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It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story.
Bloglishing? Part 1
Posted by
7 July, 2008
Posted in Blogging, Publishing
Apologies for another dubious neologism (ok, one usage already indexed by Google). We’ve had so many, why stop now? Aside from being a slightly, er, clunky name “bloglishing” captures a concept that I’ve recently been interested in; namely the different ways a blog is actually published.
Blogs are popularly thought of as quintessential self publishing, the implication being that there is no, or very little, intermediary between the content creation and consumption. Of course even within traditional self publishing there is a huge amount of intermediation of one kind or another, ranging from a simple model like Lulu to more complex schemes of vanity publishing that come with certain services.
However this very obviously fails to describe the intricacy and diversity within blogging, fails to account for differing platforms and differing scales of audience, as well as different models of collaboration on or syndicating the content itself. I would suggest that all blogs are to some extent published, with differing layers of “publication” that apply to different blogs. These layers are by no means mutually exclusive and many blogs could be included in more than one layer.
What might these layers of blog publishing look like?
the manifesto as a word cloud
Posted by
2 July, 2008
Posted in General
I’ve recently re-discovered Wordle - a web service that takes any text or RSS that you feed it and transforms the sentences into a word cloud, with lovely typography and colours.
I find it a useful tool for checking the main message of any piece of writing, from a letter to a report to… a shopping list. So I thought it would be interesting to run Sara’s “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century” through the machine and see what came out the other side.
There are no right or wrong answers, obviously - I’m not looking for interpretation here, but rather a different view on the material, to see what thoughts that highlights.
Looking at the result, I’m not surprised to see a clear message emerging around the most used words: publishers, content, digital, books. I’m also pleased to see words like readers, reading and authors are prominent. And I’m delighted that one of the strongest messages is represented by the words ‘need’ and ‘will’ - meaning, it’s something that will need to happen, and also, it can be interpreted as the will of the people involved can bring about change, responding to the need - publishers, readers, authors.
You can see the full size version in the Wordle gallery - link
Attention Deficit
Posted by
27 June, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing, Search
Whole business empires are now founded upon that most fleeting of things, at once profound and perfunctory, the human gaze. In buzzword bingo “attention economy” is a winning ticket. In this model of super abundant information invisibility is a function of excess and simply being noticed becomes the prerequisite for sucess, whether this is measured in monetary terms or by other criteria.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Go into any bookstore and what you notice is hardly an absence of choice, title vying against stylishly covered title for our hungry eyes. Indeed Reuters claims that the UK has now overtaken the US as the country with the most books published per annum, with over 206,000 books published in 2005 alone.
Even as our frazzled attention spans are being catered for by five second ad slots and continuous partial attention becomes our default the deluge of books expands. Media coverage of literature contracts. The result is that the publishing space is crowded, an attention addicted junkie with not enough eye balls to satisfy its craving.
And then along comes the web.
espresso ahead
Posted by
24 June, 2008
Posted in General
The deal has been done and print-on-demand Espresso Book Machines will be going into a major retail chain in due course - 60 Blackwells stores will have them, initially version 1.5, but eventually the more compact and faster version 2.0 (via The Bookseller).
If the EBM follows Moore’s law, you’ll be able to buy one for your home in a short while!
Eoin Purcell remarks, in his blog post on this subject, that “When you consider the customer breakdown and the likely purchases that Blackwell encompasses, you see that they are almost ideally suited as a launch customer for the Espresso in the UK!” I generally agree with this assessment, although I think the list of titles available through the machine (1MM apparently) could be more or less skewed to the Blackwells market segment, depending on their strategy. Or in other words, could Blackwells use the EBM to leapfrog Borders or Waterstones in the UK by selling the long tail titles across all segments, categories and genres? Unlikely, I suppose, with just 60 stores, and that idea relies on readers/bookbuyers everywhere being very determined about what they want to buy next, and being constantly on the hunt for relatively obscure titles. Hmm, maybe not.
Oh, and… erm, 1 million titles! Where are they all coming from? Whose titles are they? Do you need a licence to POD? There must be solid answers to these questions out there… bit more googling ahead for me, I reckon…
zoom zoom
Posted by
23 June, 2008
Posted in General, Search
User interface design is all about creating onscreen metaphors for real life objects, actions and behaviours. Browsing books on Amazon is more like flipping through a catalogue than wandering through the aisles and lingering over shelves in a bookshop.
Zoomii.com offers a realworld metaphor for book buying - visual bookshelves, covers out (if this takes off, I wonder if they’ll start putting books in spine out and charging publishers to show the cover on the shelf?) that you can click, grab and move along. You can zoom in and out to see more or less books, or examine a cover in detail.
It is perhaps a sign of the times (or just the Bezos strategy) that this new book browsing service is built on Amazon’s cloud computing services, EC2 and S3 (via ReadWriteWeb)
The challenge now, as I’m sure the folks at zoomii are aware, will be to keep the prices competitive, get more books in there, refine the UI in response to user behaviour, and spread the word. Good luck to them!
Update: Shelfari has had a makeover - looks like visual bookshelves are making deeper in-roads on the web. (via GalleyCat)
Photo: Entering Hyperspace by Eole Wind
Plumbing ROI
Posted by
20 June, 2008
Posted in General, Publishing
At the NLab Social Media conference there was, almost inevitably, a steady undercurrent from the assembled business types . It goes like this: but how do we make money? Sara mentioned buzzword bingo. How about this for a buzzword: monetize. Money being wasted, time being wasted; earnest new media consultants, saying “yes but”. The “two cultures” divide seems alarmingly prevalent at this late hour.
People like Booksquare have long and intelligently argued that publishers need to invest in social media, or new media more widely, in order to stay relevant to the readers that sustain them. We all, one hopes, know the compelling arguments for doing this, just as we are all familiar with the squeezed margins and tighter than tight bottom lines that publishers across the board have to operate within.
Andrea Saveri from the Institute for the Future said something that struck a cord. Rather than thinking about social media as an investment with an expected return, we should think of social media like we think of the office plumbing: an overhead, a simple cost of business.
Buzzword burnout
Posted by
19 June, 2008
Posted in General
I’m at my second conference on Social Networks in two weeks. I am at severe risk of buzzword burnout and if anyone asks me again whether I am twittering this conference I cannot be held accountable for my actions.
The conference has been cleverly self-knowing and instituted a game of buzzword bingo, which most people had completed before the end of the introductions. I have to say I am fed up to the back teeth with ’social media gurus’ telling me things like, ‘your organisation *must* have a blog’ and ‘did you know, social networking tools can help connect teams and make them more productive?’. No. Organisations should explicitly *not* force their members to blog. A blog is only a useful tool for publishing direct to the web and communicating around that content in a very immediate way. Like any social media tool it is only as good as its content and the level of engagement with it, and its success is bound by the degree of value its audience finds in it. Likewise, using social media tools to connect team members or to connect with customers only works if the human beings living and working with those tools (a) actually use them and (b) find them useful - and fun.
real world more fun than the digital one today
Posted by
12 June, 2008
Posted in General
Here at the Digitalist we’re frequently enthusing about experiments taking place in digital publishing, on the web, on mobile and so forth… but today I’m pleased to be able to point to a fun and innovative bit of marketing taking place in the real world - link
Congratulations to Peter James, the police and the Pan Macmillan marketeers on this idea and making it happen (always a good trick).
“Mobile, mobile, mobile”
Posted by
2 June, 2008
Posted in Development, General, eBooks
So said Google CEO Eric Schmidt when asked the future of the web. Last week in an interview with Reuters WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrel said that not investing in mobile content was to miss out on a big opportunity. At Pan Macmillan we agree. While reading on mobile devices remains marginal in the UK, it is also, at some level, already ubiquitous, a daily reality for most of us.
Mobile holds out the promise of quick, convenient, easy, chunkable, affordable, relevant and portable digital reading. It’s strengths are legion and this is why we are pleased to announce a deal with Global Reader (wap.global-reader.com), a mobile content distribution service from MPS Mobile. Over the next few months we plan on releasing over 600 titles through this service, spanning Pan Macmillan imprints from Picador to Boxtree.
Observing Change
Posted by
27 May, 2008
Posted in Blogging, Publishing, eBooks
In Sunday’s Observer it was announced that the long serving literary editor, Robert McCrum, was to stand down. He talks about how publishing has changed, how the clubby atmosphere of yesteryear has given way to the blazing lights of the corporate future. In ten “chapters” he gives us some of the big changes and events of the past decade, from the emergence of writers like Zadie Smith to the increasing importance of the literary festival.
Of McCrum’s ten great changes three are connected to the internet: Amazon, the growth of blogging and the Kindle. Each represents a separate strand of the multiple connections between publishing and the web, but each succinctly emphasizes how fully entwined they have become.
Upon reading the piece Sara sent the following dispatch from her holiday:
“Overall this is a very thought-provoking and thorough overview, but I think his observations on the digital side of things are shallow - and plain wrong in places.
