Printed on Greenpeace approved pixels: Random House e-book fail
Monday, June 28th, 2010
Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy is a great book. Random House not so good on the e-book basics though.
Posts Tagged ‘digital publishing’
Citizen journalism the winner in News Ltd vs Google
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
There’s a lot to chuckle about in Gordon Farrer’s piece about how much of a threat News Ltd poses to Google.
In no particular order, they are:
- content aggregators care much about Rupert Murdoch putting content behind a paywall,
- increasing the amount of media content in controlled spaces (ie the iPad) could significantly undermine Google’s business model,
- it will become easier to stop people breaking DRM and other copy-protection measures in the future, not harder, and
- the implication that radio stations, TV channels and other internet sites don’t read newspapers and re-use the content.
They’re all worth having a laugh at for various reasons. I’m surprised a technology writer doesn’t make more about how Google structures its search algorithim. I’m also surprised a technology writer thinks the golden age of copy protection is apparently ahead of us, not behind.
But the most interesting thing in Farrer’s piece is that citizen journalists, bloggers and tweeters have more to fear from News Ltd and other old media organisations locking up content than the other way around. Farrer makes the not unreasonable comment that if traditional news content was successfully locked away, tweeters, bloggers and citizen journos would have to go elsewhere for content to ‘riff’ off. It’s a big if but even if he was right in saying it could be done successfully, it doesn’t matter. News Ltd, Fairfax and other big media outlets should be more afraid of citizen journos having reduced opportunities to riff off their content than the other way round.
People are already paying less attention to traditional media, they’re digesting less traditional media and diversifying their sources when they do. They’re paying more attention to their Twitter feeds and Facebook updates than ever before because they feel that the content is relevant and that it matters. Locking conternt up further encourages more of that, not less. News Ltd and Fairfax et al should do everything they can to encourage bloggers and tweeters to hang off their every word.
To do otherwise risks speeding up a virtuous circle that has already begun and risks leaving old media out in the cold.
Why Cory Doctorow (and others) are wrong about the iPad
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Cory Doctorow has a great rant on Boing Boing about why he won’t buy an iPad and why he thinks you shouldn’t buy one either. It’s a great article, full of passion and well thought through arguments. Problem is it’s mostly bunkum.
He makes a number of points in the article that are worth looking at one by one.
Incumbents made bad revolutionaries
His argument here seems to be that Apple is more interested in using the great technical features of the iPad to either restrict its use or find a way to make people pay for it.
The example he uses is the Marvel iPad comic app. The argument is the app – and by extension the iPad – is bad because, for example, you can’t lend someone else your comic. Put aside the fact that it’s really an anti-DRM rant (which I mostly agree with) he forgets one simple thing. The device actually makes it extraordinarily easy to lend someone your comic – hand them your iPad. It is in this way exactly as easy to lend someone a comic on your iPad as it is with a physical comic book.
And if Apple gets this right, they’ll help craft – or at least speed up – the development of a whole new computing and media model - tablet computing.
That leads nicely into the next argument…
Infantilizing hardware
Tonight I had leftover pizza for tea. I heated it in the microwave and then put it under the grill for a minute to crisp it up. I punched some buttons on the microwave and it did what it needed to do – help me consume my dinner. I don’t need to be able to take it apart, repait it and install Linux on it. I just need it to work – like my television, my bed and my table.
But Cory’s argument here seems to suggest that if I’m only using a device to consume something I’m somewhat less likely to survive in the brave new world of the 21st century than someone who can take a device apart and put it back together.
I can enjoy consuming a book even if I don’t know how to pull the spine off, reorder the pages and put it back together again. It should be okay that not everyone wants to take everything apart all the time.
Boing Boing is a site supported by ad revenue. I bet there’s a strong correlation between the rates for those adverts and the number of people simply consuming the site – page hits or unique visitors. I hope the number of people actively interacting with the site by adding comments also factors in there but I doubt simple consumers of the site take a back seat when it’s time to crunch the numbers.
Wal-Martization of the software channel
According to Wikipedia there are around 150,000 third-party applications in the App Store. If Apple was the only computer maker in a regulated market I’d be more likely to accept the claim that “the iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers.”
But again this is an anti-DRM argument, that’s not (or shouldn’t be) restricted to the iPad. Clearly developers and customers aren’t stupid. That’s why more than three billion downloads have been made from the App Store.
The Wal-Mart analogy is a bad one too – at least on one level. The development of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and now the iPad has not seen a massive takeover of an existing market, it’s fostering a massive expansion of a new, previously small market.
Journalism is looking for a daddy figure
It’s not the device’s fault if journalists and bloggers get sucked into the spin from Apple’s marketing team. Indeed, arguing that Rupert Murdoch is silly because he thinks putting up a pay-wall will save his newspaper empire in the long-run should not be confined to discussion about the iPad.
Gadgets come and gadgets go
I’ve got some sympathy for the argument that “the real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” But that’s the real crux of the whole post. Until he gets to here, Cory seems to be arguing that the iPad can’t won’t and shouldn’t change things. But here, he pretty much gives up the ghost and you almost get the sense that he knows it will.
Should Google set up in the foyer of the New York Public Library?
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
Over at io9 Annalee Newitz has a great piece on the Google Book Settlement. It’s a quick catch-up on where things currently stand followed by a very strong analysis of Google’s role as a library versus retailer.
The GBS represents a new stage in the evolution of the publishing industry. It offers a glimpse of what bookstores might become in the mature Information Age: A hybrid library/storefront whose job is to preserve and monetize books. It will be difficult to balance the public good of libraries with the free market of the bookstore.
Check it out here.
Penguin gets it
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
A quick preview of some of Penguin’s plans for books on the iPad. Shiny!
It’s followed by a less shiny but more interesting talk from Penguin CEO John Makinson about how publishers will become more relevant, not less, and how they’ll be taking a giant leap into a distribution model that lets them play around with pricing and access a lot more consumer data. You can see that video over at PaidContent.org.
Rupert Murdoch wants to hold you hostage in a room with 1000 open doors
Friday, August 7th, 2009
Rupert Murdoch thinks you’re a hostage to news.com.au.
He thinks that because you’re a hostage you’ll happily fork over funds to read content on his website (this is despite the fact you’re already contributing through the advertising he puts there) that you used to get for free.
His announcement today that News Ltd’s announcement will start charging people to access content on all its website is an interesting one. As others have already pointed out, it’s not paying readers leaving News Ltd papers in droves that are causing so much of the problem, it’s paying advertisers – especially classified advertisers.
Fine, Rupert, it’s your content. Charge for it if you want. But I’m not sure if your model will work. Here’s a few reasons why:
- RSS – I already get my news feeds dumped onto one page for easy access. Now I’ll have one feed less.
- abc.net.au, brisbanetimes.com.au, cnn.com, ninemsn.com.au, Crikey (okay I do subscribe but it has a lot of free content as well), the Huffington Post, Twitter…
- Finding a model that works for mobile devices, not just desktops.
I might pay for some News Ltd content – a new feature from Trent Dalton or a column from Kathleen Noonan. But their general news reporting is often so atrocious that it’s almost worthless in the marketplace. And that’s why I found this quote from Murdoch so amusing:
“Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting.”
Except, you’re generally not giving us quality reporting. Some of it’s outstanding. But most of it’s not. And people won’t pay for it.
If they understood the web better they might aready have signed up to AdSense and been done with it. You can read the whole story over at the news website (while it’s still free) if you’re keen. But for some reason, they’ve switched off comments on this particular story. Sure these people get the web enough to make this work. Sure they do.
