Early Registration Now Open for TOC 2010 New York

Andrew Savikas
November 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Early registration is now open for the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference returning to the Marriott Marquis Feb. 22-24 2010.

The program for TOC 2010 reflects how quickly the landscape is changing for publishers -- digital can no longer be thought of as a separate topic; digital creation, delivery, distribution, consumption, and communication are permeating every layer of the publishing ecology.

This year we've tried to include a lot of conversations about and with readers, to encourage discussion about how new formats and modes are shaping preferences and behavior. We've also split the popular Lightning Demo sessions into two different components, both now part of the main program. The familiar 5-minute demo format will remain for a dedicated Breakout Session, and as a special Plenary Session, we'll be using the popular and entertaining Pecha Kucha format, where each speaker gets 20 slides that advance automatically every 20 seconds. We've also split several of the tutorials into two 90-minute workshops, rather than the longer 3-hour format.

It's important to remember that we are still very early in a transition as big or bigger than the shift from manuscript to print as the primary form for books. And it's useful to look back on that transition for insight into how the apparent shortcomings of the new and uncertain matter little in the long run. From James J. O'Donnell's essay, The pragmatics of the new: Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus in The Future of the Book:

Every negative claim made about print [in the 15th century] is correct, and every negative prophecy came true. Take the argument about the likeness of copies making collation and correction impossible: a perfectly valid point. Why did it not derail print in its glorious career? ... [T]he system of communication introduced by print was so large, so fast, so powerful, and ultimately such a source of wealth that the defects of the system could be remedied as far as need be. ... In short, in the end, the defects of print and the criticisms they drew didn't matter. This is a lesson worth mulling at length.

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Free news but paid comments? (via @adamgaumont)

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Not sure I agree with the conclusion, but the journey was articulate and entertaining on the changing economics of media.

http://sicmind.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/premium-content/

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Interesting TV subscriptions via iTunes in the works? (via @jafurtado)

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Reports suggest Apple is shopping $30/month TV subscriptions via iTunes (I cut the cable nearly a year ago for AppleTV and haven't looked back -- totally worth it.)

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091102/apples-itunes-pitch-tv-for-30-a-month/

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Books overtake games in app store (1 in 5 new Oct. apps was a book) (via @gigaom)

Andrew Savikas
November 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

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The Meaning of Droid | Monday Note

Andrew Savikas
November 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

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Lessons from Digital Disruption in the Music Business

Andrew Savikas
October 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Last week's On The Media (mp3 download here) devoted the full program to challenges and changes during the past decade or so in the music business -- from the unanswered legal questions about sampling (check out Girl Talk for the genre taken to the extreme) to the shifting economics of concert tickets and promotion to the changing role of industry rankings like Billboard's Hot 100. (Fun fact I picked up while listening: more than 8.5 billion songs have been sold via iTunes.)

My favorite segment was near the end, about the changing nature of the relationship between artists and fans, a segment called "Why I'm not Afraid to Take Your Money" which featured a great interview with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls:

Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there's an infinite number of answers.

People don't love music any less. There might be a lot less money out there in the industry, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the fact that the live industry is tanking to a certain degree means that ticket prices are now going to be reasonable. As far as the music is concerned, maybe it ups the ante. If you're a teenager with a dream of being a rock star, maybe you'll really think about why. Were you doing this to be rich and famous or are you doing this because you really love music and you want to connect with people, and you'll do it even if it just means you make a living wage? If that's true, I'm - you know, I'm a fan of the new system.

The Good and (and some Bad) of TOC Frankfurt Coverage

Andrew Savikas
October 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (25) | Listen

The session from TOC Frankfurt that seems to have generated the most interest in the trade press here at Frankfurt is the one from Brian O'Leary discussing the research he's been doing on the connection between p2p filesharing activity and book sales. I'm glad to see that, and I hope it persuades some other publishers to join in the research.

Today's Bookseller includes a piece titled Improved TOC to Return in 2010 by Catherine Neilan that takes issue with the program from Tuesday's event. Without a hint of irony, Pan Macmillan's Sara Lloyd, after noting that she'd been a keynote speaker here in Frankfurt and in New York, said that trade publishers weren't represented.

There is no shortage of events and platforms for mass-market trade publishers to talk about and amongst themselves. (Though I'll note that there were speakers from Random House, HarperCollins, PanMacmillan, Wiley, Cengage, and Hachette in 2009's New York program.) There are many at those houses doing interesting and innovative things, and while it's great to hear from them, TOC is also about expanding that conversation to include voices from outside the traditional publishing circles.

And while Catherine reports that "No one from O'Reilly could be reached for comment," I can say with certainty that no one tried to reach anyone from O'Reilly at either the email address or phone number listed on every page of the TOC Frankfurt website.

I'm disappointed that some of those from organizations that already have a loud and powerful voice in the industry like Pan Macmillan, Random House, and the Bookseller would choose to criticize TOC for not giving them even more say.

Kindle Device and Clipping Limits Now Lifted for O'Reilly Books in Kindle Store

Andrew Savikas
October 9, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the "Clipping" feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there's a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on.

While I can't speak about the terms other publishers have with Amazon (though it's a safe bet at least some of those kind of restrictions weren't Amazon's idea), because we want O'Reilly Kindle books to be available without any DRM, we asked Amazon if those limits applied to our books, and if so whether they could be lifted.

Though it took some work on their end (and they deserve credit for being receptive to our request), I'm happy to say that there is now no simultaneous device limit or clipping limit for O'Reilly Kindle books, and those changes have been retroactively applied for anyone who's already purchased one of our Kindle books. Here's the Product Details section from The Twitter Book on the Kindle Store:

As a reminder, most O'Reilly books aren't yet available on the Kindle in large part because the Kindle 1 doesn't yet support tables. But you can buy a Kindle-compatible Mobipocket version directly from oreilly.com as part of our "ebook bundles," which also include EPUB and PDF formats, which provide a nice alternative if you have a Kindle 1 and run into a table from one of our books that's difficult to read.

Just to be clear, our desire to make these books free of DRM does not mean that we are allowing our readers to redistribute copies to their friends, but to allow them to read the book on all of their own devices, and to otherwise make use of them without artificial encumbrances. If you're interested in multi-user licenses, talk to us.

Thanks again to Amazon for working with us on this.

A Classic from the Archive: Tim O'Reilly interviewed in 1994

Andrew Savikas
October 7, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Unfortunately I don't remember who pointed me to this (it was a few months ago via Twitter I think), but I came across it while cleaning off my Mac desktop. It's open government maven Carl Malamud interviewing Tim O'Reilly (mp3 link) from a weekly series (something that 10 years later would properly be called a "podcast"), and a lot of what's covered is eerily prescient (especially around the role of the Web in publishing).

Well worth a listen.

(Some other notable names in the interview series include Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle.)

Anecdotal Evidence from the Digital Shift

Andrew Savikas
October 6, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Back in 2004, when I spent most of my time doing format conversions and production automation, I had the privilege of turning much of what I learned doing things like batch running Word macros from the DOS command line with Ruby into a book, Word Hacks. Like our other Hacks books, it's a lesson in the value of curation and convenience -- much of the contents came from existing information, culled from blog posts, help forums, and other sources (all with permission and attribution, of course).

While it sold quite modestly, it was reviewed well, I earned out my advance, and as recently as September I ran into someone who told me the book has helped them do their job more effectively (their job being substantially similar to the one I was doing at the time I wrote the book).

This weekend my quarterly royalty statement came, and even I was struck by the relative proportion of sales coming from digital sources (this is from Q2 2009). Please note this is totally anecdotal data from a single book that probably hasn't been on the shelves in most retailers for years, so do take with the appropriate grain of salt:

Less than 20% of sales were for the print book. This is something we've seen for other "long tail" titles that show very little demand when viewed through the lens of retail print sales (i.e., Bookscan). Making titles available in digital form means the opportunity to capture sales long after a title has left most bookstore shelves.

There's still (a few) spots open for TOC Frankfurt next week on Oct. 13. Use discount code TOC09BL.

"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"

Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Among the most honest assessments of the failure of newspapers to adapt to the Web comes from John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The whole thing is unflinching, powerful, and nearly every word worth reading if you're part of a media company hoping to survive the current digital environment, much less the shift to the mobile web. It was hard to pull out highlights, but here's a few:

As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, "We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn't give up the idea that we were newspaper companies."

Also an admission of the (in hindsight) classic mistake of judging new ventures using the expectations of the old:

The service was shut down after about 9 months, but not before scooping the paper on the start of the First Gulf War, reporting 12 hours before the paper landed on most doorsteps that the war had begun. The project was halted, I was told, because "we just couldn't show that it was having any measurable impact on retention of print subscribers and it wasn't producing revenue."

Right from the start, new offerings were measured by what they did for the core product, not on their own merits. A big mistake.

And some great words about understanding that you're working with a new medium, not just a new format in which to present the old:

You have to have a strategy and you have to be committed to pursuing it. We perceived the Web site as a newspaper online, as a complement to the paper, not as its own thing. That's not a strategy.

Go. Read it now. Thanks to Jay Rosen for the link (via Twitter).

Do the Math on Your Mobile Apps

Andrew Savikas
October 1, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek Sivers that applies to many of the emerging digital and mobile markets for media:

He kept saying, "If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD... that'll be 10,000 copies! And that's only one percent!"

...

Over the next few weeks he received four orders. Total CDs sold: 4

....

I think of this every time I hear business plans that say, "With over 30 million iPhones sold, our app is sure to..."

On the one hand, putting a one-click bookstore in 30 million pockets means someone is bound to buy your app. On the other hand, if it costs you $25K to develop the app (a typical and realistic investment for a greenfield app), you're probably not going to have enough income to build any more apps for awhile.

Wanted: Proposals for TOC 2010

Andrew Savikas
July 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

If you follow us on Twitter, you already know that the Call for Proposals is now open for the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (Feb. 22-24, 2010 in New York).

One of our main themes last year was that all publishing is now digital publishing, and that's becoming clearer with each new announcement about a new device, reseller, smartphone, or other new way to reach an audience -- an audience that is now often walking around with a bookstore in their pocket or briefcase. Here's some of the topics we're looking for:

• Reaching mobile readers: when your customers carry bookstores in their pockets
• Pricing and packaging digital books
• Case studies of successful (or unsuccessful!) new publishing and digital initiatives
• Case studies from implementing lessons learned at a previous TOC Conference
• Strategies and tactics for incorporating print-on-demand into a supply chain
• Moving beyond books: selling merchandise, community, experience, and other scarce goods in a world of "free"
• Tools and challenges for an efficient all-digital workflow
• Revising your P&L's for the economics of digital publishing
• Understanding and responding to the changing retail landscape
• Using the web to find and promote the original people behind "user-generated content"--authors
• Best practices for working with Amazon, Google, and other big internet players
• How to capture and analyze web metrics of interest to publishers
• Best new practices and tools for working with and supporting authors during editorial, production and/or marketing phases
• Systems and devices for displaying digital copy (demos welcome)
• Business models for delivering and/or receiving material via new devices
• New copyright clearing, assertion, and determination mechanisms
• XML, EPUB, RDF, and other TLA's (three-letter acronyms) decoded and explained
• Using open-source tools to assemble a digital publishing workflow

If you have an idea for a session, tutorial, or "lightning demo" we want to hear from you.

And if you're making plans for the Frankfurt Book Fair, don't forget to sign up for TOC Frankfurt, a one-day conference looking at these issues from a European perspective.

CSS in an XML Workflow

Laura Dawson
July 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

At the StartWithXML Forum in New York in January, Rebecca Goldthwaite of Cengage gave a great demonstration of how Cengage uses CSS in their XML workflow. Many publishers regard style sheets as an invitation to create cookie-cutter book production, with the fear that all their books will look the same. This is emphatically a myth. Have a look at her seventh slide for examples of how one stylesheet can actually create many different looks.

CSS Zen Garden has been up for a while (Liza Daly used this model to create the EPUB Zen Garden a few months ago). It's a sort of CSS sandbox where graphic designers can play with style sheets and render the same content in very different forms. Clicking on the four links below will demonstrate what CSS can do:

• Home Page 1
• Home Page 2
• Home Page 3
• Home Page 4

It's well worth checking out and maybe having some graphic designers play around with it.

StartWithXML is Going to London

Laura Dawson
July 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

StartWithXML will be continuing in London! On September 2nd, at the British Library, we'll be conducting a one-day forum similar to the one we held in New York last January, but with a British publishing focus. Our sponsors for this event include Klopotek, MarkLogic, PLS, BIC, Publishers' Association, and of course O'Reilly.

We're still in the process of firming up our speakers, but we do have information posted here. Additionally, if you are a British publisher or service provider, there's a survey for you here.

As we get more news, we'll add it here - meanwhile, we're continuing to research and gather information about where publishers are in the StartWithXML process.

TOC Coming to Frankfurt

Andrew Savikas
July 1, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

I've had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my industry colleagues in Europe during the past year, and it became increasingly obvious there was an opportunity to bring the Tools of Change for Publishing message to a European audience. So we've teamed up with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on a special one-day TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday October 13, the day before the Book Fair begins.

Many of the topics (and some of the speakers -- including Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and Sara Lloyd) will be familiar to TOC New York attendees, but tuned for a European audience. And while the program is still in development, we're also trying to include some fresh voices who can bring a more global perspective -- such as Kotobarabia's Ramy Habeeb and Guardian Media Group's Simon Waldman.

If you have your own ideas for a session, speaker, or topic, you can submit it right here (just a simple Google Form).

TOC blog readers get a discount on registration by using the code TOC09BL when registering.

Twitter Boot Camp Coming June 15 in New York

Mac Slocum
May 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Twitter seems simple on the surface, but it takes practice to harness Twitter's audience development power. That's why we're hosting a one-day Twitter Boot Camp in New York City on June 15.

Join O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, Edelman Digital SVP Steve Rubel, Twitter expert Sarah Milstein and others at this one-day educational event. Speakers and instructors will reveal best practices you can immediately apply to engage your audience and grow your business.

Full event information and registration details are available here. Use the discount code "toc" to get $50 off the registration fee.

Google's Distribution Advantage Has Its Limits

Andrew Savikas
April 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Scott Karp has an insightful (and provocatively titled) piece over on the Publishing 2.0 blog about just how deeply Google has inserted itself in Web distribution of content. While much of the piece is about linking, one paragraph in particular is worth calling out for traditional publishers (emphasis added):

If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web.

"Content judgment" is a neat way to put it, reinforcing that when there's already more than 1 trillion web pages in Google's index value is shifting away from more content toward better filtering and curating of what's already there. (Or as Clay Shirky says, it's not information overload, it's filter failure.) While many publishers fret about customers no longer paying for content, they may miss the boat by not realizing that customers will pay for packaging and convenience (which often means judgment and filtering). For example, at the same time the market for our printed reference books has declined, our Safari online subscription service has steadily grown at a double-digit pace, in part because those subscribers value the implicit filtering of the library.

"Bite-Size Edits" from BookOven

Andrew Savikas
April 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Hugh McGuire's startup BookOven has opened up an alpha version of a project they're calling the Gutenberg Rally, an attempt to harness collective intelligence Mechanical-Turk style to proofread Project Gutenberg texts for typos and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors. In "divide and conquer" style, the system presents just one small snippet of text at a time (with some surrounding context), effectively breaking down a mountain of a task into easily managed molehills:

I had a nice chat with Hugh on Wednesday morning, and what he told me about what's to come from BookOven was quite exciting (though apparently still very much in development).

This isn't the first attempt to harness eyeballs for finding and fixing OCR errors (see ReCaptcha), but reviewing the text in context is a much more satisfying experience, and left me wanting to read more of several of the books I was seeing only in snippet form.

Software Development as Collaborative Writing

Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Following a lively backchannel email discussion, I'd planned to blog about what writers, editors, and publishers can learn from software developers (specifically their tools and techniques) but Tim beat me to it over on the Radar blog.

As I said in my email, The more I think about it the more obvious it's becoming to me that the next generation of authoring/production tools will have much more in common with today's software development tools than with today's word processors.

Software developers spend enormous amounts of time creatively writing with text, editing, revising, refining multiple interconnected textual works -- and often doing so in a highly distributed way with many collaborators. Few writers or editors spend as much time as developers with text, and it only makes sense to apply the lessons developers have learned about managing collaborative writing and editing projects at scale.

Programmers faced with annoying problems like "how do I make sure that changes I make to this text don't conflict with someone else's changes" or "how do I tell who among several writers made a particular change to some text" solved those problems long ago (Wikis are a great example of applying some of those tools and techniques to the writing process; API-based offline blogging editors are another).

And while using those tools as-is probably won't make sense for a lot of non-technical writers, those willing to at least try them out will learn a lot about what the next generation of collaborative, distributed, digital publishing tools will look like.