virtualDavis

James Governor tackles the concept of digital media consumption in a familiar and appealing way in his March 10 blog post, Reading is Writing: Illuminating The Digital Manuscript. He opens with a reminder that reading, albeit a solitary practice on the simplest level, usually tends to be[come] considerably more interactive than the initial visual/mental textual interface:

“there is an other side to the book, the canon, the stories we tell each other. We like to discuss books. We like to write things in the margin – we even have a name for this activity – marginalia, a practice as old as the Illuminated Manuscript. Most of all though, books help us learn – particularly when we share them.”

This echoes the reflection I recently offered to the smart folks over at Vook.com. They had solicited feedback from customers to see what we think they should be improving in order to help design a more appealing digital storytelling experience. I offered quite a bit of feedback, but the crux of my advice was to better leverage the full potential of interaction and marginalia allowed by the connected, digital publishing format.

The first generation vooks are basically digitzed books, e-books, with periodic video clips peppering the text that readers can opt to view as they read the text. Of course, hyperlinked text is present and the symbolic opportunity to connect to Twitter and Facebook and post your reactions to the vook, ideally offering a little free advertising to the company. This is a necessary first foray into digital storytelling, but it’s scarcely superior to reading the print version. And in many ways, it’s an inferior experience because there’s no handy way to add marginalia or share the reading  experience with others.

After reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s print edition of Crush It! then re-reading and watching embedded videos in the Vook edition of Crush It! my review (video above) was intended to offer timely feedback to the team producing these digital stories, but also to jump start their thinking. By capturing screencasts, I tried to hint at a more engaging way to open up and amplify the text. At present, the format is very solitary. Very locked up in a text-based silo with some video audio visual candy to make the reader feel like the experience is sexier than reading the print version.

James Governor grumbles that the “big problem with most current efforts in digital publishing [is that] they don’t learn from the web. We can bookmark a link on the web but why can’t we bookmark a digital book? It’s not enough to view source, you need to be able to share it and mark it up. What the hell good is XML if it’s just for layout?” While reading Crush It! or my current vook, Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Super Ideavirus, it should be quick, easy and fun to share my marginalia with others. This requires two important additions to the current vook experience:

1. a seamless scrapbook component should be integrated into the vook so that I can underline/highlight, jot notes, link to related content (including Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, blog posts) and generally capture/contribute my interactive reading, viewing and listening experience;

2. a seamless, quick and easy sharing tool.

I know that both of these suggestions are easier requested than developed. And I know that copyright issues need to be resolved with both. But these challenges should inspire innovation, not inhibit it. Whether I want to tweet, email, quote in an article, embed into a YouTube video, include in a presentation or share an audio excerpt via mobile phone, I would like to be able to open up my reading experience to share with others.

Obviously sharing in this way needs to be limited to excerpts so that copyright is respected and readers can’t skip buying the vook by accessing the full vook when shared. However, if/when I share an excerpt, the person I share with becomes a likely purchaser. The viral sales potential is huge! Especially if the shared excerpt makes it easy to buy the vook. And it would be amazing if vook buyers could then be granted access to the marginalia annotated versions of others. In other words, I decide to buy a book based upon a screencast/audio clip from a friend. I buy the vook, but rather than being limited to the original version, I can also toggle on/off the marginalia of my friend if my friend gives me permission. Likewise, I could get permission from other readers as well to access their marginalia. The practical application of this in a learning environment would be extremely valuable. A professor could enable students in his/her class to access their marginalia and follow their links, effectively supplementing the original text in an interactive footnoting environment.

I’ve become verbose, and since I’ll inevitably return to this topic before long, I’ll wrap up. But a few last quick thoughts. Vooks (and other digital book publishers) should at the very least plan to:

1. produce an integrated text, audio and video edition,
2. enable digital marginalia and
   
3. enable sharing.

It’s a dizzying experience, reading Vooks. But they represent just a few examples of a new genre that has been alternatively dubbed v-books, digi-books, multimedia books and Cydecks, all with essentially the same concept: It’s a book… but wait, there’s more! […] Is a hybrid book our future? Maybe. “As discourse moves from printed pages to network screens, the dominant mode will be things that are multi-modal and multilayered,” says Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. “The age of pure linear content is going to pass with the rise of digital network content.” (Washington Post)

The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse asks, if book publishing is moving “beyond the printed page to multisensory experience, what about reading?” I just completed a feedback survey for vook.com after purchasing and reading Gary Vayverchuk’s Crush It! They’re asking lots of questions to try to understand some of the same issues this article explores. The market will decide, and so many exciting new storytelling techniques will evolve in the process.

Where to Look for Opportunities

When we start with the premise that consumers haven’t paid for content in the past, we gain visibility into new ideas that make sense for the digital era.

It’s not micro-payments alone that will save the future for professional quality media content. On the other hand, the idea that the consumer will always pay for distribution that massively over-serves their needs is not a foregone conclusion either. Paying $2500+ per year for cable/broadband/telephony/mobile in order to gain access to a million times more content than you could ever possibly need is not going to work out so well for the media industry either.

We need solutions that improve the relevance of content for individual consumers without expecting individual consumers to be able to predict exactly what they want. The Internet has exploded the supply of content but digital technologies have only just begun to filter and sample that content for the consumer in an effective manner.

Content providers who used to enjoy control over the method of distribution are feeling a lot of pain but their content remains vital and appealing to consumers. Rather than stomping our foot like Mr. Isaacson, it is better to focus on new solutions that tie content and distribution together in ways that create great consumer experiences.

We don’t know what the other side of this transformation will look like but we have guidance;

• Look at what the iPod did for music. Think about the critical role of sampling in the success of the micropayment model for songs.
• Look at the potential of what Kindle can do for print publications.
• Study the legacy of syndication that makes business partners of the content distributor and the content provider.
• Look at the popularity of expensive sets of DVDs for old TV episodes.
• Anticipate what the near-future DVR will be capable of doing.
• Think of what GPS will mean for the distribution of local and timely content.
• Think about what Twitter and search are doing to reveal the consumer’s need for specific content at precise moments in time.

It is time to think about distribution and content holistically. Digital technologies are not the enemy, they are an enormous opportunity to improve the relevance of content to the individual consumer. Don’t think so small as micropayments for one article at a time and don’t take for granted the current ability to charge a big fee for massively over-delivering irrelevant content. Look in the middle.

Somewhere in between asking the consumer to buy content “al a carte” and asking the consumer to pay for the whole menu, new “prix fixe” solutions are going to mature.

A Final Word from Our Sponsor

While we are at it, let’s not lose sight of the value of the advertising supported model. We are in the middle of a complex media transformation and a brutal recession. At times like this, pundits like Bob Garfield want to convince us that advertising is dead.

Advertising works. In the digital era, the consumer finds it very easy to ignore irrelevant advertising but they are quicker to engage with relevant advertising than ever before because the Internet makes engagement easy.

Be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water in pursuit of the goal of getting the consumer to pay for the content. The advertiser remains happy to assume that role so long as we can offer a reasonably scaled and engaged audience. We just need to apply our new resources to help the advertiser better align their message with the right consumer at the right time.

Media companies can create new and better advertising values and it will still command a premium relative to the costs of distribution. Now that digital efficiencies have greatly reduced the cost of distribution, media companies need to look hard at the overhead that is a hangover from the analog era.

Some legacy media executives complain that they are trading analog dollars for digital pennies as advertising moves online. That is a valid concern so we can’t drag our feet when it comes to rethinking overhead costs from analog dollars to digital pennies as well.

We can reduce overhead, improve advertising value and find new consumer revenue models built on interesting combinations of content and distribution all at the same time. We need to be more disciplined about who the consumer is and what they really want as we build our new solutions, but the solutions are just waiting for the imaginations of new media moguls to find them.

via huffingtonpost.com

I excerpted this from an informative piece with sound thinking that I’d recommend to anyone creating content (word, video, music, etc.) for an audience. A few highlights:

#1. “We need solutions that improve the relevance of content for individual consumers without expecting individual consumers to be able to predict exactly what they want.”

#2. “Study the legacy of syndication that makes business partners of the content distributor and the content provider.”

#3. “Think about what Twitter and search are doing to reveal the consumer’s need for specific content at precise moments in time.”

4. “We need to be more disciplined about who the consumer is and what they really want as we build our new solutions, but the solutions are just waiting for the imaginations of new media moguls to find them.”

Image via Wikipedia

If your head is still spinning after 2009’s triple digit growth rate, you’ll need a clamp to steady your skull when you read that January 2010 e-book sales posted a nearly 370% jump over the same month in 2009, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers. The numbers are $31,900,000 for January ’10 compared to $8,800,000 for January ’09. January was also the biggest e-sales month ever, and it wasn’t even close. The biggest month to date was December ’09 at $19,100,000. (booktrade.info)

Hat tip to http://twitter.com/iainbroome for the link to this upbeat news.

Related articles

• E-book reader sales to boom as prices plunge (go.theregister.com)
• The Gorilla in in the House Again (madgeniusclub.com)
• Can’t Live Without Us, Says Publisher. Can Too, Says Konrath (ereads.com)

Here’s a quick overview of just who the Big Six [publishers] are [and] where they fit in the modern corporate world.

Hachette Book Group (formerly Warner Books)
HarperCollins (owned by Ruper Murdoch’s News Corp)
MacMillan Publishers Ltd 
Penguin Group 
Random House (largest English-language trade publisher in the world)
Simon & Schuster (owned by the CBS Corporation)

Can you be “just an author” these days, pecking away at a typewriter in a basement somewhere but otherwise completely eschewing publicity and remaining out of the public eye, Salinger- and Pynchon-style, writing in a bubble-like Platonic ideal of authordom?

I think a few authors can probably pull it off, particularly those who are already established. But it’s increasingly rare for authors breaking into the business…

We live in a networked time. The Internet is quickly organizing itself into tribes of far-flung, plugged-in, like-minded individuals and shaping how we learn about the stories we consume… The authors who engage their audience and inspire devoted clans of fans have a leg up over those who sit back and let the publisher take care of that whole promotional thing or who hope lightning will strike on its own.

via blog.nathanbransford.com

Literary agent Nathan Bransford seems to echo what I’m reading all over: no more poet in a garret… Write and write well, but don’t neglect your platform.

Photo via diannej.com

So here’s the thing: It’s difficult to sell a cookbook now, with a platform, so why would these three unknowns think they can sell a memoir without one? Creating and building a readership takes time, sometimes years. I can think of three possible explanations:

1. They’re unrealistic

2. They’re not serious

3.  They don’t believe in themselves enough to invest.

Because if the opposite were true: they’re realistic, serious, and believe in themselves, they’d get to work.

via diannej.com

via theoatmeal.com

Wow! Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) has a fancy book deal! That’s impressive and inspiring. Find more information here:

http://theoatmeal.com
http://twitter.com/Oatmeal

I heard Brad Inman give a speech at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, and he said trying to get stuff done in book publishing is like trying to swim through a jar of peanut butter. I nearly stood up and screamed “EXACTLY!” I have had the good fortune to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and tech people, and they are doing circles around my publishing colleagues because they don’t put up the roadblocks and draw the lines in the sand. If I had to guess, the peanut butter people have no idea what that means.

Here are 10 signs you might be……….The Peanut Butter:

1) You can’t think of anything to show for your work in the last six months.

2) You think your job is to prevent mistakes from being made.

3) You believe that the more people invited to a meeting, the more successful the meeting will be.

4) Meetings take months to schedule.

5) You would rather be “politically correct” and “cc everyone” than make something great happen.

6) You’re paralyzed by the concept of “scalable.”

7) You think you have the upper hand in nearly all business dealings , but deep down inside, in those quiet moments late at night, you know you’re losing “control.”

8 ) You resort to bullying tactics to get your way without ever considering what might benefit everyone.

9) You spend your days trying to figure out how to gain control.

10) You’re an information hoarder.

via theharperstudio.com

This is a great posting by Debbie over at HarperStudio. I’m especially drawn to numbers 8 and 10. Tip: Consider what benefits everyone, and share (don’t hoard) information. Win-win!

via theatlantic.com

Related articles

• Publishers still missing the point on e-book prices (gigaom.com)