Jenn Webb
Jenn Webb is a veteran of the newspaper industry turned freelance scribe, editor and researcher. She is a nerd with a passion for publishing, technology and cultural disruption.
Publishing News: HTML5 will be the future of publishing
Content is best served in browsers, indie booksellers sue Amazon and Big Six, and ASU reimagines libraries as startup incubators.
MIT Technology Review publisher, UC Berkley students bet on HTML5
At a recent executive retreat, Beet.TV sat down with MIT Technology Review editor and publisher Jason Pontin, who said that HTML5 will be the future of publishing. In a video interview (embedded below), Pontin says the basic content publishers produce — text and video — “can be much more easily offered as scripts, as processes, inside an HTML5 wrapper inside a browser application … A publisher can do almost everything they want to do on the web for multiple platforms with the same code — why make your life harder?”
Copying is a fact, not a problem
Cory Doctorow says the problem we really need to solve is how to make money when copying happens.
Piracy and DRM continue to be hot-button issues for authors and publishers, with heated arguments on both sides of the fence. I sat down with author Cory Doctorow at TOC NY 2013 to talk about the issues and how we as an industry will move beyond the conflict.
Publishing News: Novel experiments in publishing
Authors experiment with publishing paths, readers discover books just fine, and publishers might be replaced by publishing teams.
Experiments in non-traditional publishing routes
Forbes’ Shel Israel wrote this week about how he and Robert Scoble came to the decision as to how publishing their upcoming book, Age of Context. Israel and Scoble considered three of the most common publishing paths — traditional publishing, self-publishing, and crowdsourcing — and, inspired by author Rick Smolan’s chosen publishing route, opted for none other than corporate sponsorship.
“To date, we have raised approximately $100,000,” Israel writes. “This is about three-times what we heard as a best offer from a traditional publisher.”
Inkling takes the edge off publishing’s digital shift
Inkling's Matt MacInnis announces the public release of Inkling Habitat to work in concert with its Content Discovery Platform.
At an event at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City Monday night, Matt MacInnis, founder and CEO of Inkling, announced the public release of the company’s Inkling Habitat platform, a free, collaborative digital publishing environment. The cloud-based platform allows book editors, developers and designers to collaborate, integrate multimedia and enhanced content, publish to multiple platforms, and preview the content presentation across platforms.
The announcement is notable on a couple of fronts. On one end of the spectrum, you have publishers who for decades have defined content by containers. On the other, you have digital content, which works best when it remains fluid and agile. The space between these points is where you’ll find the disruption and stress the industry knows so well. It’s hard to transition from one product to another. It’s even harder to shift to an entirely new mindset.
A platform like Inkling’s keeps much of the technical and cognitive overhead behind the scenes, which lets publishers move down a path they know they have to take.
Publishing News: Amazon’s used ebook store?
Amazon's used digital marketplace patent, a data-for-content exchange experiment, and Baratunde Thurston says there's hope for publishing yet.
Amazon prepares to enter the used digital goods resale fray
The headline news this week was Amazon being awarded a US patent for a “secondary market for digital objects,” which according to the patent abstract, include “e-books, audio, video, computer applications, etc.” — so, pretty much anything.
Todd Bishop reports at GeekWire that “[t]he patent, originally filed in 2009 and granted on Jan. 29, covers transferring digital goods among users, setting limits on transfers and usage, charging an associated fee, and other elements of a marketplace for ‘used’ digital goods.” He also notes Amazon’s approach of limiting the number of transfers of used objects to “maintain scarcity.”
Publishing News: Pushing ebooks beyond skeuomorph boundaries
Jeff Gomez on ebook innovation, data journalism projects progress, and Amazon may be losing the ereading revolution.
Screens should be portals, not skeuomorphic containers
Jeff Gomez, VP of online consumer sales and marketing at Penguin Group, took a look this week at the issue of ebooks in the publishing ecosystem and argued that “we’re focusing in all the wrong places.”
Too much attention is being paid to pricing, format, business models and gadgetry, Gomez says, and notes the more important aspects that are being sidelined: “Namely, how can we use digital devices to change the way we tell stories? How will the ebook change the novel? And how will writers respond to a world where they can think beyond the boundaries of text, print, and covers?” He argues that instead of innovating, “we’re just creating another skeuomorph,” where readers are experiencing books on screens the same way they did on print.
Publishing News: The piracy debate may well be irrelevant in the future of publishing
"Artisan authors" move beyond the piracy "problem," libraries of books become libraries of knowledge, and newspapers have space for rent.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
Authors may leave publishers behind to wallow in piracy concerns
The publishing industry’s issues with piracy may become a problem of the past, Damien Walter observed at The Guardian this week. Walter looks at a newly emerging “artisan author,” an author for whom “self-publishing is a preference and file-sharing is an opportunity.”
Publishing News: Ownshelf tests ebook lending waters
A Dropbox-style ebook lending startup, the importance of libraries in publishing's fragile ecosystem, and 37Signals' responsive text editing.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
Publishing News: Amazon AutoRip — where’s the book version?
No AutoRip for books, for now; McGraw-Hill launches SmartBook; and Hilary Mason brings the fun of randomness to book discovery.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
Publishing News: Trailblazing experiments in publishing
Experiments in serial writing, crowdsourcing and subscriptions. Also, the Internet's effect on copy culture and a bookmarklet for smart tweets.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention recently.