Author: Sarah O'Keefe

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

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:

• Free samples
• Skype, YouTube, free unlimited storage on Yahoo
• Ad-supported media..product is free, make it back on ads
• Free ice cream samples
• Give away razor, sell blades
• Gift economy/wikipedia, craigslist: people donate expertise/time for nonmonetary — attention, reputation, expression…never before “dignified” as an economy. There is an economy, just money is not the currency.

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:

• Audiobook will be free with book (mp3) (free coupon in real book)
• Will participate in book search, include Google
• Considering an e-book locked to a specific reader for free
• Unlocked e-book with advertising inserted
• Book online with ads in the margins
• As many sample chapters as publisher will accept

How could a physical book be free?

• Sponsored book
• Consultants give away books
• Book with ads
• Free rebate
• Free to influentials/reviewers
• Libraries have always had free books

Why do it?

• Free book is marketing for the non-free thing
• Book is marketing vehicle for celebrity
• Can’t give away time
• If free version is inferior, you give it away to market the better product
• Use “free” to maximize reach to new influentials

Why aren’t more people doing free content?

• Most people are not represented by a speaker’s bureau and can’t monetize fame
• Online sample is not a compelling example of book (maybe for cookbook, probably not for novel)
• No natural advertiser
• Publisher opposition — publishers not in business of selling celebrity
• Annoys the retailers
• Fear and timidity/fear of cannibalization

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.

Tools of Change for Publishing/Norwegian Monks!

As part of a brief history of publishing in the opening keynote, I’ve already seen a few friends:

• The Norwegian Monks video — Technical support for books
• A reference to Vannevar Bush’s “As We Might Think” article from 1945

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:

• 65M in the U.S. read more than 6 books a year.
• 10M read more than 50 books a year. [ed.: waves]
• Younger consumers read less; they spend more time online

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:

• promote and market to the digital consumer.
• use digitized books to create a new publishing/distribution chain
• protect author’s copyright
• “replicate in digital world what we do in physical world”
• got publicity, strong public response
• no single vendor who could deliver turnkey

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

• Should publishers digitize, organize, and own the exclusive digital copy of their book content?
• Should publisher control the consumer experience on the web?
• If the cost of 1 and 2 is zero, should every publisher do them both? would they?
• How to make money

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

Neil Perlin starts blogging

Hyper/Word Services now has a blog, which Neil Perlin (the principal) describes as “low-gibberish overviews of online help technologies and methodologies.” The world could use some of that.

But more importantly, will Neil use his blog as a venue for updates to his Guide to BBQ Restaurants?? The world is waiting.

It’s not easy being green

Over the years, we’ve been quite smug about Scriptorium’s eco-friendly credentials. We don’t have any nasty, dirty factories, we mostly provide services, and all in all, we’re pretty clean.

On the surface.

It turns out, of course, that there are two major holes in our green company argument:

• energy
• air travel

On the energy front, we use power to heat and cool our office and to run our (many) computers. When we travel to visit customers, we usually fly, and airplanes emit huge amounts of pollutants.

In honor of our 10th anniversary, and for Earth Day 2007, we are announcing several new initiates to help reduce our environmental footprint:

• Recycling: We already recycle most of what we use in the office: paper, computers, aluminum, and plastic. We are also going to make a significant effort to use more recycled paper when we print, both in the office and with our print vendors.
• Air travel: Through carbonfund.org, we are purchasing carbon offsets to “zero out” the carbon emissions from our collective air travel. We are also offering our customers the option of live, instructor-led web-based classes, which eliminates travel requirements for client and customer alike.
• Energy: We have joined the North Carolina GreenPower program, which allows us to purchase energy from renewable sources.

You can find a list of carbon offsetting programs in several countries here. There’s an excellent overview of the concept at grist.org and carbonoffsets.org.

Friends in new places

We’re pleased to announce that we have joined XMetaL’s Partner Program as a Certified Service Provider.

We will not be reselling XMetaL software, but we will begin offering XMetaL classes this summer.

This is really a customer-driven decision — we have clients asking us to develop XML and DITA implementations with XMetaL as the core authoring tool.

WritersUA: My sessions

I delivered a session on Coping with the XML Paradigm Shift, in which I introduced my Taxonomy of Problem Writers for the first time. The slides are available in PDF format, and I welcome any and all comments. You probably won’t be surprised that the presentation is slightly over the top. It has, however, already served as a great conversation starter —
I heard people talking about Technosaurs and One-Trick Ponies.

On Tuesday afternoon, I did a double-length, hands-on Introduction to DITA session. (Many thanks to XMetaL for providing attendees with evaluation copies to use during the session.)

I arrived in the room about half an hour before the session and found a few people already moved in. (Always a good sign.) Trying to install and configure software just minutes before a session like this is a truly terrifying undertaking. And as we got closer to the session time, more
and more (and MORE) people kept coming. By my count, we had at least 35 people with laptops and five more without. (That’s about triple the number I’d normally allow in a hands-on training session.)

There were a few kinks, but we managed to get everyone up and running*, and I think the session was valuable. At the end, I polled the room on whether they were more or less likely to implement DITA and got an even split. Perfect!

We will be extending this three-hour session into a two-day Introduction to DITA class, which we expect to begin offering in mid-summer. Watch this space for more details.

* One person had a Mac, which I hadn’t anticipated. Sorry! The two people running Vista also had some issues. There were a few installation errors, but their software seemed to run OK.

WritersUA: Pundit panel

The opening session with the ever-popular pundit panel was interesting. Bernard Ashwanden of Bright Path stole the show with a strip routine. Perhaps I should explain.

Bernard pointed out that life was about content, and the tools were just layers on top of the content. To illustrate the point, he took off his vendor shirt, revealing another vendor’s shirt. Then, he took off the second shirt to reveal yet another vendor’s shirt. After five shirts, he ended up with a MadCap T-shirt. I’m going to assume that this was related to shirt size and not some sort of message about who is closest to his heart. I should stress that Bernard did keep his last shirt on.

Although predictions were created independently by the various pundits, they were in substantive agreement in many cases. Everyone felt that the cliched web 2.0 will have a significant effect on technical writers. In a world where end users contribute to product information on wikis, user forums, podcasts, or videos, what is the role of the “corporate” technical writer?

Several people predicted a demise for traditional help authoring tools. They said that tools must evolve to support new media and community publishing models. I agree in part, but I don’t think this will happen in the next three years, as at least one panelist predicted.

As consultants, it’s our job to understand new technology and to be ready to implement it for our customers. But our customers are at different points on the technology adoption curve. We have:

• Early adopters, who want the latest and greatest technology.
• Cautious middle adopters, who want to implement proven technology.
• Late adopters, who are the last ones to move into a new workflow.

As a result, at any given point, our active customers are:

• Implementing the latest thing
• Implementing the low-risk thing (which was likely the Next Big Thing five years ago)
• Implementing the industry standard (which is robust, but not very cutting edge)

The web 2.0 technologies are still on the extreme bleeding edge. A few companies are implementing them (the Quadralay wiki comes to mind), but corporate adoption is going to take years. Furthermore, user-generated content presents enormous logistical, legal, and corporate positioning challenges, which will slow adoption for risk-averse companies (which is most of them).

WritersUA: Overview

Attendance seemed to be up a little from last year with approximately 450 people at the show.

Great energy as usual, people were excited to be at the venue.

I got a chance to catch up with many of the Usual Suspects including Char James-Tanny, Alan Houser, Neil Perlin, Paul O’Rear, Dave Gash, Brian Walker, Tony Self, and many others. (If I left you out, it’s because my brain has turned to mush.)

Our booth was extremely busy, and we had great conversations with many attendees. In past years, we would tell people what we do (“XML blah blah structured authoring blah blah FrameMaker blah blah training consulting blah blah”), and some percentage would respond with, “Oh, I use [some help authoring tool] and I don’t need that stuff.” This year, there were two types of responses:

• “We’re working on an XML implementation.”
• “We’re thinking about XML.”

The percentage of attendees who do not need to care about XML was extremely low.

Our “Yellow Thingies” were very popular — in addition to chocolate (of course), we were giving away a printed, bound version of three of our white papers (with a yellow cover). You can get the white papers through our online store (free with registration), but attendees really seemed to appreciate the printed version.