ENTRIES TAGGED "journalism"
Publishing News: B&N improves its ecosystem
B&N Nook HD tablets launch, with Nook Video on deck; Bjarnason argues against web-based ebook formatting; and taxes won't save journalism.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
B&N pursues the “low-end tablet throne”
Barnes & Noble’s new HD tablet launch was the headline news this week. Reuters reports B&N introduced a 7-inch Nook HD tablet for $199 and a 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet for $269 — a price point B&N CEO William Lynch called a “wow price point.” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps told Reuters the devices were a big improvement over earlier iterations and that they even “one-up Amazon in some areas.”
Laura Hazard Owen took an in-depth look at the tablets over at GigaOm and outlines a few of the improved areas. First, B&N is looking to improve discoverability with the new devices and bring the tablet shopping experience a bit closer to the in-store experience. Owen reports that readers can browse the store from inside ebooks to discover additional titles by that book’s author and similar titles in the genre. B&N also is launching Nook Channels to help readers discover books that are similar to other books they’ve liked. Owen reports the channels are curated collections of books with 40 to 50 titles — many of which are curated by B&N’s in-store booksellers. There also will be a new “Your Nook Today” button on the Nook home screens, which most notably will provide book recommendations based on the device’s content.
B&N also announced plans to launch a Nook-branded video store this fall, called Nook Video. Lauren Goode at All Things Digital has the need-to-know info on the service. Goode writes that it won’t be video subscription service, but will offer rentals and download purchases for streaming, and all content will be stored in the Nook Cloud. Goode also highlighted an interesting feature regarding owned physical DVDs:
“Nook Video will also create and store digital copies of the DVDs that you normally play on UltraViolet and Blu-ray players. So if you purchase a Blu-ray or UV DVD and sync your console with your Nook Video account, it will create a digital copy in your Nook Cloud. You could then, theoretically, watch it on another gadget, via the Nook app.”
Kind of like iTunes Match for DVDs. Joe Arico at Mobiledia argues that the Nook Video announcement takes the new Nook HD tablets to the next level and fills a crucial gap in the B&N ecosystem, making B&N “much more of a legitimate contender for the mid and low-end tablet throne.”
Publishing News: One publishing experiment ends, another begins
Seth Godin ends The Domino Project, Marc Herman blazes a journalism trail, and authors get personal on tour.
The Domino Project published its final book. Elsewhere, Marc Herman took his long-form journalism straight to a Kindle Single and the WSJ looked at the changing roles of authors on book tours.
"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"
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…
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.
"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"
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…
Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing
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…
Tricky Relationship Between Mainstream Media and Citizen Journalism
Citizen journalism took a beating last week when a post on CNN's iReport incorrectly reported that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. (The post has been removed, but Google still has a cached version.) Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis pushes through the ensuing cit-j firestorm and redirects the conversation: It may be a mistake for news organizations to keep…
Boston Globe Spins Off Weekly Sports Tabloid
Newspapers are turning to niches these days. The latest example is "OT," a new weekly sports tabloid from the Boston Globe: The 24-page, full-color, oversize tabloid – called OT, which stands for "Our Town/Our Teams" … costs 50 cents and will be published every Thursday … The publication's goal is to provide coverage of professional sports teams that goes beyond…
The Rise of Freelancers
Multi-skilled journalists who can handle the rigors of freelancing may soon be in high demand as mainstream media adapts to new forms of information consumption. Former BBC reporter Angela Saini discusses her jump into the freelancing fray: I was trained by ITN and BBC News to produce, film and edit as a lone-working video and audio reporter. Although I'm…