Anderson: "It's All About Attention"

Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I'm sure Wired would have done the same) they pulled one line from a lengthy response to create the provocative title "Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job." The full passage is much more useful and nuanced:

Content is a Service Business

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free

At Dear Author, a post stating that not all content should be expected to be free; rather it must be provided, free or not, in a realistic understanding of consumer...

The Realities of Big Web Traffic and Advertising

Major news sites that rely on advertising as their primary revenue stream need to log hundreds of millions of page views per month to attract significant attention from advertisers, according...

Change Always Leaves Someone Behind

Seth Godin discusses the realities of digital change and free distribution in an interview with HarperStudio's The 26th Story: ... the market and the internet don't care if you make...

Calling Out Risk-Averse Publishers

Bloomsbury Academic is testing the theory that increased awareness from free distribution boosts book sales. The recently-launched imprint is releasing all of its titles online under a Creative Commons license...

Taking the Leap into All-POD

James Bridle has launched Bookkake, a print-on-demand (POD) publisher focusing on transgressive literature. From booktwo.org: ... Bookkake is not in the fortune-building or the fortune-breaking business. Print-on-demand and direct sales...

TOC Recommended Reading

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...

TOC Recommended Reading

Transforming American Newspapers (Part 1) (Vin Crosby, Digital Deliverance) Contrary to myopia of many newspaper executives, advertisers aren't newspapers' primary customers. Although advertising revenues may be sunshine for newspaper executives,...

Author Paulo Coelho Illustrates the Upside of Openness

Budding authors may not be able to duplicate the success of Paulo Coelho, but Coelho's willingness to experiment across mediums is certainly worth studying. From Jeff Jarvis' Guardian column: Coelho...

Report: Radiohead Experiment Yields Indirect Success

A new research report says Radiohead's In Rainbows experiment diverted a degree of traffic -- and value -- toward the band's site.

Tor.com Woos Sci-Fi Fans with Free Ebooks

Taking a page from the Baen playbook, Tor.com, a division of Macmillan, is giving away 24 science fiction ebook titles through July 27. The ebooks are available in PDF,...

News Roundup: New Kindles Rumored, Free Ebooks with Embedded Google Ads, Web Publicity and Giveaways Boost Author's Profile

Rumor: Two New Kindles Coming This Fall Citing an inside source, CrunchGear says Amazon will release two new Kindles in time for the holiday season: The first is an updated...

Web Publicity + Free = A Fighting Chance

Sci-fi author Scott Sigler uses podcasts, giveaways and grassroots Web marketing to build interest in his work. We've covered Sigler in the past, but his recent interview with The...

Free Ebooks with Embedded Ads Via Scribd-Lulu Partnership

Scribd and Lulu have joined forces to combine Scribd's iPaper format, a Flash-derived viewing technology optimized for bandwidth and speed, with Lulu content. From ReadWriteWeb: Beginning this month on...