May
8
100 Years of Marshall McLuhan
Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
Since I learnt this week that this is the centenary of the great Canadian scholar and mystifiers’ birth, I cannot resist using the fact, and using it to get back into a groove that seemed to escape me last week. I justify this by saying that I only write when I have something to say. On the other hand I have something to say far more often than I write, but I need an impulse to get me over the hump and force me to find time and concentration. That impulse is almost always the ability to use this to postpone starting something else equally important. In this way my life turns into a series of deadlines, each one creating pressure and driving activity. I dread to think what might happen if these pressures to perform were removed: would I sit down and read the whole of “Colonel Roosevelt”, the third volume of Edmund Morris’s grand life of the progressive President, and my current obsession, in one go, like some greedy schoolboy, the Fat Owl of the Remove, consuming chocolate cake? Probably. I am not a very refined person. And I do like to gloat.
Which brings me back to writing. This week’s impulsion came during the Publishers’ Forum in Berlin. I was listening to one of the beguiling masters of change, Robert Stein, describing his experimental work in his SocialBook Inc operation. I have no doubt that he is right: in a networked society reading becomes a social activity, and that I should not be secretively curling up with the Colonel, but actively debating with you and other readers (and I do know another current reader as it happens) whether Roosevelt was right to run against Taft in 1912. And was it Woodrow Wilson who was the true progressive? I know perhaps 5 people with whom I could have this discussion, and no doubt I could find 50 more online if this book were a social document. And it would be cream on my chocolate cake to have those talks, but they would slow down and retard the progress through the book, which now occupies late evenings and weekends. I read 37 books of this size last year: how many would I read in a social hall of mirrors? And would the conversation and friendship derived from Bob’s social vision, from his four styles of social reading embedded in a browser-type interface that allowed me to annotate pages, read other readers comments and interact with them, would all that compensate me for only reading 5 books a year?
Earlier in the session, part of an increasingly highly regarded meeting, put together by Klopotek, the publishing workflow specialist (http://www.klopotek.de/enindex.htm), I heard Liza Daly talking about ePub 3. I welcome this with open arms, delighted by the speed with which this revised standard is being produced, warmed by Liza’s clear and emphatic summation of its aims, and only depressed by the liklyhood that hardware vendors will take their time in introducing compliant devices. As Liza summarized it, the major advances, as well as using HTML5, are in language use (however did we persuade ourselves that vertical reading as well as horizontal left-right as well as right-left was not necessary – and thus exclude at a stroke Chinese, Korean and Japanese!); interactivity; audio and video; and design/layout conventions that allow pages to refocus themselves appropriately in terms of the screen size being used to view them. The gains here will be for graphic novels, the beginnings of multimedia in eBook, and, I would guess, for the further evolution of the eTextbook (whatever that may be). As Liza came to an end I found myself at once delighted by a real progress report by a real expert on real progress made, and straining to see the expression on Stein’s face to see if he was thinking what I was thinking: “Fifteen years on the Internet and we are only now installing the features that were so important, in the early 1990s, on multimedia CD-ROM”!
Unfortunately he was sitting in front of me, but in those days in the early ’90s when “bandwidth” meant “fixed disc”, not Broadband, Robert’s Voyager operation was the shining example of creativity in the US market in this sector. His example was very encouraging to people like me, an advisor to and non-executive director of Dorling Kindersley Ltd, who, through the drive and determination of Peter Kindersley (an impatient innovator whose background as a designer helped no end in the creation of this medium) were following rapidly along the same track to create a generation of interactive disc-based reference products whose ingenuity and use of content and software have not yet been emulated in the eBook world. DK also produced a publisher of real note in Peter’s colleague, Alan Buckingham, who proved a master at stitching together resources and effects to produce deeply engaging learning and reference materials. Alan was the first maestro to paint with the whole multimedia palette: when eBooks grow up and they start giving awards for them, they should call them the “Buckies”!
So here is one example of the way in which markets sometimes have to loop back and rediscover themselves: Marshall McCluhan knew all about that when he spoke of the effect of television on film. Another Publishers Forum speaker said something similar: “Longtail is not a lucrative market unless you are an aggregator” said David Hetherington of Baker and Taylor. Which is why print on demand providers are aggregators and why publishers surrender their digital files to them. Which heralds the day, which David did not say, when publishing margins are more rentals and royalties than retail, pushing publishing even further away from organizing the marketplace and imperilling its position.
A hundred years ago a man was born who well described these and so many other changes in media marketplaces, and did it from the user viewpoint, creating a sort of sociological view of media access. Nothing here would surprize him in the least: he would have claimed it all as his.
PS. One very good reason for going to this conference, let alone the excellent content, is being inside Berlin’s wonderful conference centre, the Axica. Built by Frank Gehry for a bank that now cannot afford it, to our great advantage, the conference auditorium sits in the womb of the building beneath a glass canopy, while seminars are held in a wooden egg suspended above it. I got to use this, and can testify to its wonderful sound qualities: spectators sit in rising seating above the (?) bank’s board room table, for all the world like speaking in one of those anatomy theatres of the sixteenth century (Uppsala university has an outstanding example).
Feb
27
Touch – Pause – Engage
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
This invocation, spoken by the referee to initiate a scrummage in the English game of Rugby Union, has been echoing through what remains of my mind in a weekend where, as ever in my place at Twickenham, I have watched England eke out a gritty victory against the French. American readers may jump a paragraph if they will at this point, or join with me in wonderment at the glories of time transfer (my son and I came home to analyse the game in painstaking detail using slow-mo on a previously recorded version, and then spent this afternoon joyously alternating between coverage of Scotland v Ireland from Edinburgh and India v England at cricket, live from Bangalore). Masters of Time and Distance, and only beholden to the Laws of Commerce (I was unable to see previous games in the US since ESPN hold the rights for excerpts and summaries!). But when this wonderful sporting escapism shrugs off the constraints of territoriality and becomes a live factor on my Tablet the dynamics of daily life change again (phone call from my daughter at university this evening: unable to complete essay because too much distraction on time-lapse internet TV). We must bear in mind that it was sports coverage (in the soon to end days of geographical exclusivity) as much as anything else that built the House of Murdoch, so this is no trivial subject matter. Nor is my concern that my children may never qualify for anything at all if they have to shrug off a barrage of media possibilities and temptations never made available to me.
And this is a futuristic conversation in another sense, and perhaps I should now make an alarming confession. I do not own an iPad. I can defend this and increasingly often have to do so, by saying that “I never buy before 6.0” (makes one sound smugly superior instead of poor and outdated) or, even more often “I am waiting for the HTC Flyer”! This usually throws the inquisitor off the scent – either he does not recognize the Taiwanese industry wunderkind, whose smartphone is so readily promoted by Google at present, or he has heard of the Flyer, due to launch later this year, and can debate with me on the merits of having a 420 gramme machine (same weight as a paperback, half the weight of an iPad), on which you can draw or write as well as use touch screen access. By this time I have covered my tracks on the ownership issue, and we part agreeing on how clunky the iPad really is. Until next Wednesday, that is, when Apple unveil iPad 2.0 and the pressure mounts again for me to come aboard.
I have been having some excellent debates in recent weeks about this unrefereed scrummage which is technology innovation, and its impact on the rapidly moving world of business and professional information. At the moment so many of our preconceptions are built around the consumer uses of the tablet world and around the access advantages that the devices provide in business and elsewhere for travellers, that we are not yet tuned into the impact that this mobile computing power could have on our workflow activities and the integration of still separate elements of our intranet and extranet worlds. In my view, carrying your connectivity on a Tablet will place renewed pressure on improvements in voice-text transliteration, and at last begin to move machine language translation from the esoteric to the standard. Words spoken will need to be stored and subject to textual analysis, as well as being copied to third parties. Documents exchanged will need to exist multi-lingually where necessary. And nothing will be stored that cannot also be heard. All of this will ready the tablet to its eventual role, as portended by the laptop releasing us from the desk, as the complete personal assistant – the PDA comes to fruition at long last. Then I will discard my Blackberry, throw out the Netbook that loyally travels thousands of miles with me and embrace the Future. But, since you ask, I am currently at Pause, and not yet Engage.
Finally, some updating of previous efforts here. In the first instance it is always good to remind ourselves of past worlds and where we came from, and the trading statement of Yell, the yellow pages publisher who named itself after its online service but never really invested in it does that splendidly. Pre-tax profits in the nine months to December were halved and revenue was 11.8 % off target. In its UK businesses print revenue went down 22.3% and online went up 1.8 %. Recovery is proving worse than recession. Like much of the newspaper world, this advertising sector is now dead wood, in my view. While it remains interesting to see who can recreate in digital services the hyperlocal environments that once gave rise to local newspaper publishing, the heirs to classified advertising directories are now fully entrenched in network marketplaces. Time to write the history here.
And can the same be said of consumer book publishers? Not quite yet, perhaps, but since I wrote about Ms Amanda Hocking (26 year old care assistant from Minnesota with 4 paranormal romances in the USA Today bestseller list last month), other evidence of successful self-publishing comes to light. This time it is British thriller writer Stephen Leather. Although an established conventionally published author, his latest novellas were rejected by Hodder and Stoughton (Hachette) as being too short. So he published them, like Ms Hocking, on Amazon. One, a gritty everyday tale of a serial killer in New York, has topped the Amazon bestseller download list for 7 weeks, and his other works have been at the top, he estimates, for 90% of the past 3 months. He claims in interviews to sell 2000 books a day, and to be earning £11,000 a month from this activity, but this is not what interests me most. Like Ms Hocking, his works are short, and sell for $0.99 /£0.70. I smell a trend – short enough and cheap enough to read on the train! I don’t commute and don’t have an iPad, but I do see that survival as a publisher may mean moving one’s focus to where the buyers are going. Or is that just old-fashioned consultancy talk!
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