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Dictionaries and other book-like objects

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 — posted by Sarah

Closing keynote from Erin McKean, Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries, Oxford University Press

A dictionary is really not a book; it is only a book-shaped object.

This presentation is loaded with visuals and loses a LOT in translation to text. Interesting coming from a lexicographer.

What makes a book a prototypical example of a standard book? The Bible might be the canonical (ha) example, but as the publishers don't pay royalties ("at least not to the author"), it's a not-great example.

Dictionaries don't act like books. People don't read them from cover to cover. Dictionaries are tagged from the beginning. Dictionaries are commodified; branding isn't very good for dictionaries. When searching for a particular novel, you won't settle for a different novel. That's not the case for dictionaries.

The smallest dictionaries are only 10 percent of the content of the largest ones.

Books are written. Dictionaries are compiled and then revised.

"The one-author book is the prototype, but there hasn't been a one-author dictionary in about 200 years."

Dictionaries are the exception to almost all the rules in a publishing house -- special paper, special fonts, specialized copy editors, and so on.

"Dictionaries are shaped like books between the book metaphor is very powerful."

But the book metaphor has lost its usefulness for dictionaries.

"Information wants to be ambient." It needs context.

And....books are not convenient enough. Need -- yes -- immediacy!

"What other book-shaped objects are you publishing that aren't really books? Would users be served better by a different shape?"

Fun!

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7:14 PM Permalink | |

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Beyond the Page/Adobe Digital Editions

— posted by Sarah

Bill McCoy, General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems

The only "products & services" session I'm attending at this conference.

A new platform is always inferior on many dimensions EXCEPT those that matter to the adopters of the new platform. The value proposition of the new platforms typically "competes with non-consumption" (Clayton Christensen).

Examples of other transitions: Automobiles were ridiculed compared to horses because of their limitations -- requiring roads and fuel that was hard to find. But automobiles didn't require care and feeding, provided storage.

File to digital camera: Compatibility with computers was the killer feature. Professional photographers reviled the initial digital options.

Traditional typesetting to desktop publishing: Early on, Adobe was ridiculed for lacking optical kerning. DTP was inferior across the dimension that professionals cared about.

Easier to transport your "digital bookshelf" than to transport the real thing.

A book may not fit in your pocket, but a cell phone or other device does. "It's better than nothing."

And...IMMEDIACY. You can get the digital book immediately.

Easy to get e-books into a large-print typeface. (This is the first time I've heard this argument. People don't like to say this in public, but it sounds compelling, actually.)

No Barnes & Nobles, Ingram, or FedEx is available. Shipping costs are astronomical.

Books may be cheap, but e-books are cheaper. And...the green argument again. Less paper being consumed.

Digital media are compelling:
Digital publishing at a tipping point?
Issues
Adobe wants to enable digital publishing. Advises against waiting for the "iPod of eBooks." Funny, that's exactly how Adobe has informally described Digital Editions in the past ("iTunes for documents"). Adobe doesn't expect to create a single store for e-books.

Standards are essential. PDF is great for paginated content, but not so great for content that needs to reflow. New format is IDPF EPUB based on XHTML, CSS, SVG, and OpenType packaged in a zip-based package.

(This is a great story for us. I wonder how the publishers in the audience feel about it.)

So, what does Adobe have?
E-textbooks meet e-learning with Flash animation embedded seamlessly inside the Digital Editions experience.

Live demo of generating Digital Editions out of InDesign via "Export to Digital Editions." Formatting in DE is controlled by XSLT and you can deliver your own if you want to.

DE available in Mac, Windows, and soon a public beta for Linux. Sony Reader will include in the future.

What about plans to support other Adobe applications? Yes. Adobe applications that are "more XML-friendly and structured" than InDesign (hmmm, what could that be??) and also those that are "more consumer-friendly."

Social networking might include shared reading lists.

You can convert PDFs back to DE, but DE is higher on the content chain than PDF. (Similar to going from paper back to digital.)

Very slick presentation. I hope the product lives up to the presentation.

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5:54 PM Permalink | |

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Revisiting Digital Publishing

— posted by Sarah

A panel discussion with a bunch of book publishers.

So, in 1998, we had e-book readers and no adoption. Just like now.

What holding back e-books?
Random House guy (with four people, I have no chance at getting names right)
And again, "immediacy" as an advantage of e-books. No inventory or quality constraints -- digital availability is cheaper than print availability over time.

Weight -- a single device holding lots of e-books is lighter than a pile of books.

First mention I've seen here of e-books as a "green" alternative. No paper, and therefore a lower-impact way of getting content.

Standards will help market growth. Being able to deliver a single, standard e-book format is appealing. Adobe Digital Editions a clear contender already.

Another challenge to the audience to experiment with different content delivery models, such as subscription, ad-supported content, and personalization.

HarperCollins, Theresa Warner

Not interested in giving away content. Is putting e-books and audiobooks in the same "digital" category. Major hurdle with e-books is clearing author rights.

From 2001 to 2008, 800 percent increase in revenue from e-books. From 2005 to 2008, 800 percent increase in audiobooks. (Of course, the baseline numbers is small.)

75% of revenue is generated from titles selling fewer than 49 units a month. This is backward from print books. 95% of titles sell fewer than 49 units a month. Top-selling category is romance. Michael Creighton's Prey is the top-selling single title.

Large book retailers are not in the e-book space, but amazon is coming. Library market is about 15 percent of overall revenue. Direct sales are about 5 percent of revenue.

Experimenting with "digital only" short content. They sell well, and are also driving sales of the author's backlist by 41%. Buyers are coming from the author's web site.

Small experiments may be worthwhile for data capture even though they may not generate revenue.

Claire Israel, Simon & Schuster
Worked at one point for the startup that created the Rocket eBook.

Started publishing e-books in 1998. 3500 books in the program to date. 80 new titles a month. No ROI calculations for a single book. Lots of experiments.

E-books are released on the same day as the print book. They are creating e-book files "just in case" they get the rights for a particular book. They are working on getting e-book production into the standard workflow. This is difficult and expensive.

Originally, Star Trek fan fiction was popular. Now, narrative non-fiction, Stephen King, and also romance.

The young adult market has been ignored and shouldn't be. (This is a really good point. Everybody's talking about how kids are all over computers and only consume information online, so why not provide their books online?)

What they worry about:
Panel discussion
My comments: e-books and books have different advantages. Books are prettier, e-books are more functional. But the cost of digital distribution should be basically zero, whereas physical distribution is expensive and inefficient. Consumers are demanding cheaper e-books, and the current pricing models don't pass the sniff test.

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5:02 PM Permalink | |

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Standards in the Digital Supply Chain

— posted by Sarah

Michael Healy, Book Industry Study Group

Supply chain; that is, how does an idea go from an author's mind into a book, has been largely ignored. But if supply chain is a high priority for other industries, why do we ignore it in book publishing?

Publishers like to stand above these uninteresting details and would rather focus on content.

Book publishing has high costs, low margins, and little growth. Plus something additional fairly grim statistics that basically show a stagnant business (at best). These conditions should cause a greater focus on supply chain effectiveness, since this could be the key to profitability.

Supply chain requires standards. Otherwise, you have "disconnected and inefficient" transactions.

The ISBN is a standard since the 1960s. Most successful product identifier in any industry. He sees this as a foundation for online book sellers, electronic card catalogs, and other features. There are standards for location information and for product description and communication (ONIX). EDI has made business-to-business communication cheaper and more reliable. These and other standards have been helpful in improving efficiency, reducing cost, and selling more books.

What will tomorrow's supply chain look like? A digital supply chain will look different from a supply chain for printed books. But how do you move content from the author to the user's desktop?

As the amount of content increases, there needs to be great improvement in the supply chain. Book sellers are not happy with the information provided about books by the publishers today. How much more difficult will this be when books are shredded and provided chapter by chapter?

Coming in 2008, we have the International Standard Name Identifier. Will support unambiguous identification of individuals. It also addresses the problem of pseudonyms, a group of authors writing under a single name, and different authors with the same name. (There's very little information online that I can find, but here's a Wikipedia entry.)

The International Standard Text Code, which is an identifier for a work, not a manifestation. The ISBN would be different for hard-cover versus soft-cover, but the ISTC would be the same.

Together, the ISNI and ISTC will help manage the proliferation of formats.

He sees an emergence of digital repositories, such as the one described by John Ingram in an earlier session. BISG now has a Digital Standards Group that is working on developing infrastructure for this digital world. They are working on an open-source messaging protocol to help content producers and content "displayers" to communicate with each other for easy and consistent search, retrieval, and display.

Managing permissions online requires policies, which could be assumed (implied license), enforced (with protection), and they should be expressed. The Automated Content Access Protocol is looking at how to create a machine-readable expression of permissions. You might think of it as an alternative to a robots.txt file.

ONIX for Licensing Terms expresses license terms for electronic publications used in libraries.

Lack of standards leads to inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. Many existing standards are relevant for digital content.

This was a good review of standards coming down the pipe. Not as exciting as the future book presentation, but nothing else has been, either.

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2:56 PM Permalink | |

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Next-generation web publishing with Mark Logic

— posted by Sarah

Jason Hunter, Principal Technologist at Mark Logic

This presentation is about distilling a set of trends from his experience in implementing at many publishing companies.

Mark Logic has an XML content server. Big-picture feature set is to load, query, manipulate, render.

This is interesting, but have you looked at the future of the book presentation yet? (I really don't want anyone to miss it!)

Trends
The business situation:
"When you buy a plane, you get more paper than plane."

They have a 200-terabyte deal with a government customer.

Some cool things you can do online: Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species with image of original printed book, side-by-side with a web-readable version.

Technology situation
People want be to one step away from answers, not two. Some examples from Google. Another reference to O'Reilly's Code Search tool, which he showed yesterday in the lightning demo session.

PathConsult web site designed for physicians.

Lots of examples of bells and whistles you can do with XML-based content being served up on the web.

There are two ways to make money: create more content OR do more with the content you have. Guess which one is more appealing?

Example: microproducts
Focusing the delivery onto a specific genre or subtopic. Mark Logic did work for Oxford University Press in developing an African-American studies web site. They aggregated relevant content from many different OUP publications.

Example: custom publishing
Pulling together single chapters from many different books. SafariU lets you do this.

I saw most of these examples in a presentation (at XML 2006, maybe?), but it's still interesting.

Content in context
Example: finding mention of a drug in the conclusions section of an article along with terms such as "contraindications," "should not be given," and/or "may cause death."
Example: electronic flight bags for pilots. Primary purpose is real-time access to weather, but also to find procedures faster
Example: historical content, such as Congressional Quarterly

Emphasis on Google
Fear: Owning the content and the user
Opportunity: better search
Opportunity: Instant AdWords registration
Opportunity: Personalized landing pages

Basically, work with Google. You probably can't avoid them. But if you have the source (XML) content, you have the "negative" of the picture. Google only has a printed 4x6 snapshot. Interesting analogy.

Take advantage of your expertise in your vertical to get AdWords before anyone else figures them out.

User participation can be direct, like blogging, reviewing, and tagging. But there's also indirect participation where search and guidance is provided by collective intelligence. This is the Google model.

Leveraging the structure
You can provide more powerful search than Google because your XML is better than the downstream HTML that Google is indexing.
You can automatically generate master indexes for a collection of your books.
You can generate "special views"; that is, multiple output fofrmats.
Historical analysis lets you look at who is citing a particular document over time.
You can print actual books faster. (This is, of course our major focus.)

Generate a dumbed-down press summary from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Basically, figures, the content referring the the figure, the paragraph in the table of contents that describes the article, and, crucially, letters to the editor in later editions that refer to that article.

What if you don't have structure?
People add it. Sometimes by an editor, sometimes with automation.
Need to mark up important information, such as people, places, companies, drug names, and the much more.

Government customers are more often focusing on structuring content automatically because they have such vast volumes of information.

Structure in fiction: What if you could identify characters, plot points, and locations, so that you can, for example, search Tolkien's volumes for a certain character's appearance? (I think the argument for structure in fiction is weak, but certainly for fiction that people study, there's a possibility.)

Content analytics
What is the shape of the "haystack"? Example from O'Reilly...309,000 pages and 123,439 blocks of code examples. Much better than file-based management or siloed content.

Agility
Must implement fast. (Not sure I agree with this. The consequences of making a mistake can be quite unpleasant.)

The most difficult task in implementing at O'Reilly was gathering up the content and undoing the various shortcuts people had taken.

The cheapest way to get structure into the content is to off-shore the conversion. (That begs the more interesting question or whether it's feasible to get authors to create structured content in the first place. For technical publications, the answer is clearly yes. For book publishing, most publishers haven't tried to push XML-based authoring onto their content creators.)

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2:01 PM Permalink | |

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Ingram: A "Tool of Change"

— posted by Sarah

John Ingram of, well, you know. He has the impossible job of following the unbelievable presentation about the analog/digital book.

We're now talking about microfiche that covers Ingram's inventory back in the 70s. I'm still thinking about the new book prototype.

Ingram has applied "aggregation and technology to create a better infrastructure for book publishers and..." something I missed because the slide is gone.

Intelligent application of technology combined with the power of aggregation. There's something called iPage. iPage would be a really excellent name for the new book.

They offer print on demand through Lightning with over 400,000 titles. They make over 250,000 books every week. Print on demand helps to capture demand that would have been missed before.

(But this sidesteps the "immediacy" argument, which has been prevalent elsewhere. Digital content is compelling because it's immediate. Seems as though POD and digital content are direct competitors because they provide access to content that otherwise would be unavailable (out of print).)

Ugh. This is basically a sales pitch for the various Ingram businesses. Boo.

Things publishers need:
Oh surprise. Ingram has a product for this.

Also:
Ding. Gratuitous mention of iPhone. I think it's been mentioned in every presentation I've seen. Also, speaking of Apple, the percentage of Mac laptops here is pretty impressive.

Yeah, yeah. They have answers for all of these issues.

More importantly, why use Ingram instead of building your own? Why allow Ingram to control digital content distribution in addition to analog distribution? Do niche publishers have different requirements than mass-market publishers?

Digital clearly presents a challenge to Ingram. They have become the gatekeeper in the analog world as a book distributor, and there are reasons why a book store would want to work with only one or two distributors. The same thing is not true for digital content. So, they're trying to position themselves to provide digital services and become a gatekeeper there. But is this compelling to a publisher? The Internet leads to "disintermediation," and I don't see how this works in Ingram's favor.

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12:33 PM Permalink | |

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The Future of the Book

— posted by Sarah

This was clearly the highlight of the conference.

Manolis Kelaidis, freelance designer, on bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds

bLink ("blink") stands for "book link."

He believes that books can be art objects, rather than solely a device to convey ideas. Old books have value (sometimes more than new ones). Old ebooks? Probably not.

Book is best interface available for information. Information retrieval from book is much easier than from digital interface. We tend to remember where information was located spatially -- at the beginning of the on a left-hand page. This context is lost in digital media.

Digital media does offer "seductive possibilities," such as linking from one place to another. He used threads to connect different pages and also bookmarks, but that didn't work so well. How do you connect one book to another book?

So, the challenge becomes to put together the best parts of analog and digital books. A printed book with buttons that let you access digital information.

Woo! Spontaneous applause as he touches a spot in the book AND LAUNCHES HIS WEB BROWSER to google that topic.

Hyperlink from the end of an essay to a discussion board about that essay.

Other ideas: Touch a paragraph, and the nearby books in the library change color to indicate that they are relevant to your topic. (Books would be tagged.)

Link to music, and include a volume bar on the book page.

Integrate the music into a novel. As you read the page, the relevant music plays.

He shows live examples of all of this. The audience is amazed.

Possibilities include:
Print conductive ink on the paper. Touching the spot closes the circuit. This communicates with the embedded electronics on the module, which includes a SIM card for portability. Then communicates with any device "in proximity" using Bluetooth. Perhaps RFIDs in the future.

Another option is the "autonomous book," which contains all of the data instead of linking back to another device.

Advertising integration...read a depressing book like Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead and suddenly find a cheery ad for a trip to the Bahamas! OK, not a good idea and artistically offensive because it destroys the immersive experience of the novel. But what about a do-it-yourself magazine with relevant ads in a corner?

The key to all of this is printing with conductive ink, which has been available in electronics for decades. The innovation is printing on paper, and being driven by the printed electronics industry. Other applications include flexible displays, RFID, memory, speakers, and paper batteries.

That was way cool.

There will eventually be video of the presentation posted. Look for it, again, on the conference web site.

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12:31 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Morning keynotes/Dale Dougherty

— posted by Sarah

Dale Dougherty of Editor & Publisher, Make & Craft Magazines, The Beauty of Print in a Digital Era

He comes to sing the praises of print.

History of technology is written from an innovation point of view rather than a user point of view. We focus on what's new and not on what's being used. New technology doesn't always replace old technology; often they coexist, but we pay too much attention to new technology relative to how much it is used.

Amazon, the canonical "digital" company, exists only because of books.

Books and Internet publishing can exist side by side. Print layouts can be more sophisticated than online layouts. The Internet is largely a collection of small bits of information, which reflects how people read online.

Long description of Make Magazine (which he publishes). By far the best part of this presentation is the visuals, which I can't reproduce here. Look for his slides on the conference presentations page.

Hybrid of Internet and print is less about delivering information and more about creating a community of people who are passionate about participating.

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11:40 AM Permalink | |

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TOC: Lightning demos

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 — posted by Sarah

These are five-minute mini-presentations from assorted vendors.

Starting them at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time seems a little cruel, but at least it's not 9 p.m. The Birds of the Feather sessions are scheduled to start at 9 p.m. and go until 11 p.m. (!!!!).

I'm clearly too old for this conference.

Mini-presentations are very hard to do.

I missed the first few. The presenter from LibreDigital is showing a social software platform for publishers.

Aha! I didn't miss Bill McCoy from Adobe, who should be talking about Adobe Digital Editions. He blogged about this earlier today.

Native PDF, but doesn't look like PDF. I looked at a beta of this earlier, which was pretty interesting. Early on, it was informally described as "iTunes for Documents."

Also supports ePub, an "open XML standard," which appears to live here.

InDesign CS3 already has support for direct export to Digital Editions.

Live, interactive content inside the document. He showed an animation of an equation (Hubble's Law) that's important in physics. I think.

"Digitization" is the wrong message. You're delivering content. In other words, move away from a book-centric thought.

Tad Staley is showing Buzzword, a web-based word processor. They like to call it "the first real word processor on the web."

Buzzword server stores the documents, so you can access them from any computer. Important for youth market, who use an average of four computers per day.

Three levels of access: author, reviewer, reader.

Sort by file name, author, page length.

Built on Flash.

All the usual bells and whistles for formatting.

Differentiators between Buzzword and other word processors? Word processor is WYSIWYG. Faithful rendering of your document from one computer and user to the next. Put a lot of time and effort into letter spacing and typography.

A couple of entertaining slams on things they do that Word doesn't.

Currently in "limited preview."

Adam Goldstein, booktour.com
"Where authors and audiences meet"

Why don't people show up for book events? They don't know about them. This product lets you enter your zip code or topics and see who is going to be around. Authors who register get their own, standard page and can then add tour dates. RSS feeds are available. Free widget to support fan sites and the like. Can send email updates. A calendar feed is available.

Basically, aggregating book tour information. This is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure it's compelling. Maybe I'm not the right audience for this.

Jason Hunter, Principal Technologist from Mark Logic
Mark Logic makes an XML content server. I spoke with them at their booth earlier today. Essentially, they are to publishing what content management systems are to authoring. Their system lets you control publishing and distribution of content (whereas content management lets you control authoring and reuse). Of course, it's not that simple, but you get the idea.

Demos:
Code search across all O'Reilly books. This is public site, so try it for yourself. It searches only code content inside O'Reilly books.

BCKS: Battle Command Knowledge System built for the Army

Really excellent presentation in a tiny amount of time. Just enough to whet the appetite.

Whew. Done. Finally. (no offense to the presenters)

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10:51 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Print on demand

— posted by Sarah

Simon St. Laurent covers this presentation on the O'Reilly XML blog.

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10:48 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Interview with Bruce Chizen

— posted by Sarah

Tim O'Reilly interviews Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe.

What is the "Adobe story" of the future?

Recall that "user-generated content" in the 1980s when desktop publishing started was quite ugly. Today feels like a repeat of the "democratization of publishing."

The volume of people who want to publish and the platforms they want to publish on have gone up.

The need for immediacy has been a changing factor. A professional publisher could plan months or years in advance. No more.

True user-generation content and collaboration is new.

What about the convergence of print and online?

There will be a point where print will go away. Probably when devices imitate paper. Between now and then -- could be 5, 10, or 15 years -- people want to put printed content on the web as quickly as possible and as efficiency as possible. They want to incorporate web features into printed content. The electronic version of the New York Times incorporates video.

What about the difficulty of linking to a page in a PDF?

Wow, didn't see that knife sliding in! No answer from Chizen. Back to convergence.

Could take printed document and make a truly interactive edition. More plugs for Digital Editions and Adobe Integrated Runtime (formerly code-named Apollo). He just called Ajax a "traditional tool." (There's a lot not being said here.)

Want to do with AIR what they did with desktop publishing for print. Browsers not good enough for certain types of content, and they want to provide something richer. Get rid of browser chrome, browser layout. Allows for sophisticated typography, graphics, animation, especially in this era.

O'Reilly: Creates document-based, stand-alone, web applications.

Chizen: Can work online or offline, high fidelity and richness of PDF/Flash. Do not force you to change which tools you are working with today.

O'Reilly: What about the concept of live documents that are authoritative?

Chizen: Have DRM around document, LiveCycle Policy Server. (which is VERY expensive) Rights can travel with the document. Ability to revoke documents (example: pharmaceutical industry). Can "recall" the document.

O'Reilly: Provides a focus for DRM that is functional by allowing for authoritative sources, revokation, and the like.

Chizen: Now applying this same technology to publishers. Can use this technology for digital books.

He expects this to be controversial. (um, duh)

O'Reilly just called Adobe the "arms provider" to the content industry because of the DRM technology.

Adobe's entire business is intellectual property. At least one-third of products are stolen. Chizen wants to decided whether or not to give away the IP. Therefore, DRM is legitimate for people who want to protect their IP.

Flex has been open sourced.

Decision depends on objective. But it was Adobe's decision, not the pirates. PDF is now out of Adobe's control as an ISO standard.

Photobucket has software based on Premiere that is free to customers of Photobucket.

Question from the audience about privacy concerns. "Privacy versus desire of publisher to know what you are looking at."

Let the user know exactly what the author intends to do with the document and the information around that document. Before you open a protected file, you can decline. If you want to look at the information, you agree to conditions set by that content provider.

What about the old documents?

Will old PDFs be viewable? Yes.

If you create a PDF, you can lock it down or make content extractable. The question is, who owns the content? If the author locked it down, you'll have to print/scan and re-created.

What about e-book formats?

Digital Editions will read PDFs. The challenge is that PDF is not reflowable, which is challenging in different screen sizes. Page fidelity good, no reflow not so good. Digital Editions also supports XML. InDesign CS3 already supports ePub format; you can export to Digital Editions format.

Will device manufacturers support this?

Sony has announced support for Digital Editions.

What about cell phones?

More sophisticated phones will support this.

What about the iPhone?

Much hemming and hawing.

Web, other than HTML, is basically PDF and Flash. Assume that all devices will eventually display these formats. Already happening in Japan, where cell phones are much farther along.

Authoring rich compound documents requires lots of applications.

We think there's an opportunity there.

Any announcement?

No.

Any solution would be host-based. Premiere Express already available. Working on Photoshop Express. Creating compelling, rich Internet sites is an opportunity. Some will use professional tools, but casual users need something easier.

Will all content types become as unreliable as photos because of Photoshop?

This will separate professional publishers from casual users, user-generated content.

Wikipedia lets you see every edit.

Version Cue does this for professional tools. Would like to take that technology for users, but without violating user's privacy.

Goes back to story about currency flagging, which caused massive negative feedback for Adobe.

Single-user versus multiuser authoring?

Named authors have more credibility. Adobe will do this provided that the users have an option.

One piece of advice for publisher?

Experiment. Be flexible with your business models. People will pay for content in different ways. Print will eventually go away. As you create content, create it so that you can reuse in an efficient manner. Otherwise, the cost of repurposing will go up.

AIR will be cross-platform. Create once, and it'll run on all platforms. Think about this, or there will be too many platforms.

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8:18 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Valuing Content in a Web-Enabled World

— posted by Sarah

Jeff Patterson, CEO, Safari Books Online
Safari Books was founded in 2000. Joint venture between O'Reilly Media and Pearson. Produces an electronic reference library for IT and business professionals featuring trusted content from leading publishers.

Publisher get paid on what gets sold, not what gets read, so publishers aren't prepared to measure what's being read.

Always humbling to ask customers how you are doing.

The issue of "monetizing" content is not a new one. Clear focus at this conference and elsewhere.

Safari has more than 37,000 individual and 1,500 enterprise customers.

Where do IT and business professionals go to find content?
(Immediacy is obviously more important for urgent problems.)

Some very interesting additional survey results. No agreement that paid content is better, although older respondents are more positive toward paid content than younger ones.

Content closest to project work (for the survey audience) is valued more highly. Programming/design techniques highly valued; financial and budget management techniques not so much.

Providing demographic information is a form of payment. Over half the respondents resist this idea. This is an issue for people who might want to build a web site that is ad-supported and wants detailed demographics to support the marketers.

45% would rather pay than provide detailed demographic information. 30% are neutral and thus willing to consider it.

73% are willing to provide basic demographic information ("name, rank, and serial number"). 73% do NOT want to give detailed information.

Free content is and will continue to be popular.

Search engines are tools for content discoverability.

There is willingness to pay for information that is relevant and necessary, but paid for content must be trustworthy, insightful, accurate, useful; available; and scarce.

Conclusion: Audiences often prefer to spend money rather than give up their time or personal information.

Very interesting.

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7:55 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Afternoon keynotes

— posted by Sarah

Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia, talking about free culture and the future of publishing

"Imagine a world in which every person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all knowledge."

An encyclopedia is a very big work. A library is much bigger than that.

Wikia is building the rest of the library. Extending the Wikipedia model beyond nonprofit education and research communities.

Collaborative vision:
Wikia is following the same growth trajectory as Wikipedia, but about three years later.

"Second wave of collaborative authoring"
The most comprehensive reference guide on the muppets -- EVER. (Example: The Wikipedia entry on Itzhak Perlman neglects to mention that he appeared on Sesame Street at one point. The Muppet Wiki covers this critical event.)

Great coverage of Star Trek and other geek culture. This is starting to change as topics such as travel and health take off.

Vision for Wikia: To become the world's largest sustainable free-content, user-controlled media company.

Wikipedia is sustainable as a charity, but Wikia is for-profit. Wikia sites are ad-supported.

Search Wikia is creating an open source search engine, which Fast Company hailed as Google's Worst Nightmare.

Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber, just hired by Wikia. Shares philosophy of openness and democratic control. Miller invented the XMPP protocol.

Principles:
Wikipedia now has 7 million articles in 125 different languages created over the past 6 years.

Wales views his job as the "design of communities, which allow people to come together and work together in a healthy fashion." He advocates against designing for the worst-case scenario. (Amusing analogy about designing a restaurant with cages since patrons could otherwise stab each other with their knives.)

Gratuitous picture of Wales with Bono. I'm missing the relevance of this.

Great speaker, though.

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7:34 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Social Software/Gavin Bell

— posted by Sarah

Uh oh. Trouble with getting the presentation to display. I hate it when that happens.

OTOH, I usually get into my presentation room a LOT early.

Gavin Bell with Nature Publishing Group out of the U.K. Works on social software and web publishing for his employer.

Hmmm. Refuses to start without his slides. I feel his pain, sort of.

Nature Publishing Group publishes numerous journal (35) and also other long-form stuff. So, how to make social software interact with consumers.

Web provides a platform where individuals can talk to each other.

Moves and fiction books are typical accessed sequentially. Web content and music are typically accessed randomly.

Books, moves, and magazines are primarily analog. Others are primarily digital.

The key difference between them is the presence or absence of a plot, which traditionally requires sequential access. The presence of plot can result in reviews that disclose the plot and thus ruin the book experience ("spoilers"). Spoilers are not an issue for music.

This could be interesting, but we're still having technical issues. Hey, a presentation!

History of social software available here.

Social media refers to things like YouTube and Flickr.

Another reference to the fact that books have no batteries. And interestingly, books require your complete attention. Unlike web surfing, you don't give a book only partial attention. (Actually, that's not true. Am I the only person out there who reads while cooking??)

The relationship with digital media can be particularly deep. iPod is not just a music player, but also a data capture device. It learns about listening and viewing patterns. This helps you form a long-term relationship with your iPod and crucially with the underlying iTunes software.

One interesting point: All of the social software found online has analog/offline equivalents. Nobody has invented anything new online, and it's important to carry over behavior expectations into the online world. (I'm not sure I agree with this, but I can't think of a counter-example off the top of my head. Somehow, I have that old quote in my head..."On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.")

Examples of effective sites: flickr.com
Flickr only works when you sure life experiences with your friends. Need your friends to be at Flickr with you. Without friends, the experience is basically pointless. Flickr started out in a totally different space and evolved into their current space.

twitter
Lets you tell your friends what you're doing.
There's no content behind/inside Twitter. (Not very sticky.) No strong ties. (I have to say I think Twitter is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen.)

typepad
Blogging platform.

myspace
Works because of the music. Teens joined myspace because of the music community already present.

facebook
Started in educational market. Place for core friendship network. They have an API, so you can write additional applications.

Online commenting at The Guardian was troublesome because columnist were responding only in print (and not on the commenting sight).

Publishing examples:
Eyewitness Travel Guides
others

Moral: Focus on specific microcontent and niches.

Message boards tend to become isolated from other content. Better to build interactivity directly into the site rather than segregating forums away somewhere else.

Finally, his own site, the Nature Network. Advice: Allow participants to invite others. Use tagging, such as del.icio.us or technorati.

If an author is already blogging on his own, what could a publisher offer to make it appealing to move to the publisher's site?

Publisher can offer reading groups and book recommendations.

Can build communities around specialist subjects, especially use "pro-am" talent -- amateurs who are producing at a professional level.

URLs need to be short, memorable, and readable. Not acceptable to have system-generated URLs, which are usually long, nasty, and full of special characters.

Summary:
An uneven presentation with some interesting information. Could have used a lot more depth and fewer examples. And a presentation working from the first minute. The summary at the end was quite excellent.

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5:56 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Getting More (A Lot More) Out of Marketing with Authors

— posted by Sarah

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine
Marci Alboher, "small author nobody has heard of"

Authors are underserved, could be served better by publishing industry. The traditional book tour only reaches people who go to bookstores for readings. Authors can also add blogging, public speaking, and events.

Anderson and partners have started booktour.com to help people find out what author events are coming up. (In beta, will launch July 10th.)

For me, at least, the focus on book tours isn't that useful. They're looking at other promotions as supporting book tours. I think most of us are looking at stand-alone promotion -- you need critical mass to do a book tour.

Really, these guys are talking about author brand. Interestingly, this ties back to the earlier keynote, where Chris Andersen said that the interests of authors and publishers diverge.

Authors want to brand themselves and increase their visibility. Meanwhile, publishers want their authors to sell more books. But establishing an author as a brand makes the author more viable outside the relationship with the publisher.

"Search privileges the old. Older stuff has more time to get links." (Andersen)

"Publisher will lose interest very soon." The economic model demands focus on new content.

A comment from a woman in the audience who runs a niche publisher. They don't do book tours, but they "follow authors around" when they do their own promotion. They take a longer view of book life.

Another comment from someone at Simon & Schuster. She feels that many of her authors are artists, "but not personalities." They might be good writers, but not so good at the self-promotion game.

"Authors can be barriers to participation in marketing." This from an audience member from Penguin Books in the U.K.

Oddly, nobody has mentioned self-publishing. In a world where the author is expected to do all of the promotion, what does the publisher bring to the party? In the past, the answer was perceived quality or the knowledge that somebody has done editorial work, but if the book is selling based on the author's reputation and visibility, then what does the publisher bring? Distribution isn't that important when sales are being driven by direct links to the author's web site.

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3:32 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Allen Noles/Online books

— posted by Sarah

Publishers are competing against immediacy and convenience, against "free" and "good enough." The value of immediacy may be higher than the value of acquired a printed book with (presumably) higher quality.

There is an opportunity for new authors to create content. They will need to be adept with video, audio, Flash, and not just words a text. (A question from the audience later pointed out that good writers with technical knowledge are already in short supply. Where will these content-creation savants come from?)

Recommendations for publishers:

Think like a beginner.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few." -Shunryu Suzuki

Publishing companies are in defensive mode. The presenter thinks they shouldn't be.

In my experience, people are always in defensive mode when faced with change.

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2:37 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Tim O'Reilly/Publishing 2.0

— posted by Sarah

What do killer Internet applications have in common?
Web 2.0: harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

Each of these companies is building a database whose values grows in proportion to the number of participants -- a network-effective-driven data lock-in. (gulp)

Law of conversation of attractive profits
And thus, if digital content is becoming cheap, what's next? What's adjacent?

For publishers, the question is: where is value migrating to?

Asymmetric competition
Curating user-generated content
Collaborative authoring
What job does a book do? What is a book's competition?
Search is most important benefit of content being online

"Piracy is progressive taxation"
DRM: "Like taking cat to a vet" (hold them very carefully and loosely!)

More options = happier users

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2:20 PM Permalink | |

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TOC: Chris Anderson/Free: The economics of giving stuff away

— posted by Sarah

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief, Wired Magazine

The cost of things tend to fall to zero over time.

You can build business around giving things away:
If marginal cost of reaching the N+1 customer is approaching zero, then treat the product as free and figure out how to sell something else.

The price of a magazine like Wired is arbirary; it bears no relationship to the actual cost of the magazine. The subscription price is intended to qualify your interest. Setting the price too low "devalues the product."

Most music is free. "Free as in speech" -- DRM is going away. "Free as in beer" -- bands are experimenting with giving away music to market the live performances.

Games and movies would be free if not protected. They are locked down to enforce prices. Artificial barriers tend to fall over time. Already seeing ad-supported videogames. (neopets)

The shining exception: Books! They are not asymptotically approaching free. Books make sense. They provide the optimal way to read. The physical product is better than digital product...excellent battery life, screen resolution, portable, and it even looks good on your shelf. Easy to flip through.

If "free" is "the business model of the 21st century," how could a book be free?

(This was preceded with a disclaimer that many of these options would be "offensive" to people in the audience.)

For his next book, Anderson wants to do the following:
How could a physical book be free?
Why do it?
Why aren't more people doing free content?
The most critical point: The interests of the author and the publisher are critically misaligned. Publishers doesn't benefit from speaking fees of consulting fees, only from book sales.

Sounds like an argument for self-publishing to me.

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2:09 PM Permalink | |

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Tools of Change for Publishing/Norwegian Monks!

— posted by Sarah

As part of a brief history of publishing in the opening keynote, I've already seen a few friends:
According to Tim O'Reilly, Microsoft Encarta "fatally wounded" the Encyclopedia Britannia because of "asymmetric competition."

A series of short, related keynotes to kick off the conference. I like this approach; in a nontechnical, high-level keynote, it can be difficult to fill a 60- or 90-minute slot.

Brian Murray, HarperCollins, Retooling HarperCollins for the Future
Consumer publishing *was* straightforward. All promotion wasdesigned to drive traffic to a retailer.

In 2005, "the earth moved." There were search wars, community sites, user-generated content, Web 2.0. Newspapers and magazines responded with premium, branded sites online based on advertising or subscription models.

Book publishers are confused. Search engines treat digitized book content like "free" content. Rights and permissions are unclear. Books are not online -- except illegally! Book archives are not digitized.

Before 2004, "book search" took place in a book store.

What is the role of the publisher in a digital world?
What is the right digital strategy?
What are the right capabilities?
"Search" provides new opportunities for publishers.
Publishers must transition from paper to digital.
How can publishers create value and not destroy it?

Some statistics:
Search is used more often than email.

HarperCollins decided to focus on connecting with customers, rather than e-commerce. Amazon and others already do e-commerce. They focused on the idea of a "digital warehouse" that is analogous to the existing physical warehouse. They want to:
Improvements from digital production and workflow could fund some or all of the digital warehouse investment. Projects that were low priority "IT and production" projects become high priority. Savings were realized in typesetting/design costs, digital workflow, and digital asset management.

The digital warehouse now has 12,000 titles. (Looks as though they were scanned, which doesn't meet *my* definition of "digital content.")

At this point in the presentation, we began to hear a lot about "control." Control of content, controlling distribution, and so on.

HarperCollins does not want others to replicate their 9-billion page archive in multiple locations. They want others to link into their digital warehouse. But if storage is cheap and getting cheaper, what's in it for, say, Google?

Strategic issues for book publishers
The focus on controlling content was interesting and perhaps not unexpected. The business case based on savings in digital production was also interesting.

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1:25 PM Permalink | |

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