textbook publishers are doing), to publish iteratively (as O'Reilly does with its Rough Cuts), to make excerpts available for free download, etc.
If you're a book production editor, an XML workflow will be very concrete -- you tag a manuscript according to its format ("chapter heading," "illustration," "copyright page"), and those tags are applied to a pre-defined style sheet.
If you're in marketing, an XML workflow allows you to work with the author's keywords, target specific audiences for the content, and package the content in appealing ways.
Could you do all of this without XML? Sure. You could use a relational database and shove your manuscript, chapter by chapter, into tables in SQL. You could assign keywords in a relational database. But you couldn't do formatting. You could use InDesign or Quark to do your formatting. But you couldn't break up your manuscript into "chunks" and repackage those "chunks" into new products with those programs. XML has the capacity to handle both, and handle them well.
Like most acronyms, XML is a tool. It's not a goal in itself, but a way to get to your goal.
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Taking the Leap into All-POD
Mac Slocum
September 30, 2008
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James Bridle has launched Bookkake, a print-on-demand (POD) publisher focusing on transgressive literature. From booktwo.org:
... Bookkake is not in the fortune-building or the fortune-breaking business. Print-on-demand and direct sales mean that we cut out much of the warehousing, distribution, and discounting costs that are currently causing so much trouble in the trade. Order a book from the Bookkake website and it is printed and shipped directly to you.
POD editions can be ordered in the UK and US with free shipping. In addition, all Bookkake titles are available as free ebooks in DRM-free PDF, EPUB and MIDP formats:
... I firmly believe that by supplying interesting readers with the best version of what they can get elsewhere for free, I'll be rewarded with customer appreciation and loyalty.
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10 Things Ebook Merchants Should Offer
Peter Brantley
September 29, 2008
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Jane at Dear Author has a wonderful list of 10 things ebook merchants should be providing as a matter of course. Here's just one example, but read the whole list:
Buy a for a friend. The only site that offers this feature is Fictionwise. Amazon does not even offer this for Kindle which makes no sense. When a reader wants to buy a book for a friend, she wants to buy a specific book. She doesn't want to send a generic gift certificate and hope her friend uses it for said book.
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Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development
Mac Slocum
September 29, 2008
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Audience fragmentation is an oft-cited source of mainstream media's ills, but two dissimilar publishers show that valuable attention can still be acquired.
Politico, an on-the-rise political publisher, is expanding while everyone else is contracting. In a recent interview with mediabistro's FishbowlNY, Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei said there's opportunity in niche content models:
I don't think our model can be easily replicated, at least on the print side (unless the federal government moves to another city). John [Harris, co-founder] and I do think there is a very robust future for niche sites online. The new media formula is pretty simple: If you can build a desirable audience that a class of advertisers wants to reach, you have a darn good chance at success. Advertisers want efficient ways of reaching their target audience, and niche sites offer it (if you can build a big enough audience). We have some thoughts on variations of Politico that might work elsewhere -- and we might have more on that next year.
A separate story about a successful hyperlocal initiative from Lost Remote's Cory Bergman reinforces VandeHei's optimism:
... My Ballard has exploded in popularity beyond our wildest expectations, surpassing the weekly neighborhood newspaper in monthly reach (unique users compared to the paper's physical subscription base.) We've even launched similar blogs in surrounding neighborhoods with the help of friends and friends of friends, forming a news blog network covering the core of Seattle's fastest-growing communities.
Politico is geared toward affluent decision makers and information-hungry political junkies while My Ballard is serving up local news to an engaged urban community, but both sites are employing the same simple model: target a promising market, serve it with compelling content, then adapt to the needs of the audience.
Old-guard companies who still believe audiences can be cornered are bound to fail because the exponential increase in distribution channels empowers audiences to form and shift on their own terms. Audience freedom has pushed the publishing industry into perpetual beta, and content firms that acknowledge this -- and work with it -- are best positioned to succeed. That's why there's so much value in the trails being blazed by Politico, My Ballard and other publishers -- including smart "old" companies. These publishers recognize that an ongoing cycle of "target-serve-adapt" is the best way to attract attention from on-the-move groups.
Related Stories:
- How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
- Guardian Blazes New Media Trail with paidContent.org Acquisition
- Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
- Photo Blog Shows Innovation Still Alive in Media Orgs
- Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One
- Web Community Management Tips
College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks
Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008
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Seven college bookstores will soon offer movies and ebooks through in-store kiosks. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association.
A kiosk-based system targeted at college students will struggle to compete against digital options like iTunes and P2P networks, but Ars Technica says movies are the first step in a broader initiative:
... it's part of a plan to get electronic distribution channels up and running in advance of the availability of digital textbook material. If all goes well, the first digital textbooks and supplementary class material will appear there starting next summer. Left unsaid, however, was whether this material would be protected by DRM; it's a safe bet that it will.
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Storytelling Through Book Spines
Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008
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The Sorted Books project puts book spines to work as storytelling devices:
The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies -- a cross-section of that library's holdings.
I'd love to see a mash-up combining Sorted Book projects, outsourced book cataloging, and a customizable Web interface.
(Via Boing Boing and Shelf Awareness)
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Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo
Liza Daly
September 26, 2008
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Last week I was in New York for the city's first Web 2.0 Expo. I was a member of the program committee and one of our goals was to make it a uniquely New York event. This meant a real focus on measurable outcomes and integrating Web 2.0 principles into established business, in contrast with the more startup-friendly atmosphere of the San Francisco event. The fact that the conference ran during the week of the Wall Street meltdown only reinforced the need for pragmatism in tough economic times.
Naturally I was interested in applying what I learned to the publishing world. If you couldn't make it to the event, here were my big take-aways:
Web 2.0 is social software
Consultant Dion Hinchcliffe's tutorial on the Web 2.0 landscape summed it up best: Web 2.0 means software that gets better the more people use it. This is radically different from traditional software development, which gets better only when programmers add new features. (In the case of Microsoft Word, it generally gets worse.)
The best example in the publishing space is LibraryThing, which has a more accurate book catalog than Amazon.com, but also content found nowhere else. My favorites are the Legacy Libraries, which collect works associated with famous dead people. The Legacy Library project illustrates a related principle of Web 2.0: encourage unintended uses. LibraryThing was designed for individuals to catalog and rate their own books, but this user-driven initiative has added tremendous unexpected value.
Thinking outside the box
That is, outside of a single computer (geeks like to call them "boxes"). More Web applications are either being built on top of other services, or make use of so-called cloud computing. Amazon, Google and other providers now offer a wealth of ready-made software and infinite computing power to allow companies to leapfrog over problems of cost and scaling.
Only a few years ago when I was approached by a publisher to start a project, we would begin at the beginning: purchasing a computer, selecting a service provider, writing some HTML, crunching some data. With services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, there's no longer any need to buy hardware: instantly an application can be deployed on one computer, or a thousand, at very low cost. This makes experimentation much more feasible: if no users come to a new product, no expensive hardware investment has been wasted. If it's successful, a few keystrokes can add 10X the computing power.
Cloud computing has also created tremendous benefit for offline processing tasks, as shown by The New York Times when converting their digitized archive for use on the Web.
It's not just about people, it's about data
Finally, Toby Segaran's talk on "The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data" reminded me how much value publishers have. Toby explored clever ways of finding usually-expensive data for free (for example, rather than paying for Yellow Page listings of restaurants, he scraped the New York City health department Web site, which includes ratings of every food-service facility).
Diving deeper, he emphasized how much value can be added to digital services if they are already full of content. Wikipedia came preloaded with a public domain encyclopedia, as it's much easier to correct or update old content than to enter it wholesale. The more of your content that users can find and interact with (for example, by providing an extensive full-content backlist), the more engaged they'll be.
Speaker presentations for the conference are available here: Web 2.0 NYC presentations.
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The Kindle, the Cloud and Mixed Signals
Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008
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Adam Hodgkin notes a discrepancy between Amazon's cloud-computing efforts and the Kindle. From Exact Editions:
If Amazon decides to switch tack on the Kindle and treat it simply as a blank slate on which users can rent rather than outright buy titles, they will have the infrastructure in place to make this change. Amazon is a true believer in the 'cloud' for next generation computing, but it apparently thinks that digital books are different: droplets on the ground rather than nodes in the cloud network.
(Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream)
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TOC Recommended Reading
Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008
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Direct-To-Fan: Radiohead, Marillion And The End Of Labels (Robert Andrews, paidContent.org)
80s rock group Marillion, hardly a Top 10 draw nowadays, engages its fans so closely that they funded its latest album to the tune of £360,000. Erik Nielsen, who masterminded the strategy as MD of Marillion's Intact Records business arm, told our London EconMusic conference: "About a decade ago, we set out to release the bonds of the record companies over the artists. We worked out that we needed 5,000 fans to finance an album - when 12,000 did, we thought 'well, we can do this now'. We've continued to do that since 1999." By releasing the digital version of that album specifically on to P2P networks this month - "just to see what might happen, because we knew it was going to happen anyway" - the band has tripled its normal sales of physical deluxe copies.
State of the Blogosphere: The How of Blogging (Technorati)
One in four bloggers spends ten hours or more blogging each week. The most influential bloggers are even more prolific. Using Technorati Index data, we analyzed the posting and tagging behaviors of bloggers according to their Technorati Authority. Over half of the Technorati top authority bloggers post five or more times per day, and they are twice as likely to tag their blog posts compared to other bloggers.
Why the Financial Times can charge for metered content (Jason Preston, Eat Sleep Publish)
Those people who are just passing through and "joining the conversation" can be given free access, while those people who are your actual customers will be asked to pay for their content. By metering their content instead of simply throttling it like the New York Times did, FT is able to keep their content out from behind a wall while still charging for it. [Emphasis included in original post.]
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Boston Globe Spins Off Weekly Sports Tabloid
Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008
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Newspapers are turning to niches these days. The latest example is "OT," a new weekly sports tabloid from the Boston Globe:
The 24-page, full-color, oversize tabloid - called OT, which stands for "Our Town/Our Teams" ... costs 50 cents and will be published every Thursday ... The publication's goal is to provide coverage of professional sports teams that goes beyond daily news ...
... OT joins a growing roster of niche publications created by the Globe in the past two years. They include Lola, a monthly magazine targeted at young women; FB, a monthly with a name that stands for "Fashion Boston"; and Design New England, a bimonthly magazine about home and garden design.
The shifting media landscape has turned the Boston sports journalism market into a game of musical chairs in the last year. Reporters and columnists are bouncing between national outlets, the Globe, the Boston Herald, local television and radio stations, and upstart publications. Boston-based sports reporters used to be closely associated with their media organizations, but in recent years a handful have boosted their individual brands through simultaneous relationships with newspapers, broadcast stations, Web sites and personal blogs.
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Why You Should Care About XML
Andrew Savikas
September 25, 2008
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Since we began talking about the StartWithXML project, a few offline comments have come in suggesting that imposing XML on authors (and editors for that matter) won't work.
When framed that way, I'm in violent agreement. I would never argue that authors and editors should or will become fluent in XML or be expected to manually mark-up their content. I naively tried fighting that battle before, and was consistently defeated soundly. It is simply too much "extra" work that gets in the way of the writing process.
But there are several reasons why it's really really important for publishers to start paying attention to XML right now, and across their entire workflow:
- XML is here to stay, for the reasonably forseeable future. While it's always dangerous to attempt to predict expiration dates on technology, I think it's fair to assume XML will have a shelf life at least as long as ASCII, which has been with us for more than 40 years, and isn't going anywhere soon.
- Web publishing and print publishing are converging, and writing and production for print will be much more influenced by the Web than vice-versa. It will only get harder to succeed in publishing without putting the Web on par with (or ahead of) print as the primary target. The longer you wait to get that content into Web-friendly and re-usable XML, the worse.
Many in publishing balk at bringing XML "up the stack" to the production, editing, or even the authoring stage. And with good reason; XML isn't really meant to be created or edited by hand (though a nice feature is that in a pinch it easily can be). There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."
Read more…XML and APIs: Perfect Together
Brian O'Leary
September 24, 2008
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This week's formal announcement of the first three APIs for Google Book Search provides a frame for the "why" in StartWithXML: Why and How?
Although Google has confirmed just a few APIs, or application programming interfaces, the firm has clearly opened the door to making book content more easily searchable and findable and, through the use of some standard identifiers, more meaningful.
It's that last part that makes the use of XML even more compelling. While the first set of tools naturally provides publishers with the ability to call attention to bodies of work (including reviews and ratings), it is easy to see that next-generation APIs, developed by Google and exploited by publishers, will allow users to search content much more deeply and finely than full-text search currently allows.
As those capabilities come online, the ability to provide structured content that includes reader-valued tags will greatly improve the search experience. While Google controls the search capability, publishers will be able to use APIs to develop compatible tools and employ XML to structure and tag content in ways that improve search results for the content they publish. Ultimately, relevance and visibility will drive awareness, trial and purchase.
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Finding Balance Between User Experience and Web Ads
Mac Slocum
September 24, 2008
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In a post at Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp compares the advertising value propositions of Google and Facebook:
With Google, the value to users and the value to advertisers is perfectly aligned. Everybody wins.
With Facebook, if you read between the lines, it's really the same value proposition as traditional advertising -- advertisers forcing themselves on users, in a way that creates little or no value for the users.
As Karp notes, Google found a way to automatically "opt in" users by serving contextually-relevant advertising with organic search queries and individual Web pages. Value is automatically established because readers are seeing ads connected to their chosen topic.
Expanding on Karp's point, there are two aspects of Google's text ads that have always struck me as innovative:
- Simplicity -- On the Web, a short and relevant message delivered at precisely the right moment holds far more power than a flashy ad banner.
- Lineage -- The DNA of AdSense and AdWords is closer to editor-picked related links than the broad brand campaigns of traditional advertising.
Google used algorithms to establish advertising dominance, but the fundamental advertisement-user balance Google employs is a mechanism all content creators should keep in mind as they develop their own ad-based projects. Ultimately, effective Web advertising boils down to one simple question: How can ads enhance the user experience?
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[TOC Directory] Recent Additions
Mac Slocum
September 23, 2008
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20 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including:
Visit the TOC Directory to add your own listings and events.
Amazon and Google Challenging iTunes through Mobile
Mac Slocum
September 23, 2008
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T-Mobile's Android-based mobile phone will include a connection to Amazon's MP3 store. From Wired's Listening Post:
Owners of the device will be able to browse, search, preview and purchase music on the Amazon MP3 store using the phone's cellular connection. In order for purchased MP3s to download, the phone must be connected via Wi-Fi. (The mobile iTunes store, on the other hand, remains completely offline without WiFi.)
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CEOs Must Have API Literacy
Peter Brantley
September 23, 2008
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With the release of the expanded Google Book Search application programming interface (API) presenting new opportunities and decisions for publishers, Adam Hodgin argues for API-literate CEOs:
Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow Google (YouTube, he she or ItTube, or anybody else) to manage and define the API which has access to their content. Having, or buying into, allying with, the API's which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google's, Amazon's, Facebook's and Apple's, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?
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Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
Mac Slocum
September 23, 2008
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Feedbooks is a Web-based service that converts, catalogs and distributes ebooks in a variety of formats. Co-founder Hadrien Gardeur discusses Feedbook's system and future services in the following Q&A.;
How would you define your company? Is Feedbooks a distributor? A digitizing service? A social network? Something else?
Probably all three. We already distribute a massive number of ebooks and most of our users currently use Feedbooks to discover and download public domain or Creative Commons licensed ebooks. But we're also working on various tools for authors and small publishers to create ebooks. We'd like to turn our readers into potential authors, and create a service where new authors can distribute their creations to a large user base.
Who is your typical user?
Do we really have a typical user? We probably used to have typical users when we mostly provided ebooks for dedicated reading devices: heavy readers. But that's not the case anymore, now that we've extended the service to the iPhone, too.
Why did you start Feedbooks?
We've seen a lot of very exciting services for music and video these last few years and I really believe that there's a huge potential for ebooks too, thanks to E Ink-based devices and multi-purposes platforms such as the iPhone and Android. I love reading and I'd like to create a great service where anyone can discover new books, and where authors can easily connect with readers.
Your Web site lists support for the Kindle, the Sony Reader, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook Gen3, the iPhone and other smartphones. How are you able to support all of these devices?
We use an abstract representation, somehow similar to DTBook, to store all of our books. We can generate a file on the fly based on this representation. Adding new formats is fairly easy thanks to this technology. We were the first service to distribute books in EPUB for this reason.
Which ebook format is most popular with your users? Which e-reader is most popular?
EPUB and the iPhone are probably the most popular right now thanks to our seamless integration into Stanza. The most popular dedicated device is the Kindle.
Have established book publishers used your service to create ebook editions?
No, we're still working on those features. I expect major publishers to use XML+XSLT or Adobe InDesign rather than a dedicated service. We're creating our publishing feature with the end-user or small publishers in mind rather than major publishers.
Do you plan to sell ebooks?
We do. I believe that free content and user-generated content in general shouldn't be in a different environment than the rest of ebooks. It makes a lot more sense to have both in the same environment and create an optimal experience for the user.
When will sales begin?
No specific date yet, we'd rather focus on building a good service first and then add this component.
Print on demand (POD) services seem like a logical extension for Feedbooks. Is this something you're planing?
Sure, I consider POD as another potential format for our platform. It's a lot easier to turn an ebook into a POD book than the other way around.
The Feedbooks RSS tool appears to be targeted at Kindle users who want to receive updated news and information from RSS feeds. Do you anticipate other uses for this tool, such as a blog-to-book service?
It's not targeted at Kindle users only. I use it every day on a Sony Reader, and it's actually quite popular with the iPhone, too. I've been experimenting with blog-to-book, there's a lot of such "blooks" (blog+book, serialized novels using blogs) out there. I created a catalog entry for Stanza to test how the readers react to these serialized novels. Such a tool could probably be very interesting for publishers, too.
Feedbooks and Lexcycle, the company behind the Stanza e-reader, have a close working relationship. How did this come together?
Lexcycle launched the iPhone version of Stanza a few days before we decided to release the first version of our new API. Marc [Prud'hommeaux, principal developer at Lexcycle] contacted me: they were looking for content that could be directly integrated into Stanza's online catalog. We exchanged a lot of e-mails with various information, and did a lot of work together to make sure that this would work from day one. There's still a lot of new features that I'd like to introduce and we'll continue improving both the API and Stanza in the future, to create an optimal experience.
How are publishers and others using the Feedbooks API?
I would describe our API as read-mostly for the moment. It's mostly useful for reading systems such as Stanza. Once we turn it into something that's read/write, the situation will be quite different and I can imagine various innovative publishing techniques based on this.
What publishing techniques do you foresee?
Publishing should be more of a seamless experience. We already use a lot of publishing tools (blogs, social networks etc...) and we shouldn't have such a gap between these tools and ebooks.
What are the biggest issues with digital conversion?
There's a lot of formats, and you can expect standards such as EPUB to evolve in the near future. But I believe that the biggest issue for publishers is to find the right balance between what users are allowed to do and the ability to preserve the layout and design of a book. The holy grail for publishers is probably something as powerful as PDF, but reflowable. Ebooks allow users to customize a lot of things and preserving the design of a book shouldn't be at the cost of this flexibility.
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Google Book Search Listings Now Embeddable
Mac Slocum
September 22, 2008
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Titles from from Google's Book Search index can now be embedded in non-Google Web pages. From Inside Google Book Search:
We're launching a set of free tools that allow retailers, publishers, and anyone with a web site to embed books from the Google Book Search index. We are also providing new ways for these sites to display full-text search results from Book Search, and even integrate with social features such as ratings, reviews, and readers' book collections.
Google's Preview tool is already being used by publishers (including O'Reilly), retailers, libraries and other sites.
Basic Book Search previews are generated through Google's preview wizard (example below). Customized results can be built with the Book Search APIs.
Embedded Book Search example:
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