Tools of Change for Publishing: Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading

Outperforming Books at Getting a Job Done

Andrew Savikas
November 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Clay Christensen talks about how people hire products to do jobs for them, and for a very long time books have been the best performers at doing certain types of jobs. That's changing of course, and the crop of new Augmented Reality applications should be on the radar of many types of publisher, from travel to fiction to repair manuals:

In the not-too-distant future, it might be possible to slip on a pair of augmented-reality (AR) goggles instead of fumbling with a manual while trying to repair a car engine. Instructions overlaid on the real world would show how to complete a task by identifying, for example, exactly where the ignition coil was, and how to wire it up correctly.
A new AR system developed at Columbia University starts to do just this, and testing performed by Marine mechanics suggests that it can help users find and begin a maintenance task in almost half the usual time.

We'll have a session on Augmented Reality at February's TOC Conference.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23800/?a=f

Posted via email from TOC Posterous

Michael Tamblyn's TOC Frankfurt presentation (actually a dramatic recreation thereof)

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

via blip.tv

Shortcovers' Michael Tamblyn was kind enough to record his talk and slides from last month's TOC Frankfurt Conference. I got a lot of great hallway feedback about the session, and you'll see it's for good reason. Michael will also be speaking at TOC New York.

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

William Patry delivering Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Duke

Andrew Savikas
November 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Google Senior Copyright Counsel Bill Patry, who will be one of our keynote speakers at TOC 2010, delivered a great lecture at Duke last month dissecting the "moral panic" approach to copyright debate, as exemplified by the late Jack Valenti, former CEO of the MPAA. His talk is just under 30 minutes, and then he goes into Q&A with the audience. I particularly appreciated his point that copyright is a social structure, not a moral one, and not one that's based on property rights.

Posted via web from TOC Posterous

In-depth insight from Tim O'Reilly on lessons learned from Safari Books Online

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

"As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we've learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O'Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned"

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a-cloud.html

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

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.

Publishing Models for Internet Commerce

Andrew Savikas
October 14, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Last week I pointed to a 1994 interview Tim O'Reilly did that touched on the impact the Web would have on publishing. A nice contemporary companion is this 1995 paper titled "Publishing Models for Internet Commerce" that remains relevant (perhaps more so) today:

In an information glut, it is not content but context that is king. Someone chooses the New York Times over the New York Post not because of any kind of proprietary lock on content (though to be sure there is a role for scoops and special features) but rather because it has developed an editorial point of view that appeals to a particular class of reader. In a similar way, there is an enormous role for the establishment of "information brands" on the net--publications that have established relationships of trust with particular audiences.

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.)

"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).

Economist on "Mobile Marvels" in Emerging Markets

Andrew Savikas
September 29, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Though here when we talk about mobile it's usually in the context of mobile reading and media, that's just a small piece of what's happening as we move to the age of the mobile web, especially in emerging markets.

This week's Economist has a special report on Mobile and Telcoms in Emerging Markets that's worth a read. For example, in about two years mobile is forecast to eclipse fixed broadband as the way most people use the Internet:

Worth particular note are the Beyond Voice and Internet for the Masses stories (from which the graph above is taken):

HOW long will it be before everyone on Earth has a mobile phone? "It looks highly likely that global mobile cellular teledensity will surpass 100% within the next decade, and probably earlier," says Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, a body set up in 1865 to regulate international telecoms. Mobile teledensity (the number of phones per 100 people) went above 100% in western Europe in 2007, and many developing countries have since followed suit. South Africa passed the 100% mark in January, and Ghana reached 98% in the same month. Kenya and Tanzania are expected to get to 100% by 2013.

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:

In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.

Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.

Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing

Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (11) | Listen

While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a post by Clay Shirky:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change -- take a book and shrink it -- was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

I'll second Tim O'Reilly's reaction to the piece:

This is a piece that anyone concerned with the future of publishing simply MUST read.

It's a long post, but well worth a close read (and re-read). Though Clay's talking about newspapers, much of what he has to say applies to book publishing in particular, as well as media in general.

More on Shirky's post from Mark Bertils (@mdash) over at indexmb.com:

Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.

Full Text of Jason Epstein's TOC 2009 Keynote

Andrew Savikas
February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

Few can claim the depth of experience with publishing that Jason Epstein brought to the stage at the TOC Conference. Among my favorite moments of the conference this year was the chance during a break to hear Jason talk with Tim O'Reilly about their respective views on the past and future of publishing.

Several attendees asked for the full text of Jason's keynote, and he was kind enough to oblige:

Speech given by Jason Epstein at the 2009 O'Reilly Tools Of Change for Publishing Conference

I don't have to tell anyone here that we are at the end of the Gutenberg era; at the threshold not only of a new way of publishing books but of a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg's, assuming we survive our financial calamity, our 20,000 nuclear weapons, and our melting ice cap, all of them by the way unintended consequences of the western civilization that Gutenberg's technology made possible.

Five centuries ago Gutenberg's dream was to print a uniform prayer book on his new press to be distributed to all the churches of Europe and in this way unify the catholic faith which was fractured by schisms, especially in Germany where Gutenberg made his living selling trinkets at religious fairs. Instead, to what would have been Gutenberg's dismay had he lived to see it, the printing press spawned our modern world with all its wonders and woes -- the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and for better and worse, our skeptical, secular, experimental civilization. Whoever believes that books are simply another form of entertainment has missed the point.

Links to All Articles/Posts from Best of TOC eBook

Andrew Savikas
February 15, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Some of you interested in the "Best of TOC" ebook have objected to having to go through the O'Reilly shopping cart process to get the free ebook. Point taken, and thank you for the feedback. Other readers are looking for a place to comment on the pieces; because these were all published blog posts, many already have rich comment threads of conversation. To address both concerns, here's a full linked list of all the pieces we included in the Best of TOC ebook:

According to our ecommerce data, several hundred of you have "purchased" the free ebook. I'm thrilled there's so much interest -- this is definitely something we'll be looking to do again with this and other conferences.

The "O'Reilly Bump" and Bookworm

Andrew Savikas
February 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

During his TOC Keynote, Tim O'Reilly talked about how the status he confers through "retweets" on Twitter are really just another form of publishing, not much different from the status we confer on authors by publishing them, or speakers by featuring them (especially at multiple conferences), or hackers by inviting them to Foo Camp.

On the Web, the effects are easily measured, and Liza Daly has a post over at O'Reilly Labs talking about the bump Bookworm got from the association with O'Reilly. Her graph tells the main story, but digging deeper reveals some notable nuggets (emphasis in the original):

Because of this integration [with Stanza], iPhone and iPod Touch users account for 10-20% of all visitors to Bookworm on any given day

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
October 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

In Defense of Piracy (Lawrence Lessig, Wall Street Journal)

The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or watching or creating, "media."

Where is everybody? (Joe Wikert, TeleRead)

"If you build it, they will come" only works in the movies. If they really want to succeed Borders needs to do something beyond just making all this technology available in the store. Where are the in-store events (e.g., come let us help you research your family name, come see the latest e-book technologies, etc.)? How about signage in other areas of the store that promotes the tech kiosk area?

Mass book digitization: The deeper story of Google Books and the Open Content Alliance (Kalev Leetaru, First Monday)

Both projects offer the ability to search within a particular work, but only Google offers the ability to search across its entire collection. A search across the OCA archive only searches titles and description fields, not the full text of works. The OCA system thus offers a document-centric model, while Google offers both document and collection-based models, allowing broad exploratory searches of its entire holdings: the equivalent of being able to "full text search" a library. The importance of this difference cannot be understated in the limitations it places on the ability of patrons to interact with the OCA collections.

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
October 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The Future Is A Foreign Country (Timo Hannay, Nascent)

As with my journey to Japan, my personal response to all this internet-enabled weirdness was one of almost unadulterated joy. The fact that it is disrupting publishing is, I think, the single most important reason that I've come into the industry. How boring the last 550 years since Gutenberg have been. Until now.

Ok Entrepreneurs, Time to Step Up (Brad Feld, Feld Thoughts)

When I look back at the dotcom apocalypse that was 2000 - 2002, I realize some of the best companies I've ever been involved in were created during that time. In the midst of this, I remember the endless stream of "the Internet is over" and "the information technology business in now a mature business and there will never be innovation again." Yeah - whatever.

Watching Books (Richard Curtis, TeleRead)

As successive generations accustomed to being diverted by watching, rather than by reading, enter the editorial workforce, impatience with printed text is demonstrably increasing, as we can see in the sharp decline of newspapers and magazines. Books require a commitment of time and attention that we either don't have or aren't willing to give. The temptation to skip or skimp is strong. One editor confessed to me, "I tend to scan manuscripts on screen rather than read them the way I do a printed text." We must therefore ask ourselves whether instead of reading books on screen, we are watching them.

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
October 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The Live Web (Doc Searls, Doc Searls Weblog)

The Web isn't just real estate. It's a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.

Putting the "book" back in Facebook (Dan Piepenbring, if:book)

Despite the presence of "book" in its title, few critics to my knowledge have construed Facebook as the ultimate electronic yearbook. They focus instead on its broader "social network" applications. That's all well and good, but what is Facebook if not the quintessential model of an electronic book done right? Like its conventional print brethren, Facebook chronicles the lives of a certain network's members. It's teeming with photos and groups; its wall posts are the digital equivalent of those slangy well-wishes from your friends and acquaintances (and maybe a stranger or two).

The Origin Of The CD-Keys, Part Three (Daniel James, Penny Arcade)

Nobody added your business to the list of protected species, despite what your lobbyists and lawyers say. Find a business model that's actually appropriate to the 21st century, and perhaps scale back your expectations of vast profits accordingly (oh, and fire some lawyers and lobbyists, too, please).

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
September 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

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.]

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
September 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The End (Boris Kachka, New York Magazine)

The kind of targeted, curated lists editors would love to publish will work even better in an electronic, niche-driven world, if only the innovators can get them there. Those owners who are genuinely interested in the industry's long-term survival would do well to hire scrappy entrepreneurs at every level, people who think like underdogs.

Part Three: Bookstores vs. Online (Joe Wikert, Publishing 2020 Blog)

Why do loyalty programs always just have to be about one store/chain? Why can't there be a loyalty program that includes two or more stores I shop at most frequently? One might be a bookstore but others might be a grocery store, an electronics retailer or maybe a gas station. Points accumulated at all these locations would be pooled together so that one month I might redeem them for a book and the next month I might use them on my gas purchase.

The Future Of Media Round Table (Media Magazine)

Esther Dyson -- I think part of what's happening is that as more and more media becomes possible, different kinds of information find their most suitable venue. Yellow pages are stupid on paper and they make more sense online. Whereas a book, that's linear; you're supposed to read from beginning to end, so it's fine on paper. So I think they'll persist in those forms. And a sort of visual-display kind of magazine makes a lot of sense. Anything that is interactive, where the data changes, like stock prices, again, makes no sense on paper.

News Roundup: Sony Reader Arrives in UK, Google Scanning Newspaper Archives, Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use

Mac Slocum
September 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release

Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom:

Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September.

As I'm sure all of those working in the digital publishing departments of trade publishing houses will agree, it's nice finally to have a major high street bookselling brand pitch itself into the ebook ring so wholeheartedly - and the Sony device is the most compelling (and competitively priced) there is of the dedicated devices so far available here in the UK. I must say it did make my heart leap just a little bit to see huge POS displays promoting the Sony Reader and the associated ebook catalogue from Waterstones in the Tottenham Court Road and Picadilly branches, and it was fun to go in and do some underground detective work to discover that the Waterstones staff seemed quite clued up about it all. (Continue reading)

Google Scanning Newspaper Archives

Google is extending its scanning efforts to newspaper archives. From the New York Times:

Under the expanded program, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project. Google angered some book publishers because it had failed to seek permission to scan books that were protected by copyrights. It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.

Google ... will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers. (Continue reading)

Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights

The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions:

But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says, because they fear that colleges will pay for copyright licenses instead of asserting their rights under fair-use doctrine. "We debate back and forth whether this is the best model for us," he says. "As we move toward more licensed products, are we giving up basic rights under the law?"

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