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Mac Slocum
July 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

This is Not a Comment (Derek Powazek, Powazek.com)

Chastising all internet commenters for the actions of the loudest, craziest ones is no different that swearing off all newspapers because of Jason Blair.

Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship (Rebecca MacKinnon, RConversation)

The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes?

Once More With Feeling: The LATBR Publishes Its Last (Kassia Krozser, Booksquare)

... I still maintain that a book review section in a major newspaper should be reflective of the subscriber base, even if it's trying to maintain a certain level of discourse; you have to bring the larger audience in, even a little bit, if you want to expose your conversation beyond the choir.

Why I Joined the POD People (Richard Grayson, Quarterly Conversation)

Eventually, as print-on-demand technology improves in quality and costs shrink, trade publishers will probably rely on POD for all their books, just as some academic publishers have begun to do. Trade publishers waste a lot of money (and trees) by publishing copies of books, even bestsellers in fourth or fifth editions, that never get sold; no matter how many print runs, publishers always seem to have books left over. After my first book was remaindered I bought 400 copies of my first book for a nickel a copy, then discovered the cost of storing them was so expensive that I ended up throwing dozens of copies into a Miami dumpster.

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

Lessons Learned from myebook and LinkedIn (Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog)

Where are the "view comments" and "send to a friend" buttons on my Kindle? They don't exist, at least not with Kindle 1.0. But why shouldn't I be able to take pieces of the book I'm reading and send them along to my friends with Kindles for their review? And all those notes and comments I've already embedded in some of my Kindle books/newspapers/magazines...why can't I share those with my Kindle friends as well?

Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr (Clay Shirky - Britannica Blog)

Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.

The founder of ArtsJournal talks about arts and new media (Crosscut Seattle)

As users have more access to more information on the Web, the sheer amount becomes overwhelming. So increasingly you have to depend on curators -- other people -- to find the good stuff that you want to see over time. So you find the curator whom you trust.

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Mac Slocum
July 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Sittin' Here, Watching The Market Go By (Booksquare)

Since there has been significant interest in using the iPhone as an ereader, I was, well, expecting amazing things from the publishing industry. Hopes. Dashed. On a weekend when headlines were there for the grabbing and customers were searching for both toys and content, the publishing industry, perhaps practicing summer hours, was curiously silent. Not a single major initiative, announcement, horns-blaring call to check out these great offerings on iTunes.

Queue and Apple: Excitement over the newest iPhone (Print is Dead)

But when's the last time you -- if you ever have -- saw someone dressed up as a book itself? When's the last time someone posed as a dust jacket rather than as a figure posing on a dust jacket? Of course, this doesn't happen. Why? Because people don't love books themselves; rather, they love the characters and worlds found inside of books. So despite all of the talk of books being amazing technological devices, you never see people waiting outside all night in order to buy a blank one.

You Don't Build Communities, You Enable Them (Techdirt)

What the rest of the internet has shown is that you build community not by building a community, but by enabling a group of people to do what they want. And that can include commenting on the news, creating the news or sharing the news among many other things.

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Mac Slocum
July 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Ebooks and the Iphone (Publishing Frontier)

So by selling books as $5 iPhone books instead of $7 paperbacks, the publisher makes $0.90 per book. And, of course, if the publisher charged $6.99 for the iPhone book, the numbers would be $4.89 received from Apple - $0.70 royalty - $0.05 PPB [printing, paper, binding] - $0.40 art, promotion, etc = $3.74, or a profit of $2.09 over the paper book.

Wikipedia gets fictional (Seth's Blog)

A consistent rule on Wikipedia has been to rely on edited print publications (the mainstream media) as well as physical or unchanging materials (like the DVD of a TV show). This made sense five years ago, but as the world abandons print reference (which Wikipedia largely relies on for verification), are we biasing the entries in favor of Abraham Lincoln (plenty of printed facts available) and TV series characters (we can prove that George [Costanza] worked for Vandalay Industries)?

The difference between media and comms (The Equity Kicker)

The challenge for socnets [social networks] is that people are getting bored of accumulating friends and profile hopping and there is no obvious new entertainment service to build. Hence the platform strategy.

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