Wherever 2012 takes you, we hope that it offers the occasional swing past our happy new website for insights, events, and TOC resources as well as links to our own YouTube playlist and a nice slate of slideshare presentations. That’s right—we’re a one–stop love shop.
Cheers,
Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert
TOC New York 2012 – Save 15%
The sixth edition of TOC is just one month away and this year promises to be our best yet. Join us as we deliver a deft mix of the practical and the visionary to give you the tools and guidance you need to succeed—and the inspiration to lead change. See the schedule of workshops, sessions, speakers, and events. Newsletter subscribers save an extra 15% when you register with discount code NL111.
Hot Type
Kat & Joe’s Must–Reads
2011 In Review
The five things that shaped publishing last year are bound to shape publishing this year, and yes–we are still talking about Amazon.
Har de Har . . . Ouch
As always, the specter of online piracy looms. Here’s a short and sweet post by author Brian O’Leary on beating the piracy system by offering a better mousetrap.
And the comic Louis CK recently held a grand experiment, offering a new comedy special only by download from his website for a $5 donation. He writes that he did this against “well–informed advice,” but continues: “Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. . . . I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.” Good on you, Louis!
Retail Lending
Writing recently on Publisher’s Weekly’s blog, the Internet Archive’s Peter Brantley takes a moment to consider the library. He says, “The most important strategic opportunity for publishers rests where it has never before existed: in essence, considering libraries to be their best retail outlet.” Peter will moderate a TOC NYC panel on this very subject, and if this article is any indication, that session will go a long way toward finding a win–Hourwin e–Hourlending middle ground for publishers and libraries.
News of the Noise
Writing recently on ReadWriteWeb, David Strom takes the lessons learned by indie music purveyor Noisetrade and applies them to a more multidisciplinary approach, one that touches the publishing community, too. Strom argues, “The goal isn’t just to sell tracks, but track the buyers and be back in touch with them when the artist is appearing live in their area or has something new to offer.” Publishers would be smart to figure out what kind of value they might be able to add in exchange for either revenue or valuable long–term investment–type consumer data.
Creative Copying
“[I]f we genuinely want to promote creativity, we must encourage copying,” argues William Patry in a provocative piece on Bloomberg. “The idea that people copy because they lack creativity is powerfully harmful, and it runs counter to the history of copyright.” Kat says: “I link to this because it’s about the issues that are supposedly being addressed via proposed SOPA legislation. There is no easy answer. That’s the point–as SOPA suggests, and it’s dangerous, as Patry illustrates via historical example–to think there are easy answers. Go ahead and read and think about it and be inspired to participate in this conversation. It matters.”
Sitting Pretty
If you’re reading this newsletter on a tablet, chances are you’re not hunched forward. Rather, you’re likely to be enjoying the ergonomic pleasures more commonly associated with the newspaper or the hardback book. It even has it’s own name: Lean Back 2.0. Furthermore, the digital lean is eclipsing the paper’s fold, with The Economist projecting a fall of over 50 percent in the preference for paper over other formats in the next two years, with tablet preference growing to over 20 percent.
Novel Idea?
Posting on Nieman Labs, Joshua Young looks to the New Year with hope, particularly for content creators. “I think 2012 will be the year in which we realize that Google’s first core principle [Focus on the user and all else will follow] misses something important,” he says. “We will recognize all over again the value in catering to the writer–or, rather, the best writers. We will thus also invest in giving them tools to reach the right readers. . . . 2012 will show us.”
That’s Pounds Sterling
Kerry Wilkinson is the most successful British mystery writer you’ve never heard of. Wilkinson sold the 100,000th copy of his enovel, Locked In, on Christmas Eve, making this first-time novelist hit the top of the Kindle bestseller list. Wilkinson hastens to assure that he has not quit his day job. But we like this bit of advice, too: “I’d say owning an ereader is crucial,” Wilkinson told FutureBook. “If you understand how to buy books via one, you have a much better chance of figuring out how to sell them.”
Publisher’s Corner
The Occasional Rant From Our Benevolent Dictator
When Joe’s not busy exploiting his adult son’s technical prowess, he’s thinking about publishing at large and DRM protections in particular. A recent piece by Joe Esposito on his Scholarly Kitchen site prompted this reflection:
I hadn’t ever thought of it that way but if the industry goes DRM-free it could help level the playing field against Amazon. I think of my own situation. I’m buying all these ebooks from Amazon. Every one of them means I’m more locked in with Amazon than ever before. I blogged about this earlier and it’s something the typical consumer probably doesn’t think too much about—until it’s too late.
It’s sort of like how iTunes started. Everything was DRM’d. Fortunately, I didn’t catch the iFever till after they started relaxing that. I never did buy that many songs from iTunes, but the ones I did were all DRM–free. That made it wickedly easy to just drag them all from my Mac to my new Samsung Galaxy S II Android phone. Good luck doing that with your ebook collection.
Maybe the message in this is that we need to get the publishing industry to a DRM–free stage before Amazon becomes as dominant as iTunes. Then again, maybe it’s too late for that.
Exceptional Excerpts
Tantalizers From New and Upcoming Works
This week, we share from a new essay by 24symbols co–founder Justo Hidalgo, slated to be on the TOC ecommerce panel planned for Feb. 15.
We are entering a golden age for entrepreneurship in the publishing industry. The Books in Browsers conference last October in San Francisco and the London–based Futurebook conference in December showed a rich array of startups from all around the world. Profile Books’ Michael Bhaskar has compiled a list of publishing-related startups which he intends to add to as it grows. There are many reasons why this is happening.
Books are digital
Or, I should say, books can be digitally managed. Standards such as ePub2 or ONIX enable both the content and the metadata of the books to be digitally available. And this means that new capabilities and services can be built around the content. You can think of e-bookstores, of course, but startups try to look beyond the obvious: what about recommendations based on the book’s DNA รก la Pandora, like BookLamp? Or relating places, songs, or others books, as does SmallDemons? And what about some remixing, like BookRiff does?
Talking Reading
Joe speaks with mobNotate’s founder Ricky Wong as well as their technical advisor Sean Gerrish about where they are with the mobNotate platform, why social is an important part of tomorrow’s reading experience and what it will look like.
‘Five’ is for ‘Future’
Is HTML5 the future of publishing? Brian Fling of PinchZoom Press thinks so, but cautions that it’s not an either/or situation vis a vis ePub. “Don’t focus,” he counsels, “on the end client. It’s about understanding how your content is managed and how you think about how your content is presented in a mixed platform world.”
Final Note
Our Weekly Nod to the Absurd
eAmish et Al
Want to learn more about a tiny pocket of Pennsylvania folks who forswear such modern conveniences as power-line electricity and automobiles? Look no further, friend, than the Amish, whose lifestyle and beliefs are now handily compiled in an ebook. Mental Floss helpfully gathers this item and 10 more in a chirpy list of ebooks that are simply wrong.
