Feb

13

The Dog Next Door

Filed Under Blog, eBook, eLearning, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

I am staying in a (very good) hotel in Nashville, TN and in the next door room there is a dog. Not a huge one, I guess from the soprano bark, but a loud enough one to induce IBH (increased blogging behaviour) in me. This should all settle down and revert to normal next week, but the idea that is “dogging” me tonight, as both Dog and I seek sleep and relaxation, is this: in order to enjoy optimal content in a multiple mobile access point world do we alter the content, alter the devices, or alter the user experience.

First, some definition of terms. In the hotel lobby this evening I noticed device proliferation like never before. PC (concierge), laptops, iPad, smartphones, other tablets and PDAs. Clearly all can access the same content via the Web, but not have the same experience of it. I, for example, cannot access the Six Nations Rugby because my screen size is wrong in one source (and where the size is right, the vendor cannot sell me the content because of territorial rights – my credit card is registered in the wrong country). The rights question is one for another day: my issue this evening is how to free content from the device display limitation.

And in thinking through the problem my thoughts go back all the time to the article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff in Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1) on the death of the Web and the ascendancy of the Internet. So we might say that these issues will be resolved on the internet by an App which the user downloads. This will interface with his content sources and optimize them for the device which is being used to access them. The appearance and treatment of content therefore becomes a part of the design interface of the internet, and nothing to do with the source publisher, who will “create” in a context that is a lowest common denominator allowing for the widest range of optimization. The Bland leading the Bland, perhaps, and certainly something which becomes more complex as we introduce more images, graphics, video and audio alongside text in increasingly multiple media services. Still, this is the user workflow approach, with the App allowing users to control their access mode.

If this world prevails, some of my publisher friends will run screaming into the street tearing their hair (though few of them have much of that). They want to re-assert the primacy of the Web, because they want to continue to control the customer in every way that they can. Already threatened by Apple, Amazon and Kobo, and only partly disarmed by the hope that Google Editions may prove an ally after all, many publishers see loss of control of the delivered appearance of their products as an ultimate separation from end users. They would want to have editionizing software that ran with the product, allowing you to see it differently according to the device you are using, but, within your licence, always able to ensure that what you were looking at was optimized to the device you were using to read it on. In this way the publisher of origin would be able to charge for the added value of multiple device usage as well as keep control of the licences conferred on end users.

This may not be an enduring problem, since the network will one day resolve it as an access condition. But in the meanwhile there are choices. And as it happens, we have what citizens here call a “bake-off” between the two opposing camps. In the red corner on my right, please meet Flipboard Pages (http://flipboard.com), who will take any page of published media you encounter on Twitter or Facebook, and reconfigure it to read properly on your access device. This is an App, and this is the beginnings of a workflow solution.

And in the Blue corner, on my left, meet newly launched TreeSaver (http://treesaver.net), a JavaScript solution for the publishing community to allow multiple device viewing of the same content in very different device contexts. It adjusts automatically to the context, and the portfolio of exemplars on its website work very impressively. This is the Web solution and represents the ways in which the content creation community will try to fight back. Add this, publishers will say, and it will justify higher prices for subscription or one-off products. Buy from us, the intermediaries will say, and you can have Grandson of Flipboard as standard on all our products and services.

As I say, this may not last forever, but, in every field of content, the next 24 months will see decisive battles on the business models of content marketplaces. Do Apple et al get to restructure the business or not? And if not, do the originating agencies retain control of the appearance as part of the battle to retain a direct connection with the consumer? What did not appear to be real issues six months ago are now front and centre. How can you keep your hair when all around you are losing their heads. And is this issue the Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night?

Feb

9

“I Can’t Tame Wild Women…

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

…but I can sure make a tame woman wild”. After an evening in the splendid bars of Nashville’s HonkyTonk district, odd things float to the surface of a disorientated brain. I do not, for example, know if Ms Amanda Hocking can be categorized as a wild woman, but book publishers have made her mad and she is well on the way to getting even. More of that later. This note is intended as a three part meditation on Format, and those who live- and die- by it.

Lets start with Mr Murdoch’s shiny new The Daily, published for iPad. I caught up with it this week and whatever its qualities – and it has some – it is an attempt to create a newspaper in a format not intended for newspapers. “New Times calls for New Journalism” it stridently proclaims, so I invite you to glance at these extracts from Sunday’s editorial:

“…Here you will read reviews of books that matter. Pieces that explore religious faith. And history stories that illuminate where we come from.”
“You will also find The Daily’s own point of view. We will crusade for reforming America’s broken schools so that we can remain the world’s pre-eminent economic and technological power. We will fight for sensible immigration reform and smart environmental laws. We will push for policies that give Americans the maximum possible freedom in their personal lives. And we don’t believe that expanding government is the solution to most problems.”
“…We believe America is exceptional, and that it must retain its unique role as global leader.”
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/02/06/020611-opinions-editorial-day1-newlede/

This sounds to me just like an old-fashioned newspaper claiming an audience in the old-fashioned way. Far from the global opportunity to allow readers to create what they want to hear, in threads that agglomerate into stories, Mr Murdoch’s people have taken what has failed already and reconstructed it digitally. Did they think that the fall in advertising was somehow unconnected to the formatted functionality of the newspaper? What if advertisers left because newspapers  no longer worked? They no longer influenced people or enlarged brands. What a pity no one at News seems to have studied social media at all (despite owning MySpace and running it into the ground). Because in social media you find people who do influence others, and guess what, they are people just like us.

So lets go over to www.Klout.com. This site measures that interest in influence which Mr Murdoch missed. It enables people to run campaigns by influencing key influencers – people whose following in tweets and social sites and blogs adds up to influence that affects opinions, and buying decisions. So maybe the newspaper of the future will be built not around “new journalism” but what opinion formers think is important. Only it won’t be called a newspaper. Here is what Klout (and it could equally well be its rival, PeerIndex) say to companies  about using this influence:

“Your business needs influencers. They’re already talking about your industry and maybe even your products. Find and engage these influencers and they can become evangelists for your brand. Klout allows you to find influencers based on topic or hashtag. Do you know the value of your customers? Historically lifetime value has been measured based on purchases, but with Klout you can understand their network value. People trust recommendation more than advertisements; Klout allows business to tap into that power.

Your Business should:

You can also connect directly with influencers through Klout Perks.”

So, in other words, you pay the influencers to favour you. Was this where your advertising went, Mr Murdoch? And then your publishing house. Harper Collins (and all its rivals, to be fair) rejected Ms Hocking and forced her to self-publish. Here USA Today takes up the story (http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_ST_N.htm?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter):

“Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads.

More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books.

“I can’t really say that I would have been more successful if I’d gone with a traditional publisher,” says Hocking, 26, who lives in Austin, Minn. “But I know this is working really well for me.”

In fact, Hocking is selling so well that on Thursday, the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list.

A recent survey shows 20 million people read e-books last year, and more self-published authors are taking advantage of the trend.

(Self-publishing is done without the involvement or vetting of an established publisher and uses a publishing system such as Lulu, Smashwords, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing or Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! Many traditional media outlets do not review self-published books.)”

Ms Hocking got even rather than getting angry. But what she did should not happen in the regular media world. She should need big name publishers  to get her name about. Only Harper Collins could get her the shelf space, the book plugging session on a Fox TV show or the exposure to create national demand. But they didn’t and she didn’t need them. She used the influencing power of early readers to create a brand presence, and I bet that her readers don’t think they are reading a book as much as a thin strip of ever-changing exciting narrative. “Its an eBook – oh, you mean that used to be a book?”

I imagine with interest how my favourite book publisher will tackle this. After a great deal of flim-flam about quality control (did you ever hear a publisher say “this is badly written rubbish and though I know it will sell in millions I decline to publish”?) he will point to the price. We could never do anything at 99 cents, he will say. Funny, that. Mr Murdoch’s The Daily costs 99 cents – per week. Its a new business. Lets get used to it.

« go back — keep looking »