“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”
― Douglas Adams
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Disaggregating supply
Context First: Moving inexorably toward a “pre-book world”
This is a very good piece from Brian O’Leary at Magellan Media Partners on how we need to rethink digital content and “publishing in containers” that segregate and isolate the content from the web. With convergence to a single screen everything is funneled through the web, a platform that “includes everything and excludes nothing”. Since the beginning of publishing the book, magazine, film and television supply-chain relied on the ability to exclude but to fully take advantage of digital distribution and discovery on the web we instead need the content to be open and accessible -precisely the opposite of what DRM and ePub is designed to do. Precisely what publishers are striving to prevent. Here O’Leary suggests how publishers should shift how to think of their content:
We need to migrate from thinking about products to instead planning for and offering services and solutions. To get there, four principles apply:
- Our content must become open, accessible and interoperable. Adherence to standards will not be an option;
- Because we compete on context, we’ll need to focus more clearly on using it to promote discovery;
- Because we’re competing with providers that already use low- and no-cost tools, trying to beat them on the cost of content is a losing proposition. We need to develop opportunities that encourage broader use of our content; and
- We will distinguish ourselves if we can provide readers with tools that draw upon context to help them manage abundance.
A very dense and thoughtful piece that should be read in it’s entirety.
~ eP
Making culture for the internets—all of them
“Consider a webcomic like xkcd. It’s a touchstone of internet culture, and yet it’s presented only in English. (There are a handful of unofficial translation sites, but they seem to be spotty at best, abandoned at worst.) You could argue that xkcd’s core audience of programmers, scientists, and students all speak English, wherever they are… but I don’t know. I think there must be a few hundred thousand internet users out of China’s half-billion who would absolutely love the comic—who would feel, as so many xkcd readers do, that it’s somehow speaking to them directly—but whose English isn’t up to snuff. What a thing that would be, to make this bit of culture available to them!
We, the internet culture makers: we don’t translate enough. We don’t push hard enough against these linguistic and social borders. Instead, we pat each other on the back for our elegant file-format choices. Instead, we talk mostly to ourselves.”
All books are ebooks and all screens are books, TVs, newspapers, magazines, fax machines, comic books, movie theaters, radios, telephones…
All books are ebooks and they have been since the 80s as Paul St John Mackintosh pointed out recently on Teleread. He is right, every manuscript is edited and laid out at some point and exists in some form of digital file and then “sent to the printer” and bound. The only difference in the last five years is that people have increasingly been able to choose not to read from the printed file. We now live online, we read the news online, we correspond online, we watch TV online. We are having the same epiphany we had with Fax machines and copiers - why am I printing this on paper when it is on my desktop already. The real change publishers and authors are facing is that a large amount of books like the interoffice memo don’t need to be printed anymore.
We used to send letters but now we send emails. Letters were often long and eloquent because you had to say everything at once and wait days for a response. Now we IM instantly, text constantly, and communicate in truncated words. Def fstr but betr? Eloquence and length moved to blogs and many of us set up Family blogs and as a result our private letters and thoughts began to get an audience outside the family. We began to personally brand ourselves and then Facebook gave us tools to make that easier. Family and friends could respond to our posts faster again like email and IMing. Our daily interactions got shorter again.
Today every one of us can write a novel and make it available to sell as easy as we could set up a family blog. Authors can build their audience as easily as we can build our family and friends on Facebook. Kickstarter asks us for money just like our kids emailing us from college. Private letters and literature are now being poured into the same bucket and along with our news we piggyback the photos from our family vacation. We mix our playlists with Homeland and Real Housewives. And like the letter - once digital we are filtering and distilling it into smaller chunks and consuming it faster. We buy songs not albums, webisodes are 3 - 15 minutes long. We read news as a headline and magazines as an article.
It is only logical to think Books too will increasingly become shorter and episodic, subscribed to like a blog or TV show. We are “liking” authors like Neil Gaiman on Facebook the same as our family, sharing Instagram photos of what we ate with him, even knowing what his friends and neighbors ate. And occasionally - for about the price of a beer - Neil Gaiman will tell us a story just like our Uncle Ed would on Thanksgiving.
We are constantly filtering as a society an immense stream of data daily and only choosing to print what we find indispensable and important. This is significantly shifting demand in an economic model based on printing. Like documents once sent printed on fax machines, we have a significantly diminished demand to print a lot of the books that drive the profits of big publishers. 50 Shades of Gray, Harlequin Romances, business books, content that is consumed and discarded for the next new thing quickly we are finding are tailor made for digital. The real important stuff, the stuff of lasting value, the art, the philosophy, the hard work of research and fact checking and editorial back and forth - this we want to keep as artifact and manifest in an icon on our shelves. The fast and ephemeral, the lowest common denominator with the largest audience, “the latest thing” is what drives the profits and like all our personal communication we no longer have a need to print it. We filter, distill, and share it ourselves while it burns bright but know that once consumed we no longer need to see or own it.
It’s the very stuff we want to “print out to keep” that publishers tend to make the least profit on. Return on investment on Joyce or Salinger takes some time to build, cure, and reach maturity.It tends to have smaller audiences to start but it’s impact is important and its influence on us as a culture and society is immense and important. The problem we are facing now is that the economic model that this content was created in is moving from one where there was a careful and delicate balance of editorial control and power that a publisher had and a need for a retailer to support works of value by attracting an audience in order to facilitate the discovery them. What we are seeing in digital publishing now are the struggles of publishers and retailers trying to compete for a role in an environment that does not naturally want them in that role anymore. Authors attract their own audience. Fellow readers attract their own audience. Communities, Groups, and Forums act as sentient audiences roving the web in search of content to share and consume on their own (and whose byproduct is even more fan generated content).
The digital world is about finding and audience and sharing information instantly from point A to point B. Publishers, Retailers and Distributors are currently just middlemen getting in the way of discovery - and the internet abhors middleman.
The challenge for Publishers, Distributors and Retailers is to find their role in this environment where content and family and news and entertainment all live as one. Form used to tell us what was a book, magazine, newspaper, family photo, email, or Tweet. Now it is all text on the same screen. The words are left to speak for themselves. Where they started doesn’t matter the moment we boot up our device and see their glow.
~eP
HTML5's biggest and most important feature has gone unnoticed by many outside of browser vendor circles.
For the first time we have a standardised compromise between the overly strict behaviour of XML and the unordered mess that is tag soup.
Baldur Bjarnason is one of the best writers on digital content and ebooks on the web. His observations are prescient, clear, and easy to understand. His words should be a must read for everyone in the industry. ~ eP
The End of the Internet Kit
A nice example of how to personalize an ebook, the End of the Internet Kit uses your own social media to show you how to build an analog copy of the Internet - you know, just in case the Mayans were right.
An Imaginary War, A Wikipedia Hoax
Fuzzy Reality is a real problem in this virtual world of the internet. I fear increasing government dissemination of “New History” will subtly erase and rewrite our inconvenient past eliminating anything that might spark dissent. As a society we will be neutered by the Trojan Horse of easy, free, and unlimited access to information. ~ Arthur C. Clarke
Wikipedia editors unearthed a clever hoax perpetrated on the web’s gullible netizens, sending the mighty “Bicholim Conflict” back to where it originated: non-existence. For five years, the imaginary year-long battle, from 1640 to 1641, between Portugal and the mighty Indian Marath Empire, reigned as truth in the user-generated halls of Wikipedia’s archive. Despite the fact that the cited sources were as real as the conflict, it even achieved “Good Article” status for its thorough 4,500 word recounting of the major historical event. It is said that history was once written by the victors; now, history is also written by the bored.
» via TechCrunch
How Digital Is Changing Our Reading Habits
I read reams and reams of writing on websites and research papers in PDF. I download books for my own pleasure and some get sent to me by friends who have managed to uncover a creative commons gem that needs to be read. In terms of word consumption I probably read twice the amount I read before and perversely enough I also do about twice the writing to the tune of some 16,000 words a week and yet there is a paradox at work here that comes down to the medium.
The way we read today is so different from the way we read ten years ago that it requires some major adjusting to get used to.
GrabMyBooks - The web as a book
A Firefox add-on that allows you to grab content from the web and easily convert it in an epub / mobi file fully compatible with your e-book reader!
Macmillan Dictionary to Be Strictly Digital
How do you not like an announcement that starts with an Umberto Eco quote:
Umberto Eco recently argued that “The book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved”. But dictionaries are different from other books. Like maps and encyclopedias – but unlike novels or newspapers – dictionaries are things you consult (while you’re doing something else) rather than things you read. For any kind of reference enquiry, the book really can be improved upon, and at Macmillan, we’ve taken the decision to phase out printed dictionariesand focus on our rich and expanding collection of digital resources. CONTINUE
Macmillan’s Dictionary site is designed to present its reference content to consumers and provide a direct service and resource while building the brand. It is clean and user friendly and shows Macmillan has a clear strategy for building a direct relationship with their reader/user.
