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Read20: August 2008
Shopping Electronic Publishing Rights
Peter Brantley
August 26, 2008
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Kassia Krozser discusses why and how authors are getting savvy to retaining electronic publishing rights. From Booksquare:
As publishers like Random House try to redefine concepts such as "out-of-print", savvy authors and agents will be more diligent about defining tight deadlines for contracts (in fact, I'm a bit surprised this isn't happening more frequently). Firm deadlines allow authors to renegotiate terms, especially as the digital market grows and evolves. While publishers love the idea of locking someone into 2008 rules, it's a safe bet to say that this landscape will be vastly different in ten years.
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BookTour and IndieBound Make Author Events Hyper-Local
Peter Brantley
August 26, 2008
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BookTour, which provides author-generated pages and a listing of author tour events, has integrated their database with IndieBound. This is an interesting model, which obviously could expand in its breadth. From the BookTour blog:
... the trouble is neighborhood bookstores are all different (that's what makes them great). That made it hard to dump all their data into our hoppers in one go ...
Now, throughout BookTour, events taking place at IndieBound-represented bookstores will be added automatically to our database. Equally important, on both author and venue pages, when an event is taking place at an IndieBound-repped store, you'll have the option to purchase the book directly from that store.
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Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence
Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008
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In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance:
Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing industry fought off the paperback and was skeptical of the book club -- which was effectively a technology-driven invention that used the new science of direct marketing and the mail to change the business. Now there are innovations like Amazon and Audible [Note: Amazon acquired Audible in January '08]
Effectively, from my perspective, these disruptions -- along with Superstores -- changed a relatively aristocratic product into a mass market product. A lot of these disruptions have allowed increasingly middle class and lower middle class people to have access to books, which were traditionally for rich people.
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Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
Peter Brantley
August 22, 2008
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A fairly significant ruling came down Wednesday in Lenz v. Universal, a rather infamous case where Universal Music Publishing Group issued a takedown against a YouTube video of a young child dancing to a song in the background -- a song in which Universal maintained some rights. Universal later acknowledged that this was a fair use of the music, an incidental use, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pursued the aggressive use of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns. The court ruled in the EFF's favor, and it should have significant outcomes. The EFF writes:
Universal moved to dismiss the case, claiming, among other things, that it had no obligation to consider whether [Stephanie] Lenz's use was fair before sending its notice. The judge firmly rejected Universal's theory:
" [A] fair use is a lawful use of a copyright. Accordingly, in order for a copyright owner to proceed under the DMCA with "a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law," the owner must evaluate whether the material makes fair use of the copyright."
Universal had insisted that copyright owners could not efficiently police copyright infringement if they had to consider whether a give use was fair. Not so, said the judge:
"[I]n the majority of cases, a consideration of fair use prior to issuing a takedown notice will not be so complicated as to jeopardize a copyright owner's ability to respond rapidly to potential infringements. The DMCA already requires copyright owners to make an initial review of the potentially infringing material prior to sending a takedown notice; indeed, it would be impossible to meet any of the requirements of Section 512(c) without doing so. A consideration of the applicability of the fair use doctrine simply is part of that initial review."
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Short Fiction Renaissance Enabled by Digital
Peter Brantley
August 20, 2008
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Gary Gibson makes a good observation about the forms of fiction enabled by e-readers. From The Digitalist:
There's a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn't previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading was done through the medium of collections by well-known sf [science-fiction] authors that would be deemed financially unworthy in the modern age.
Yet without the requirement for printing, binding and shipping, it would be nice to think that short fiction collections could achieve some kind of rebirth in the age of the ebook. Although there are certainly authors such as Beckett and quite a few others with collections out, these tend to come from smaller, specialist presses and thereby both cost more, have smaller print-runs and are harder to find. Ebook publication, I think, places such collections in a better position to be found by the right audience. It certainly means an extra potential revenue source for any author who's had, say, a dozen or so stories professionally published and would like to be able to bundle them in an e-format.
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Report: Pre-Roll Video Ads Not all that Bad
Peter Brantley
August 20, 2008
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Given how "unacceptable" we were told this would be to viewers, it's rather remarkable how many people are now obviously accommodated to pre-roll ads in videos. From Beet.TV:
The vast majority of online video viewers are watching pre-roll and overlay ads, a study released today by Break Media and Panache shows. Completion rates for 15-second pre-roll ads were 87 percent, and 77 percent viewed campaigns with overlay ads for at least 15 seconds.
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EFF Looks at the Big Questions Surrounding Digital Books
Peter Brantley
August 19, 2008
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At the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a post on what the future of digital books portends for pubishers and consumers:
Skeptics should remember that it wasn't long ago that many predicted that CDs would never replace vinyl, and later that MP3s would never replace CDs. You can still find great record stores that specialize in vinyl, but the trend towards digital music has been steady and unstoppable. And the music industry has paid a huge price for their failure to embrace the new technology. After first ignoring new technologies, they then proceeded to try to sue innovators, restrict users with DRM copy protection and then punish fans with indiscriminate lawsuits, none of which did a thing to stop online sharing of music. Sales are down, illegal filesharing is up, and no one has found a way to unite the industry around monetizing the sharing of digital music (though EFF has suggested a Better Way Forward).
Will the same thing happen to the publishing industry as books become digital? If the trend continues, with better devices promising longer battery life and better screen resolution, digital books will become a force to be reckoned with. Are we doomed to watch the publishing industry run through the same gamut of bad decisions that have plagued the recording industry for the last few years?
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The Crowdsourced Cat Book
Mac Slocum
August 19, 2008
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Amazing but True Cat Stories is a 38-page coffee table book born from the combined efforts of Mechanical Turk contributors. The creator/editor of the book, Björn Hartmann, describes the genesis of the project on his blog:
The idea for this book was born in Terminal A at Washington Dulles, where I was stranded for some hours in late July 2008. To spend my time, I posted the following two tasks on MTurk:
1. What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write at least one paragraph about a funny, unbelievable or otherwise memorable incident involving your cat. This should be a real story that happened to you or your family.
2. Sketch a cat. With or without an environment and toys. The cat can be drawn in software or on paper. Do not upload photographs of cats. Have fun!
Before I got out of that terminal, it was already clear that the submissions were too good to keep to myself. My fiancee Tania suggested turning the stories into a book. So, after a few days of collecting, I selected about 25 stories and 20 images and spent an evening doing a nice layout for a Blurb book.
The book can be previewed here.
(Via the Reading 2.0 list and Boing Boing)
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Infinite Permutations of the Digital Book
Peter Brantley
August 19, 2008
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James Bridle discusses the near infinite malleability of digital books. From booktwo.org:
Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass before the book tells the same story again.
The nature of the web makes such a book possible. Immediately, a simple reading of the user-agent to determine the reader's operating system and browser could be used to present each with a different version, breaking the narrative along several general pathways. Sections could be hidden or revealed by simple manipulation of the layout.
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Twitter Faces Ramifications of Not Being Global
Peter Brantley
August 15, 2008
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Twitter, the microblogging service, has had an uneven rollout of an economic model, and was never able to come to good terms on payments for instant messaging (SMS) through its application with mobile carriers abroad. Consequently, it has limited its instant message functionality to North America. On his blog, White African, Erik Hersman talks about the ramifications when you try to be global, and then can't:
In our globally connected world, if your service can't cover the globe, then you need to open it up for communication between similar services. What we really need is a platform that allows Twitter-like applications to "talk" to each other globally. If I set up a similar platform in West Africa then there should be a way for Twitter users in the US to also accept my updates. Closed gardens in this case create single points of failure. (I'm interested in the less restrictive Identi.ca platform.)
This global contraction by Twitter creates opportunities for others. Jaiku, recently purchased by Google, now has the ability to grow deeper into other regional markets. And, if nothing else, Twitter has done us all a favor by launching a global pilot project that proves out the usefulness of this type of service. Launching country- or region-specific clones of this same type of service is now a real option. [Links included in original post.]
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A Vote for One-Use Gadgets
Peter Brantley
August 14, 2008
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Jeff Gomez, in his series on owning a Kindle, voices a preference for multiple gadgets each doing one thing well:
One thing that I don't mind about the Kindle is that it's an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device -- one thing that did everything -- and that I wouldn't want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You don't pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I don't use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I can't read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.
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Smithsonian Advertises Via Bluetooth
Peter Brantley
August 13, 2008
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The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are sending out Bluetooth tethers to passers-by. From a Smithsonian press release:
... this new medium of advertising prompts Bluetooth phone users to opt-in to receive a free downloadable message ... Bluetooth-enabled bus shelters, located in Washington, D.C.'s major pedestrian areas, will deploy a silent prompt to mobile users with Bluetooth within a 30-foot radius.
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Kindle Projections, Roadblocks and Sightings
Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008
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Theresa Poletti from MarketWatch comments on the relative absence of Kindle sightings, particularly in Silicon Valley:
The biggest problem is the fact that the Kindle is only available online, via the Amazon.com Website. For many consumer electronics products, potential buyers need to touch and feel the device, to pick it up and play with it, before making any kind of purchasing commitment ...
Another roadblock for the Kindle is design. The company offers no alternative colors to the chalky white, which gets dirty easily and "looks cheap" according to [Rob] Enderle. He notes that the competing Sony eReader is more stylish, though it lacks many of the service components that make the Kindle popular.
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Game Re-creates Lost Oakland Neighborhood
Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008
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My hat's off to the release of a superb project out of the UC Berkeley Journalism School that re-creates a "lost" and once vibrant neighborhood of Oakland, 7th Street:
There's much more to be done -- developing a curriculum so grade school students can use the game to learn about 7th Street and the blues and jazz scene (we got a small grant to help with this); installing some computers we're buying for the West Oakland Senior Center and the West Oakland Library so folks there can access and play the game; getting older folks and young kids to play the game together as an experiment in cross-generational learning; building out the next phase of the game, in which the player will be challenged to organize the community to stop the projects that destroyed 7th Street, such as BART, the post office, the freeway and the public housing projects; and filling in more of the current game world by adding more characters and places the player can interact with.
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Story Development Thrives in the Sports Department
Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008
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The Associated Press recently commissioned an anthropological study into how youth obtain news information. What struck me most was this reference to something a bit orthogonal to the report -- the elements of story development. From Ethan Zuckerman's My Heart's in Accra:
... the biggest thing I took from report was the connection between sports coverage and other news coverage. Dan Gillmor has observed that one of the reasons sportswriting is often so strong is that everyone already knows the score. Serious fans don't need to know that the Sox won last night - they want to hear about Tim Wakefield's frustrations with lack of run support, or Terry Francona's metrics for evaluating Wakefield based on quality starts and innings pitched rather than wins.
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