Last September, Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish posted a very helpful overview of how a content “funnel” can drive business results.  In it, she identified six content stages for associations:

Many business-to-business publishers employ a similar approach to gather contact information, compile data and ultimately monetize some content.  Today, consumer publishers are more likely to give away content, but Bloomberg’s acquisition of BusinessWeek illustrates a successful exception that could influence others down the road.

As models evolve, even book publishers need a content funnel.  It’s almost reflexive to talk about the growth of verticals and niches in book marketing.  Creating a niche presence often starts with free content and moves on to registration and rewards for loyal participants.

In business, we’re inclined to spot the differences across companies and industry segments.  More often than not, I’ve found the things that tie association, magazine and book publishers together to be the more fertile ground.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about price elasticity and the value of testing the sales of eBooks at a range of price points.

At the time, I hadn’t seen a BusinessWeek/GigaOm post, “Publishers are still missing the boat on eBook prices”.  In it, Mathew Ingram describes instances in which eBooks are offered at or above the price of print books, even though most eBooks are very limited in the ways that they can be shared, lent or resold.

Ingram also notes an unintended consequence, identified by Market Partners’ Lorraine Shanley: high prices for mainstream books open up a profitable middle ground for self-published authors.  These authors have access to a range of publishing platforms at Amazon, Apple, Smashwords and elsewhere.

I’d add an unintended consequence of a similar sort.  When the largest publishers negotiated agency pricing, they did so in a way that made their share (70%) a matter of public discussion.  Authors whose eBook royalty rates may have been 15% to 25% of the net price could easily compare their shares to the traditional publishers’ much higher return.

The explicit gap has motivated some authors to push for a higher royalty rate, withhold eBook rights or go out on their own.  That may end up being an even higher price to pay to protect the near-term sales of hard-cover books.

Speaking at this year’s Midem conference, Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, acknowledged piracy of the firm’s flagship product, Angry Birds:

“We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products.”

Hed went on to say:

“Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day.”

Midem attracts a music audience, but that did not stop Hed from criticizing the approaches taken by the music industry in its efforts to stop piracy.  He did compliment an aspect of what he feels the music business did right: treating customers as fans, something that Rovio does with Angry Birds.

The paid versions of various Angry Birds apps sell for very little (US$0.99), but those downloads add up.  Having compiled a large installed base, Angry Birds is now seen as a channel, and Rovio is looking at ways to integrate something musical with its apps.

When revenues are growing, I think it can be easier to argue that one can “live with piracy”.  Still, Rovio seems to be doing a good job of distinguishing between the instance of piracy, which appears significant, and its impact, which may actually be growing the audience for the company’s free and paid apps.

On Monday, Joe Wikert built on recent work by Charlie Stross, Joe Esposito and the New York Times to plot a path that would help Barnes & Noble disrupt Amazon.

Wikert suggests that publishers heed Charlie Stross and stop insisting on device-specific DRM, the option that effectively handed Amazon permanent status as the dominant eBook player in the United States.  It would be a bold move, and I’d love to see it tested.

Although publishers of all sizes lament Amazon’s dominant position in eBook sales, the largest continue to insist on using device-specific DRM as their defense against piracy.  Preserving a closed system only works to the advantage of the largest player.

It also has no impact on piracy.  Device-specific DRM may cut down on unauthorized, casual lending, but it seems just as likely that it also lowers the price consumers are willing to pay for a digital license.

People like Kirk Biglione have been saying as much for several years.  In a comment to Wikert’s excellent post, I note that Biglione presented a comprehensive overview of “lessons learned from the music industry” at both the 2008 and 2010 Tools of Change conferences in New York.  Chief among those lessons: DRM restricts markets.

In November, the comment thread on one of my posts evolved into a discussion of how IDPF might develop interoperable DRM akin to Blue-Ray.  That prospect may appeal to a content provider, but it is unlikely to bring Amazon to the table until it has locked up the market.

As for consumers: I’ve yet to find one who sees the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a triumph of innovation.  It’s just another iteration of device-specific locks.

Earlier this month, Scientific American published a post by Bora Zivkovic, its blog editor, describing how ScienceOnline 2012 was put together.

Zivkovic starts with what many people intuitively recognize as the true value of many conferences - the hallway conversations - and asks what might be done to build that energy and insight into regular sessions.  Some of his solutions included:

Intentional diversity is something I’ve seen work really well at Books in Browsers, the Internet Archive’s fall event.  Organized by Peter Brantley and Kat Meyer, the 2011 agenda included people from around the world, both speaking and participating.  Making that happen took outreach, careful planning and at least a few grants from the IA.

As meetings get bigger, maintaining a commitment to diversity and dialogue becomes more of a challenge.  Changes in formats can help.

At last year’s Tools of Change in Frankfurt, Sheila Bounford hosted a conversation with me and Alastair Horne in a way that made it feel as if those attending were part of a living-room chat.  The upcoming Tools of Change conference features a ”startup showcase” that I expect will bring a range of new ideas and presenters to the discussion.

No one idea makes a good conference better, but it’s interesting how many good ideas relate back to getting more and different voices into the conversation.  Oh, and really good wi-fi doesn’t hurt, either.

A bit of disclosure: Excluding only Bora Zivkovic, I am friends with the people mentioned in this post.  I like them, and I like what they do.  That probably biases me in some ways, but I think the examples I’ve provided stand on their own as touch points.

In ”The opportunity in abundance”, I described the prospect of people not engaging with our content a manifestation of what Jane McGonigal calls a ”super-threat”, not just to publishing, but to the way we function as a country, an economy and as a part of a world order.

I went on to say that we have a responsibility to address this threat, not just so that we can make money, but because we’re the ones with the ability to solve it.

Other industries facing an uncertain future have banded together to solve big problems on a macro level.  The Gas Research Institute, for example, was authorized in 1976, at a time when the natural gas industry was highly fragmented among producers, wholesalers and distributors.

By 1981, GRI was spending $68.5 million on research and a total of $80.5 million on oversight and R&D.  This represented about 0.2% of the wellhead price of gas that year, valued at the time at a bit more than $38 billion. Funding, drawn from a surcharge on sales as well as some government grants, accelerated to something north of $100 million in the mid-1980s.

If you look across all of publishing in the United States, it’s about a $40 billion business.  Imagine what we could do if we could create and sustain an organization with $80 million a year in funding. This is the opportunity in abundance: a fighting chance to remake our industry and ourselves in a way that reflects, to borrow the phrase, our better angels.

Individual publishing companies are often described as “silo’d”, with distinct functions and departments that sometimes operate in a way that blocks communication and leads them to miss opportunities.  But publishing as a whole is also silo’d, represented by dozens of industry associations whose charters are specific to an narrow set of issues or a component of the supply chain.

They are also underfunded.  The Book Industry Study Group, the association with perhaps the broadest charter, has an annual budget well under $1 million, and it is bigger than some of its sister organizations.

The funding argument contained in “Abundance” has sometimes been interpreted as a call to support existing organizations more fully.  While I don’t want to deny these organizations bigger budgets, I don’t think that expanding the existing, silo’d organizations is the right solution.

Consistent with my recent post about ”life during wartime”, we need to develop and fund an organization that looks at content creation, management, dissemination and preservation (*) as an integrated whole.  It needs to span all aspects of the publishing value chain, and it should look across multiple markets (trade, education, scholarly and academic publishing and the like).

And ... it should be measured by outcomes that improve the extent to which content is usefully consumed.  The objective here isn’t just efficiency (though that is important); it’s ultimately our goal to place reading at the center of a social and civic conversation.

Building something bigger than ourselves can motivate in ways that a litany of conferences, trade shows and confabs never will approach.  Most of us came to publishing, to libraries, to book selling, to writing because we love what this business could do in the world.  Now’s the time to make that a sustainable reality.

(*) Edited on January 31 to add “preservation”, with thanks to Sheila Morrissey for the suggestion.

Last week, paidContent posted a guest column by Gregory Galant in which he offered a simple idea to help the magazine industry save itself: fix their back-office systems to improve customer service.

Galant describes a situation all too familiar to anyone who has subscribed to a print magazine: renewal mailings that start several months before an actual expiration; clunky interfaces that treat physical and digital engagement separately; and subscription lead times measured in months.

I’d add a few of my own: magazines that request an e-mail every time I renew but do nothing with it; special e-mail offers from publications I already receive (offering rates better than the ones I got when I loyally renewed); and periodicals in name only that come in bunches, sporadically or not at all after I subscribe.

Galant calls on periodical publishers to move to monthly billing via credit cards, eliminating both fixed-term subscriptions and the renewal efforts those subscriptions engender.  Those approaches would emulate Netflix and ... Amazon.

At the end of last year, Donn Linn described 2012 as a year that will see the ”revenge of the plumbers: the nerds, geeks and dirty-fingernail men and women who work behind the scenes so that the shiny new products and services the public sees work when customers come a-calling.”

Although Don was writing about book publishing, his assessment applies broadly.  Back-office systems to handle renewals, billing and fulfillment can be difficult to overhaul.  Many publishers outsource these functions, and even those who have fulfillment operations in-house manage the activities at arm’s length.

But if magazines really care about maintaining direct relationships, they need to upgrade these systems, treat customers with a fully informed respect and stop making me, or Gregory Galant, work so hard.

Over the last several months, Hugh McGuire and I have been co-editing Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, which is being published in three stages by O’Reilly Media.

The first section, a collection of eight chapters that described publishing’s future environment, was released in October.  We’ve just finished editing the second section, which features nine essays that really challenge the conception of “book” in a digital age.  The chapters and authors include:

1) Why the book and the internet will merge (Hugh McGuire)
2) Web literature: publishing on the social web (Eli James)
3) Making books out of words (Erin McKean)
4) Why digital books will become writable (Terry Jones)
5) 10,000 feet above the silos (Travis Alber and Aaron Miller)
6) User experience, reader experience (Brett Sandusky)
7) App, meet book (Ron Martinez)
8) The curation of obscurity (Peter Brantley)
9) A reader’s bill of rights (Kassia Krozser)

Today, you can read the first section for free online or buy it as an eBook (the current price is $7.99; it goes up as more sections are released).  When the second section is released (we are aiming for mid-February), you’ll also be able to read it online and buy it as an eBook.

A print version of the book will be made available when the third and final section, which will offer a range of case studies, is released.

We’re taking this staged approach for three reasons.  O’Reilly is interested in and has been testing staggered releases of some titles, and this project seemed like a good fit for them.  On our side, the essays are contributed by a cross-section of folks (16 to date), and the dual-release (online and as a digital book) gives the authors and editors feedback through the web site that hosts the content.

Finally, the site we are using is PressBooks, a new authoring and publishing tool that Hugh McGuire has been working on for more than a year.  We have been using PressBooks to write, edit and style the content for these chapters.  The platform also generates digital (EPUB) and print (PDF) formats directly, a plus for both speed and cost.

I’ll post when the second section is available to read and buy.  I think you’ll find the content of the first two sections to be both challenging and encouraging, and I hope you’ll add your voice in the commentary that is evolving online.

A generation ago, when I was just starting out in publishing, my first boss walked into my office and handed me copies of the then-current issues of Time (where I was working) and Newsweek.  “Look at these and tell me how they were put together,” he said.  “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

I looked at the two magazines with a mixture of anticipation and panic.  Just out of business school, I felt as if I had won the lottery to be working at Time.  But a week into the job, I knew nothing about how magazines were put together.

I fumbled around with the two copies for 30 minutes, made lots of notes and hoped for the best.  My boss, Bob Hughes, had worked in the railroad business before becoming an operations manager with both Newsweek and Time, and I knew he would be back on time.

As the half hour lapsed, Bob walked back into my office, settled in the one chair that fit in front of my desk and said, “Tell me what you know.” I went back to my notes and showed him what I had found.

He listened patiently for what felt like an eternity but was probably ten minutes.  When I was done, he nodded, reached for the magazines and said, “Good effort, but ... no.”

Bob picked up Time, flipped to the first bind-in insert card, folded the pages toward the cover and pulled the center of the issue apart from the staples.  I’d been saving magazines for years, and he heard me gasp.

Laughing, not derisively, Bob said, “Relax. We can always make more.”

He went on to give me an extended lesson on how magazines are made and how you can figure it out even in a delivered copy.  It’s an hour I remember to this day, one that changed how I look at printed publications.

Bob was always teaching someone something.  In the short time I worked for him, he would stop me at least once a day with a quick, “Take a look at this.” Invariably, he would have found an example of something he already understood and wanted to be sure I did too, or something that surprised him and that he needed to share.

He took me on my first trip to a printing plant, an R.R. Donnelley facility in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  Above the noise of the presses, he shouted at me to start at the back.  “Everyone wants to look at the printed forms coming off a press, but if really you want to know about a printing plant, look at how well they handle the paper going in.”

As a boss, he had the precision of a railroad signal master and the curiosity of a child.  I mean this purely: in the short time I worked for him, his eyes were always wide open.

A few months in, I made an error of omission that cost Time US$50,000 in a single weekend.  By that time, Bob had taken a new role inside Time’s production group, and my new boss did not see it as a teachable moment.  Bob sat quietly throughout the discussion, and when it started to turn ugly he said to no one in particular, “I’d have made the same decision if I’d been in Brian’s shoes.”

I’m not sure that’s true; mine was a rookie mistake.  But he turned the meeting around and probably saved my career at Time Inc. (to the extent that it could have been saved).

Bob is retired now, and I don’t write this to put him on a pedestal or pretend that he didn’t have his eccentricities (he did).  But he helped fill that summer, my first summer in publishing, with a sense of innocence and magic that many of us once felt for this business.  I would like to have it back.

Last week, Lauren Indvik at Mashable covered an emarketer projection of ad spending (online, print and television) through 2016.

The Mashable headline was (perhaps predictably) ”Online ad spending to surpass print for the first time in 2012”.  The study sees online ad spending increasing 23% to US$39.5 billion in 2012, then continuing to grow to US$62.0 billion in 2016.

What I found more interesting than the inflection point, though, was substantial overall growth in ad spending through 2016.  Sure, this may turn out to be the year in which digital trumps print, but total ad spending is projected to grow from US$68.0 billion in 2011 to US$73.3 billion this year, an increase of 7.8%.

Even after several years of persistent declines, the expected spending on print advertising will total US$32.3 billion, while the total market grows 38% and exceeds US$94 billion.

Without spending too much time parsing a headline, maybe the lesson here is an extension of my earlier call for “either-and" publishing.

We live in a world that is increasingly digital-first, and certainly there are niches that are already digital-only.  But there are still a lot of ways that advertisers are supporting existing and emerging print models.

I doubt that future models will be “print alone”, but the inflection point seems less important than the idea that advertisers appear ready to support publications (across media) for some time to come.  That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in the work being done to develop and promote the nextPub specification.

Yesterday, I wrote that publishing success will likely start with meeting the explicit and implicit needs of readers, and users.  Here’s an example of how we could go about making that happen.

It’s no secret that libraries, among other publicly funded institutions, are struggling these days.  State and local-government budgets have been hard hit by the downturn in the economy, and states like California have been cutting library services deeply over the last three years.

At the same time, format preferences are changing significantly.  Last week, digital library distributor OverDrive announced that the number of eBooks checked out in 2011 grew to 35 million, an increase of 133% over 2010.  According to OverDrive, 22% of all library checkouts are now made via a mobile device.

The shift has caught some libraries by surprise, and even those that anticipated digital demand find themselves with limited acquisition budgets.  The result: limited access to many popular titles.

There’s an unproven sense that, by making knowledge freely available, libraries support and even foster reading and some higher-order social goals, like democracy.  In a 2006 interview with Glyn Moody, Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart saw digital abundance in those higher-order terms:

… the result will be an even greater overthrow of the previous literacy, education and other power structures than happened as direct results of The Gutenberg Press around 500 years ago.  Here are just a few of the highlights that may repeat: (1) Book prices plummet; (2) Literacy rates soar; (3) Education rates soar; (4) Old power structures crumbles, as did The Church; (5) Scientific Revolution; (6) Industrial Revolution; (7) Humanitarian Revolution.

As I noted in my Books in Browsers presentation, “That’s kind of cool if you’re part of the proletariat, but it might be a bit unnerving if you’re an oligarch (or aspiring to be one).”

In publishing, the oligarchs have names like Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Hachette.  Other than Random, these “Big 6” trade publishers have met the rise in digital demand through libraries by limiting availability (HarperCollins, Penguin) or refusing to deal at all with the channel.

I think this is a lost opportunity.  Libraries could represent a net loss in sales of a given book, or even of books in total, but right now there is very little credible data to draw upon to decide where the truth lies.  As if the case with assumptions about piracy, we truly don’t understand cause and effect here.

Now, part of what prompted Penguin to rethink its willingness to sell eBooks to libraries is OverDrive’s recent move to partner with Amazon on a Kindle lending option.  As Eric Hellman aptly explains, “… the extension of Overdrive lending to the Kindle flipped libraries into the Amazon column.”

There we have it: friends, and enemies; winners, and losers.  Two-party negotiations, a binary choice.

If you don’t follow Eric Hellman’s work, take a look at the post I linked to above as well as an earlier one on ”Library data: Why bother?” He makes powerful observations about the opportunities libraries offer to publishers willing to partner with them.  In his view, they offer more book sales (a good thing, last we checked) and improved discovery and access.

These are real-world examples of the opportunity in abundance.  Rather than fight with libraries, why not trade these new opportunities and sponsor joint research that examines how libraries influence both near-term and lifelong reading?  Why not explore options that challenge OverDrive’s dominance in the library space?  Why not ask for some help?

And rather than try to deny Amazon a supply of eBooks, why not position ourselves as the industry concerned with developing a lifelong love of reading, and learning?  Amazon may provide selection, speed and price, but it has never been a friend of reading or even a willing contributor to state or local taxes.

It’s an ideal, yes, but I think it’s a better option for publishers than keeping James Patterson out of digital libraries in the hope that Amazon will someday cry uncle.

In November I started to outline how the ideas in my Books in Browsers presentation, “The Opportunity in Abundance”, might be applied to the prevailing publishing supply chain.

It can be an intricate argument to make.  We’re accustomed to evolving the rules of the road in a series of “two-party, one-issue” negotiations.  The established rules, valid not that long ago, worked reasonably well in static or at least stable systems.

Now, supply-chain roles are blending, with customers starting to look like suppliers, partners and even competitors.  We’ve entered an era in which abundance, fueled by lower barriers to entry in a digital era, makes it possible for anyone to take on non-traditional activities.

These changes can feel like a gold rush or a land grab, both of which are zero-sum games.  As Eric Hellman described earlier this month, zero-sum games soon enough begin to look like wars.

That’s not the future I think we need to accept.

We’re at an actionable crossroads.  We can fight to preserve the distribution-centric model that has been in place for much of the last century, or we can examine options to shift to a publishing model that measures our success in supporting customer-valued outcomes.

In “Abundance”, I talked about repositioning publishing as the ”engine of the engagement economy”.  In my earlier post, I linked that back to something John Battelle had first posted in 2006, five of what he called “the golden rules of publishing”.  These included:

- Conversation over dictation
- Platform over distribution
- Service over product
- Iteration over perfection, and
- Engagement over consumption

As I noted in November, Battelle adds to the original five with new, uncomfortable sixth: all brands are publishers.

Right now, we’re worried about an abundance of authors, a blending of roles, a evolution of platforms and a host of challenges maintaining the infrastructure in place to support the creation and distribution of physical books.  Our ultimate customers - readers - are worried about none of these things.

Soon enough, all brands will become publishers, and all authors will seek to become brands.  Not all brands, or authors, will be successful, but the ability to market and distribute content efficiently won’t remain the hallmark of successful publishers.  Success will likely start with meeting the explicit and implicit needs of readers, and users.

A closing note: I’ll be exploring other aspects of these ideas in posts that follow.  I’ve also been invited to join an O’Reilly Media ”Executive Roundtable” in New York on February 13, at which I’ll present “Abundance” and engage in a discussion that includes Lean Startup author Eric Ries.  The event is invitation only, and you can ask for more information by contacting O’Reilly and completing a brief form.

The decision last week to shelve the Senate’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion House bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), was hailed as a victory by many firms and individuals who had made “Stop SOPA” a rallying cry.

By the time Republicans debated last Thursday, the bills were dead enough that the four remaining candidates all denounced the legislation in one way or another.  Only Ron Paul went beyond the headlines to say:

“This bill is not going to pass. But watch out for the next one.”

As Clay Shirky points out (in a response to a recent column by David Pogue), we always have to watch out for the next one.

Established content industries have been battling technology since technology became a part of how we create, manage and disseminate content.  As William Patry points out, this is seldom a battle for the rights of authors or creators.  Most often, it’s an attempt to preserve an existing, profitable business model at the expense of consumers.

The debate has shifted a bit in the past week to examine whether big-media companies failed to report on SOPA (because doing so did not help their corporate interests).  I’m more worried about the reporting that actually did occur, because it is almost breathtakingly bad.

From CNN’s John King repeating the company line ("Those who support the law, Senator, argue tens of thousands of jobs are at stake") to an Associated Press (AP) lead that described SOPA as ”legislation that would curb online piracy”, the media that did report failed to even ask the basic question: How do we know this is true?

If you read my work with any regularity, you know how strongly I support copyright.  I distinguish between the instance of piracy, in which files are uploaded and downloaded in a way that infringes upon copyright, from the impact of piracy.

So it was with some incredulity that I read what Mike Nugent, executive director of Creative America, had to say to AP about the web-based companies that opposed SOPA:

“In fact their business model is being asked to be subjected to regulation. They’re misleading their huge base.”

Those who favor a change in the law to “protect” copyright may not have a huge base, but they have done a pretty good job of misleading.  The GAO has looked at piracy studies and found all of them lacking, even baseless.  Let’s come up with a shared understanding of what is really going on before we risk undermining the web.

Unfortunately, many people have tried to get the movie and music businesses to develop better numbers.  It hasn’t helped.  These are companies and associations that are working with Congress to preserve a business model.  And that’s why they’ll probably be back.

Yesterday, I talked about the “three gears” I consider the core components of workflow.  In this post, I’d like to offer some questions that any association, book or magazine publisher can ask themselves to help prepare for a change in workflow.

In asking questions, you want to define what you have in place, identify where it is working and where it is not working, and document the things you need to do in the future (near-term to mid-term) that you aren’t doing or can’t do now.  The kinds of questions that can help at this stage include:

Process
How is a typical book/magazine/web page created?

What’s the cycle time for creating basic content (weeks, days, hours)?

How well is the current process working (errors, rework, ability to meet schedules, ability to meet current expectations)?

What changes in expectations do you anticipate in the next couple of years?

Technology
What programs are used to create, manage and disseminate content (InDesign, Quark, Word, etc.)?

Do you have a content management system (CMS) in place?  For how long?  Has it met your expectations?

Do you have other systems in place (digital asset management, web content management are typical)?  How are they linked to the CMS?

How has the technology set-up changed in the last few years?  How do you think it needs to evolve?

Organization
How are the people doing content-related work organized?

Have the roles changed at all recently?

Is any work outsourced? How do you interact with these organizations (i.e., content conversion in India vs. someone co-located in a publishing operation)?

Are there any organizations whose work you would like to emulate?

In gathering information about how work is currently done, you can also get a sense of how deeply your staff has thought about workflow issues and how ready they might be to undertake a change.

You don’t need to go hog-wild asking questions like these.  Try to have a conversation, take notes and then back-check against a list like this to see if there is anything missing.  The more time a team spends talking about workflow, the better.

Much of the work we do with association, book and magazine publishers involves structuring workflows to best meet current and emerging (cross-platform) expectations.

I define workflow as the intersection of process (how things get done), technology (not just systems, but any tools used to create, manage and disseminate content) and organization (structure; the roles people play and the tools they use).

In revising content workflows, it is seldom the case that a publisher can change things in one area (install a new CMS, for example) and not affect the other two components.  Sometimes the impact is small; other times it takes a big change in an organization or process to take full advantage of a new tool.

Conceptually, I think of it as a set of three gears.  The relative size of each of the gears varies somewhat, but there is an interdependence that (if not addressed) hamstrings a change or an implementation.

Tomorrow, I’ll share some of the questions I ask publishers in helping them understand both where they are and where they need to be.

William Patry, among the pre-emininent legal minds in matters of copyright, has just published How to Fix Copyright, a successor to Moral Panics and The Copyright Wars.

The earlier book covered the history of copyright and its evolution from “a utilitarian government program” to what he described as “a bloated, punitive legal regime”.

In the new book, Patry returns to many of the same themes, building a case that results in a practical (and ambitious) approach to reforming copyright: stop making new laws until we evaluate the effectiveness of the current ones; and make no new laws without a basis in evidence.

The book, which I highly recommend, has been strongly endorsed by folks like Cory Doctorow at boingboing, who described Patry’s work as “a superbly argued, enraging book on the state of copyright law today.” As was the case with Moral Panics, the book is astoundingly footnoted (55 of 323 pages), underscoring the author’s commitment to evidence.

If you’re on the fence, make some time to read three excerpts that were published last month by Bloomberg:

- “Copyrights are no longer about copies”;
- “Creativity springs from careful copying”; and
- “Pricing, not piracy, hurts culture trade”.

If you do make the time, be sure to read the comments, because Patry engages fully and fairly throughout.

Contrast Patry’s approach to the specious claims made about how much movie revenue is lost to file sharing.  Compare Patry’s tone with that seen in the temper-tantrum tweets of Rupert Murdoch, criticizing the President for “giving in” to Silicon Valley and pirates.

Although the arguments made in these two books directly pertain to legislation like SOPA/PIPA, we are already living under bad copyright law.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998 without any recourse to facts, has resulted in a host of unintended consequences.

The call for a new approach to copyright comes from many quarters: social media guru Clay Shirky; best-selling author Barry Eisler; as well as Cory Doctorow and William Patry.

It is time to take them seriously.  Rather than continue a debate that is heavily influenced by campaign donations, let’s try doing it Patry’s way: figure out what copyright should do, and measure how well it is doing it.  Then, change the law in ways that evidence says will make a difference.  Repeat as necessary.

Almost two and half centuries ago, John Adams argued in defense of the British soldiers accused of killing civilians in the Boston Massacre.  His was not a popular role, but he famously observed:

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Would that we could look back in a decade and say that we had done something defensible for copyright.  You can start by reading the book.

On New Year’s Day, Eric Hellman posted ”2011: The Year the eBook Wars Broke Out”, nine turns of the tide that he characterizes as “preludes to a fight to the death”.

In short order, Hellman describes each of the clashes and follows up with some critical observations and questions.  For “Amazon occupies Overdrive”, he asks “Do the traditional library values of privacy go right out the door?”

And as the Authors Guild tackled Hathitrust, Hellman notes that their legal action “seemed hasty and ill-contrived”, adding “This kind of thing happens during wartime.”

Hellman has written a really good post, one worth spending time with.  You may walk away thinking that we really are on the cusp of an eBook war, but (as Hellman notes at the end), “There’s hope.”

Part of that hope might be found in some of what I wrote last fall for “The opportunity in abundance”.  In it, I called upon participants in the publishing supply chain to:

- work together to reposition publishing as the engine of the engagement economy;

- develop a set of principles based in fairness and capable of balancing current requirements with some, perhaps many, future unknowns;

- create a shared way to model new approaches, test assumptions and make decisions based in fact; and

- articulate a clear and defensible set of reasons to collaborate.

Next week, I’ll be returning to these points in a series of posts that I hope can provide what Eric Hellman’s describes as a rope to grab when you’re falling into the abyss.

Earlier this month, I wrote about a Texterity survey of app use, as well as the potential of HTML5 as an app alternative.

Yesterday, Julieta Lionetti pointed me to coverage of a survey of “connected consumers” that found only 4% prefer to use branded apps for online commerce.  Of those surveyed, 87% preferred to access e-commerce websites from a PC or laptop.

A caveat: the survey is sponsored by Zmags, which offers retailers and other branded entities its “on-demand rich media merchandising platform”.  Zmags is in the business of selling non-app e-commerce solutions.

That doesn’t invalidate the results; it’s just worth remembering.  The full study, which contains more data than ReadWriteWeb was able to report, is available for download.

The 1,500 respondents skewed slightly female (52%) and richer (mean household income of $63,000 a year).  The survey found that e-commerce via tablets is expected to increase significantly in the coming year.

Although the research does not specifically address publishing, it is a harbinger.  Publishing is already blending with a variety of content-dependent businesses.  As Amazon ably illustrated, how people shop eventually influences their thinking about things like access, pricing and customization.

So I may not buy the idea that 87% of us prefer websites over apps (or would know if we did), but it is worth knowing that tablet owners value convenience, inspiration, straightforward transactions and price.  Whether through an app or a website, publishers will need to learn how to meet those expectations.

Last week, Horace Dediu, writing at Asymco, posted an adept assessment of the difference between “observation" and “prediction”.

It’s that time of year when predictions come out in full force, so it is refreshing and instructive to read something that calls for a more flexible approach.  Better yet, it calls for collaboration.

One thing I would add to Dediu’s observations: predictions work best when the future looks a lot like the present, or the past.  In more fluid environments, collective observation can play a critical role.

That argues for a change in our approach to more than just predictions.  It’s not a case of “no future” in publishing, just not the future we might have predicted.

Adweek (in some ways the successor to Mediaweek) recently reported that some publishers have had success with tablet owners buying digital versions of back issues of magazines.

For example, Hearst reports that back issues make up 30% of single-copy digital sales, while two Martha Stewart publications claim that a quarter of their single-copy digital sales involve older issues.  Here, the inherent scarcity of an off-sale date may be working to the advantage of periodical publishers.

Bonnier, a special-interest publisher whose titles include Popular Mechanics, lowered the price of its back issues by 40% and sees a steady business.

In the Adweek piece, Hearst president David Carey noted, “Much of our content is truly timeless.”

If that holds up, it might also become an argument for making that content much more agile and recombinant.  That way, readers won’t just buy issues; they’ll design and buy their own custom content solutions.

I have written a couple of times about the persistent practice of publishers who hire interns and do not pay them.  No ranting today.

But it is a disappointment that the New York Times, which has reported on the practice with a critical eye, continues to use unpaid internships. 

This isn’t hypocrisy of the sort seen when Lamar Smith promotes SOPA but fails to give even Creative Commons credit for a photograph used on his web site.  As well, what is reported by the Times is not necessarily the same as its business practices.

I just expected more.  There may always be a line of people willing to do whatever it takes to work at the Times, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right to not pay them.

While the number of companies claiming that they manufactured e-reading devices has declined since its peak in early 2010, the number of variations on a theme has almost made up for the consolidation.

Service options, “special offer” (ad-sponsored) models, tablets and quasi-tablets all made their debut in 2011.  Just this week, Amazon announced the launch of a mobile-web store optimized for the iPad.

There are lots of favorites among the current crop.  Publishing Trends posted a round-up of various reviews last week, and everything from the Kindle Fire to the Nook Tablet to the Kobo and Sony Wi-Fi readers got a nod from at least one source.

The number of web sites dedicated to reviewing devices also seems to be on the rise.  I find Nate Hoffelder’s The Digital Reader good for news, with the somewhat misleadingly named PDF Devices a solid source for side-by-side comparisons.

The reviews make it clear that the “best” device to choose depends on how you want to use it.  Because reading is an individual experience, it seems likely that the products we rely on for digital content consumption will become increasingly targeted at narrower niches.

I’ve been carrying around a post, ”Get your content right and the rest will follow”, that appeared on the Folio: web site in early December.

Although the article targets business-to-business publishers, the challenges it addresses are closer to universal.  ”Striking the right balance of print, online, social media and tablet apps” and “getting closer to the audience” resonate across most publishing segments, including associations.

The author, Kelley Damore, identifies all the right problems: the need for segmentation; identifying an audience, especially through intermediaries; and measuring ROI across multiple platforms.  Still, I found myself asking: does “first-rate edit” necessarily solve these problems?

A bit more than a year ago I wrote about the disruptive value of being ”good enough”.  Publishers might be better off solving a problem or meeting a need not with “good editorial”, however defined, but with a solution the reader valued.

I know that’s heresy, and it somewhat contradicts a post I wrote earlier this week about The Atlantic.  But in an era of abundance, I am not convinced that “good editorial eventually translates into strong readership, regardless of the platform”.

Next month’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York includes a session on Wednesday morning that I want to highlight.

At 8:30 a.m. on February 15, Dianne Kennedy, Peter Meirs and John Dougherty are presenting an update on nextPub in a session titled ”Bringing Magazines to Digital Distribution Channels”.

Kennedy works at IDEAlliance, an association dedicated to identifying best practices for efficient end-to-end digital media workflows. Meirs and Dougherty oversee technology initiatives at Time Inc. and Hearst, respectively.  All are working on the nextPub specification.

Although the title and session description leave the impression that nextPub is just about magazines, it is not.  The specification is valuable to any publisher interested in creating content that can be seamlessly transformed for distribution across a variety of digital reading devices.

That would mean pretty much any book or periodical publisher.

Much is made of differences between book and magazine publishing.  However, when it comes to workflow, metadata and cross-platform presentation, I’ve found that many more similarities than differences.

The nextPub specification offers publishers an opportunity to streamline the delivery of any content to multiple devices.  I encourage you to consider attending the session.  If you’re registered, you can also post questions and comments on the session’s description page.

A bit of disclosure: When I worked at Time Inc., Peter Meirs was a colleague and remains a friend.  On two engagements with Hachette’s magazine division (now largely part of Hearst), John Dougherty was a client.  Neither of them was involved in the creation of this post.

On New Year’s Day, media investment bankers at the Jordan, Edmiston Group published a summary of 2011 transactions in what they call the media, information, marketing services and technology sectors.

JEGI reports that most of the activity occurred in two sectors: marketing and interactive services; and B2C (business to consumer) online media and technology.  Taken together, those two segments accounted for 505 of the year’s 896 transactions.

This week, AdMedia Partners, also a media investment bank, announced the results of their annual survey of industry executives.  The AdMedia report, titled M&A Prospects for Media, Marketing Services and Related Technology Firms, looks ahead and sees growth in merger and acquisition activity in 2012.

There is some interesting data in both reports.  They are available for downloading at the links provided above.

In a very real sense, what’s truly interesting is what’s not mentioned: these media investment banks are tracking (and facilitating) transactions far from the traditional media landscape.  When the big news is eBay’s acquisition of GSI Commerce, or Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca, you know we’re not in Kansas anymore.

When you follow the money, you see that publishing is already blending with a variety of content-dependent businesses.  The good news is, these other segments understand how content can be used to attract and serve an audience.  The bad news is, that’s not how we think in much of traditional publishing.

Folio: ran a nice end-of-year article on The Atlantic, which recorded its second consecutive year in the black.

A “thought leadership” magazine founded in 1857, The Atlantic had not turned a profit in decades.  In the last several years, the magazine raised its price substantially, trimmed (and later grew) its rate base and broadened its digital and in-person (events) business.

Although the shelf life of examples can be short, I think a key part of The Atlantic‘s success rests in its decision to charge readers a healthy price for its subscriptions.  The decision helped the publication balance circulation and advertising revenues and invest in digital platforms and live events.

Reducing the magazine’s rate base by 28% (from 450,000 to 325,000) was a bold move, but it reduced reliance on less-profitable third-party sources for new subscriptions.  It also turned circulation from a loss leader into a profit center for The Atlantic.

While it took several years to build the other businesses, The Atlantic demonstrates that readers will pay for content, when that content is valued and delivered in ways that make sense for them.  It’s not just a race to the bottom.

I wrote yesterday about growth in the use of mobile devices to search the web.  Although the formats and devices are in flux, there appears little doubt that we are moving to a “mobile-first” model for web use.

For the last three years, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) has tracked mobile trends among its members.  In the most recent survey, published last November, ABC found that the majority (85%) of its members do provide mobile content.  That’s good news.

The 15% who do not offer mobile content cite development and maintenance costs (79%) and staffing resources (57%) as their top two reasons.  “Reader interest” (36%) was a distant (and debatable) third.

That’s bad news.

Getting ready for mobile is not cost-free, but using expense or staff resources as a justification is a very short-term tactic.  It’s not necessary to build proprietary apps, and optimizing a web site for mobile need not be an enormous undertaking.

The greater concern isn’t that publishers think that mobile takes resources, but the judgement that it takes too much.  We’ve passed the tipping point for the dissemination of digital content.  Print isn’t dead, but print alone most certainly is.

At GigaOm, Ryan Kim documents how the rise of mobile search, payments and shopping is paving the way for a “mobile-first world”.  Services like Pandora (60%), Twitter (55%) and MyYearbook (54%) already see the majority of their traffic coming from mobile platforms.

Kim notes that commerce on mobile devices more than doubled to 18.3% this past Christmas season.  While Amazon’s price-check promotion was controversial, it also got more people using their smartphones at retail.

Much as the rise of digital content has challenged publishers to rethink how content is created and managed, mobile is reconfiguring the relationship between producer and consumer.  Although there are good examples of mobile-ready content sites (the New York Times was an early leader in this regard), many publishers have yet to tackle the delivery of content to mobile platforms.

Magellan is among the latter group.  Our site (and this blog) are not optimized for mobile.

Today, about 20% of our traffic originates on a mobile platform.  Google Analytics confirms that our mobile visitors spend less than half as much time on the site, and they click through to another page only a third as often, when compared with traffic from other sources.

Numbers like those signal lost opportunities, ones that will only grow in importance over time.  In 2011, smartphone ownership reached 44% in the United States, and it is expected to pass the halfway mark in 2012.  Traditional site designs and content offerings risk being left behind.

I’ve written before that there are many ways to meet market demand for devices and content offerings.  Apps are sometimes critical, but being mobile-ready is going to be mandatory soon, if it isn’t already.

Of course, that’s also a note to myself.

As part of a walk-up to last December’s Technology Conference and Expo, ASAE posted a helpful article on how to ”Create an Integrated Dashboard System for a Small-Staff Association”.

(I have a colleague who feels I should clarify that the staff themselves are not necessarily small; they are few in number.  Done.)

The post caught my eye partly because last June I became a board member of just such an association.  As a result, I’ve become well-acquainted with the substantial work that two full-time staff at Association Media & Publishing must do to stay on top of issues and questions.

The author, Benjamin Butz, offers six useful tips:

- Favor Excel over other, more complicated or less familiar tools

- Connect across focused workbooks; don’t make any one workbook too complicated

- Give everyone ownership (and expect it in return)

- Write data once and use the program to perform any required calculations

- Make the dashboard visually appealing, only as complicated as it needs to be, and no more.

- Remember that any problem you have is probably not new; use search engines to seek options and answers.

Butz goes on to describe five dashboards (30,000-foot, membership, sponsorship, event and website) that he has found useful in his work.

If I had one qualifying comment, it would involve connecting across workbooks.  In my experience, this approach works reasonably well when all of the documents are on the same server and unlikely to be moved.  A cloud solution can help in this regard.

If a set of workbooks does need to be shared, the links between two or more workbooks can easily get lost when sending files outside of their original realm.  Excel offers opportunities to re-establish those links, but the work required to do so reliably can be complicated.

Overall, the post offers useful guidelines for developing a reporting dashboard.  Butz’s advice extends beyond associations, as well.

Over the holidays, fans of comic-book publisher Marvel protested the company’s support of the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA).  Coverage at Big Shiny Robot provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of the debate.  BSR notes, helpfully, that Marvel is owned by Disney, whose support for SOPA is widely known.

It is interesting that, as Marvel is asking the U.S. government to intervene with pirates, it is also reclassifying all of its mutants as non-human so that it can save almost half of the import tax due on action figures.  Apparently dolls (representations of humans) are taxed at 12%, while toys (everything else) are taxed at 6.8%.

Much could be said about the wisdom of harmonized tariffs, but I’ll just observe the disconnect: “Defend our IP, at whatever cost”, versus “Let us denigrate our IP (and pretend that the premise of the the mutant series doesn’t apply) and save 5.2% on imports”.

Okay, I’ll admit that I’m stretching a bit, but you probably see the point: companies can be expected to argue any side of an issue to gain an advantage.  It’s the role of government, when called upon, to balance the interests of the few against the interests of the many.

Personally, I’d give them the tax break if they’d stop supporting SOPA.  We’d all win.

As the calendar changed to 2012, the U.K.-based Publishers Association (PA) announced that piracy had ”more than doubled” between 2010 and 2011.  The association drew this conclusion from the number of takedown notices it issued in both years.

This is another case in which the ”instance of piracy” is considered the same as its impact, and I’ve made a resolution to let my prior writing on this stand.  But the PA’s Richard Mollett took it a step further, claiming:

Search engines are the gateway to piracy. That’s why we are working with the government to try to encourage search engines to do more to reduce the prominence of these infringing sites.

The PA is noted for its strong anti-piracy stance, and with SOPA still very much alive in the United States, blaming the gatekeeper is in vogue.

But contrast this point of view with that of video-game executive Gabe Newell, whose interview on pricing was the subject of another post.  On piracy Newell says:

It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates ... The people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. … It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.

Usual disclaimer: this isn’t a claim that piracy is not a problem for at least some publishers, and I think enforcement is an option to provide a short-term bulwark.  But blaming Google for revealing where books may be found without also considering something basic, like whether books are legitimately available in the markets that are looking for them, is not helping.

Over the holidays, Indie Reader ran a story on what it calls the “growing debate” about the wisdom of selling eBooks for 99 cents.  It’s a good overview of the discussion, but it also joins the list of stories that equates lower prices with less revenue.

The article asks, “How do we value our writing?” There’s no single answer to that, of course.

Newer authors may seek to lower any barriers to discovery, while established writers want to find the price that maximizes total income.  In both cases, lower prices can serve those ends.

As the marginal cost of a good (in this case, eBook) falls to zero, pricing becomes an exercise in revenue maximization.  Digital-first and digital-only imprints and authors have no reason to defend the higher price points in place for print products.

The video-game industry understands this pricing opportunity.  Kirk Biglione recently pointed me to an interview with Gabe Newell, whose company created games that include Half-Life and Portal.  The company also operates Steam, sometimes considered the “iTunes of the video game industry”, a tool that gives them some insight into pricing.

Newell’s experience reveals that video-game pricing is “perfectly elastic” when the price is more or less seen as permanent.  Any increase in price is offset by a decline in sales that keeps total revenue the same.

When price is used as a promotional tool - “75% off for a limited time” is his example - they found a very different result.  Total revenue in those situations grew 40-fold.

That’s not a typo.

There’s at least one member of the publishing supply chain that understands the value of digital promotions.  A few weeks ago, I described Amazon’s “free eBook for Prime subscribers” as an experiment that publishers could learn from.  After debuting with a small selection of 5,000 titles, Amazon has expanded to offer a reported 66,000 titles, including at least some independent and digital-only authors.

With respect to price, there are no easy answers for publishers that must continue to manage both print and digital platforms.  With respect to testing, though ... 

About a year ago, I wrote a short post praising the virtues of a “barebones and featureless” app from the Economist.  The magazine had managed to integrate its print and digital offerings in a way that many other periodicals had missed to that point.

As the number of app-friendly platforms grows, other publishers appear to be following the path paved by the Economist.  This doesn’t mean the death of customized apps with extensive interactivity, but those solutions certainly aren’t right for every publication.

HTML5 is also making inroads.  Folio: recently posted a substantial round-up of publications that are exploring the use of HTML5 as a mobile delivery platform.  Those profiled included the Financial Times (somewhat a sister publication to the Economist), which employs it as an alternative to Apple.

Last month, Folio: also reported the results of a Pew Research survey of tablet use that was sponsored by the Economist.  More than half of those who owned a tablet used it to consume news; 17% said they read books on the device.  The survey was conducted last summer, well ahead of the debut of tablet devices from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo.

The Folio: article on tablet use also notes that the Economist claims to have sold 100,000 digital-only subscriptions, of which 75% are new to the publication.  This contrasts with a much lower number (18%) of new recruits found in the Texterity study.  There isn’t a right answer here: the lesson more likely is that your mileage may vary.

Yesterday was “Public Domain Day”, celebrated in places like Poland, Israel, Macedonia and Italy, but not the United States.

Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain (CSPD) points out that, in countries that are not the United States, 2012 is a year in which works by authors that include Louis Brandeis, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf become “freely available for anyone to use, republish, translate or transform.” CSPD explains:

It’s the second part of the copyright bargain; the limited period of exclusive rights ends and the work enters the realm of free culture. Prices fall, new editions come out, songs can be sung, symphonies performed, movies displayed. Even better, people can legally build on what came before.

The United States is not part of Public Domain Day because the length of U.S. copyright was extended in 1998 to automatically last for an author’s lifetime, plus 70 years.  The earliest that any works covered by the law would become available under public domain is expected to be 2019.

Copyright in the United States was written into the Constitution to reward those responsible for creative works with a limited monopoly on their use.  Proponents of legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act use what is an almost unlimited monopoly to justify an assault on due process.

In a wide-ranging interview with TechDirt’s Mike Masnick, author and IP lawyer Barry Eisler plainly states:

No reasonable person can claim that, with a term of less than a century, artists wouldn’t be adequately incentivized to create. So current copyright terms are clearly too long from the standpoint of what’s best for society overall.

Eisler goes on to point out how these laws backfire:

Every time content providers try to slow, control, or stop new distribution technology, they wind up hurting not just consumers, but also themselves ... Lower-cost, more efficient distribution methods are developments content providers should embrace, not attempt to stymie, and fighting technologies that benefit consumers is about the best way I can imagine to lose money, create new pirates, and seed business opportunities to competitors.

In his 2009 book, “Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars”, William Patry argues strongly that innovation depends on a more limited copyright than we now have.  In the absence of innovation, we find piracy, the consequence of a bad API.

It’s resolution time.

Via Twitter, I learned yesterday that Woody Guthrie’s 1942 list had 33 items, including an ambitious “Help win war - beat Fascism”.  My list is simpler.  In fact, it is one thing:

Write something useful every day.

A while back I posted a summary of my three guideposts for this blog: link out; add value; and be constructive.  An end-of-year “lessons learned” post on a custom-publishing blog reminded me of these rules, which I’ve mostly followed.  But, it added one more: “Be consistent”.

The coming year will present a host of opportunities to improve how we create, manage and disseminate content.  At the same time, there are threats, many of them baked into our traditional views of how publishing should work.  There is plenty to talk about, and I hope to contribute in at least 366 concise and useful ways.

Earlier this week, I returned to the idea of “either-and" publishing: thinking about digital as part of a range of content dissemination offerings.  Some recent work by arts and crafts publisher Interweave shows how even “digital” can shift when you look at the level of a niche or audience.

In one of its recent posts, the Mequoda Group noted that Interweave has surveyed its audience to determine both adoption rates and uses for a variety of tablets.  Data collected in October 2011 revealed:

- Although overall purchase data suggests that about 11% of the U.S. market owns a tablet, 28% of Interweave’s “buying” audience has a tablet;

- Of those who don’t yet own a tablet, between 40% and 48% intend to buy one in the next six months.  Mequoda points out that these numbers predate the launch of lower-cost tablet options like the Kindle Fire and may understate future intent;

- Interweave found that its “buying” audience favored the use of tabled for e-reading, while its magazine subscribers made “browsing the web” the primary purpose; and

- Unlike the Texterity (mobile app) survey, the audience for Interweave skewed female and older.

We’re often knee-deep in data about trends in the sale and uses of various devices.  Much of that data can be directionally beneficial, but publishers still need to evaluate its relevance in terms of the audiences served or targeted.

Smartly, Interweave plans to repeat the survey on a frequent (quarterly) basis.  They are an unusual example in their commitment to the development and use of data, but they may not remain unusual for much longer.

The Nieman Journalism Lab is wrapping up 2011 with a series of guest posts looking at what the new year will bring in journalism.  I was particularly taken with one that Dan Gillmor posted last week, in which he claimed that “2012 will be the year of the content-controller oligopoly”.

Because the Nieman folks focus on journalism, Gillmor names several choke points (search engines, wire-line ISPs, mobile carriers and Apple) but bypasses Amazon, which in the book and some magazine spaces could be considered a throttle on open dissemination of content.

Gillmore also talks directly about what he calls “the copyright cartel” (in his view, Hollywood and its allies) and efforts of both Congress and the current administration to reduce or eliminate the use of due process in taking down Internet content.

The debate about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and its companion bill, “Protect IP”, often focuses on movies and music, but many of the supporters of the bill are so-called traditional publishers.  Gizmodo has compiled a list of firms supporting SOPA, including ten trade, four high-education and two periodical publishers, as well as the AAP.

With all of these organizations vying for a seat at the table, Gillmor sees 2012 as a year in which we move from an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers.  He hopes journalists start to more vigorously examine the implications of legal initiatives like SOPA.  That’s a 2012 resolution I could get behind.

Just before Christmas, the Guardian reported that Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria had decided to stop writing as a protest against unauthorized distribution of at least one of her books.  A well-known writer in Spain, Etxebarria posted on her Facebook page that the number of unauthorized downloads had exceeded the paid sales of her most recent book.

According to the Guardian, some of the reactions to her announcement were harshly critical of the author.  That’s unfortunate, as Etxebarria has made a personal decision and likely a difficult one.

I do hope she reconsiders, though, because the data on which she based her decision has some gaps.  That the number of downloads exceeds the number of books sold is problematic, but it’s worth investigating where the downloads went.

It’s possible that the downloads are taking place largely outside of her home market (Spain).  If so, they might signal an opportunity to grow Etxebarria’s presence in other regions or countries.

If the downloads are concentrated in Spain, Etxebarria might test an earlier decision to publish only in print.  In the Guardian, she had noted:

“We decided against publishing it as an eBook because that is easy to pirate. It would have been like throwing it straight to the lions.”

Clearly, a print-only strategy is not working as a barrier to piracy.  In practice, it may be the case that the absence of a digital option has even helped create a pirate market.  To evaluate that possibility, it is worth testing a digital option in Spain.

I’m not excusing the pirated content, but it’s not clear what conclusions we can draw from the data.  Before giving up on writing, Etxebarria might look at ways to use pirate activities to help grow her presence internationally, much as Paolo Coelho has done.

For the last six years Texterity, a digital and mobile solutions provider, has conducted an annual readership survey to (in their words) “better understand reader preferences and consumption patterns across print, digital and mobile platforms.” The 2011 research, whose results were published this fall, used an “in-app” survey to focus for the first time on mobile magazine readers.

Texterity worked with publishers of 25 magazine titles, gathering over 5,000 responses to a variety of demographic and behavioral questions.  The magazines that participated in the survey favored business or association publishers (60%), with consumer titles making up the balance.

The sample skewed male (84%) and toward tablet users (61%).  Among the key findings:

- People use their magazine apps an average of five times each month, with half spending a half hour or more on each issue

- Although the majority of app users also use print and other digital media, 18% are new to the publication and use only the app to access content.

- Most (81%) app users reported sharing magazine app content using e-mail, social media and word of mouth.

- Two-thirds of those responding said they interacted with in-app advertising, and 40% claimed they purchased something as a result.

- Echoing findings reported elsewhere, the majority of app access takes place at home and at night.

Surveys like this consistently underscore that apps are (for the most part) not either-or, but part of a content consumption continuum that includes print, web and app delivery of information.  The 18% who are “app-only” may be an exception, or they may also be new readers who have yet to migrate their content consumption to other platforms.  Picking one solution likely loses some or much of a potential audience.

Association Media & Publishing reported these findings in the November/December issue of its member publication, Signature.  A copy of the full survey results can be obtained by completing a short form on the Texterity site.

‘Twas the night before eBooks, when all through the House
Every intern was stirring, and starting to grouse.
The print books were shelved in the warehouse with care,
in hopes that big orders soon would be there.

Editors were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of best sellers danced in their heads.
Prices were stable, their lists were a snap
So they’d settled their brains for a long winter’s nap.

When out among blogs there arose such a clatter,
I leaped to my desk to see what was the matter.
To Techdirt and Booksquare I flew like a flash
And learned from the master, Richard E. Nash

Bloggers had written for years in the know
That the coming of eBooks was much, much too slow
when, what to their wondering eyes should appear,
but a digital reader with a screen all too clear.

The reader’s inventor, so lively and quick,
I thought for a moment it might be St. Nick.
As Kindle debuted, in numbers they came,
And market by market knew Bezos by name

“Now Sony! Now Kindle!
 Now, iPad and Samsung!
On, iPod! On, iRex!
 (That last one found hamstrung!)
In this holiday season, devices to all!
Now read away! Read away!
 Read away all!” 


As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky
so up to the mountains the sales they flew,
See the IDPF chart, and Amazon too.

Publishers balked, as sales broke through the roof
Looking they were for additional proof
That eBooks would do more than just stick around
And in a flat market they might even abound

But as eBooks grew, a burr in the foot
Would libraries abscond with all of the loot?
And as readers asked for options to borrow
Some publishers left them little but sorrow

Still reading persists, the options keep growing!
Like Readmill! And GoodReads! The seeds they are sowing!
ReadSocial, and Cursor, with the promise of more!
Small Demons the latest to come to the fore.

While publishers hold on by the skin of their teeth
Digital books seem like berries, not holiday wreaths
An uncertain future, an emptier belly
“Let’s fill those e-readers with Percy Bysshe Shelley”

Still, Bezos could be a right jolly old elf,
I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.
Could a wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Help us past this moment of dread?

But Bezos spoke not a word, went straight to work,
filled all his readers, then turned with a jerk.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
Denied us good data, though his stock price still rose.

He sprang to his website, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,
”Happy reading to all, and to all a good night!

Online headlines sometimes get ahead of the story that follows, as was the case yesterday, when e-marketer wrote that ”Mobile usage overtakes print consumption”.

It would be easy enough to interpret “usage” as “reading”, and some comments on the article took exception to the potential confusion.  It was interesting, though, that the time spent on mobile each day is now estimated at an hour, up 30% over 2010, while the time spent reading magazines and newspapers is down 12%, to 44 minutes a day.

It’s a trend, not an absolute comparison, but where time and share of mind goes, so too will advertising revenues and product sales.

As content is increasingly found and consumed digitally, content owners are being pressured to develop new ways to support smaller-scale sales and (very) light footprints for tracking rights and royalties.  YouTube recently bought RightsFlow to help it manage revenue sharing for music posted on the site.

This gives YouTube a credible option for clearing rights and turning what would have been infringement into a revenue-sharing win-win.

RightsFlow operates at the level of a songwriter or a music publisher.  The revenue might not prove to be a windfall, but it is a smarter approach than the one taken by record labels in licensing content to Spotify.

In publishing, start-ups like Valobox, which has developed a mechanism to sell content on a progressive basis, offer a practical approach to micro-consumption and micro-payments.  Compared with some of the arm’s-length mechanisms we have relied on to track and clear rights, this small-scale approach offers a path to capitalize on content consumption wherever it occurs.

Last month, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that it had successfully negotiated a new, five-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between owners and major-league players.

Given both baseball’s history (there was a debilitating strike in 1994 that ended the season early and saw no World Series played) and the recent lock-outs of both football and basketball players, the MLB agreement was developed with little fanfare or apparent rancor.

That is to say, little rancor until the deal was announced.  Among the subsequent reactions: ”The new CBA is terrible”, particularly in the way it treats amateur baseball players; and the new agreement is ”full of unintended consequences”, many of them detrimental to the long-term health of baseball.

A post largely sympathetic to the new agreement captured the central argument of these and other reviews: the CBA shifts money away from those not at the table, notably in the farm systems, and favors those already represented.

In October, I made the argument that the publishing supply chain had evolved from “complicated” but predictable to “complex” and increasingly prone to the impact of unintended consequences.  I went on to reference Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler, both of the Boston Consulting Group, who had written:

Increasingly, industry structure is better characterized as competing webs or ecosystems of codependent companies than as a handful of competitors producing similar goods and services and working on a stable, distant and transactional basis with their suppliers and customers.  In such an environment advantage will follow to those companies that can create effective strategies at the network or system level.

The network includes the farm system, and the publishing equivalent of the farm system may well be libraries. 

When it comes time to negotiate new supply-chain rules (and if you hadn’t noticed, that is happening every week now), it is easy to forget the farm system.  The rancor evident in reactions to publishers’ decisions to limit or eliminate the ability of libraries to distribute digital books is a sign that the new rules are being negotiated in a relative vacuum.

As in baseball, forgetting to offer or even denying the farm system a seat at the table may simplify life in the short term and erode demand and competitiveness in the long term.  I can’t prove it just yet, as the data on the full impact of libraries is scarce and incomplete.

But I certainly would want the data before denying libraries a role in the supply chain.  Getting that data starts by giving them a seat at the table.

Almost three decades ago, I came to publishing through the back door.  I had grown up writing, so production wasn’t the place I had thought I would land.

But land in production I did.  In many ways, though, it was a good fit.  I had studied chemistry in college and focused on operations while in business school.  At the time, production was less data-driven and more a matter of brute force.

It often surprised and sometimes amazed me that the processes used to create, manage and distribute content were peculiarly idiosyncratic and iterative.  It struck me then (as now) that publishers competed on content and its availability, not on the way that it was created or managed.

When editors changed in the magazine business, processes and schedules would change with them.  In book publishing, every title seemed to have its own story.  Most of the people I worked with liked it that way, or at the least they said it had to be that way.

In the time (now 13 years) I’ve consulted on cross-platform workflow assignments, I’ve come to talk about my career as a “fight to eliminate checking in publishing”.  When anyone asked me how it was going, I’d observe that I was about halfway done (with my career) and “it wasn’t looking very good”.

Today, I’m much more than halfway done, and the idea of building an effective and efficient publishing business has never seemed more remote.

The recent push to pass legislation to “stop" online piracy contrasts the dominance of those who innovate and compete with the declared needs of what Robert Levine describes as “the culture business”.  His recent book is a call to restore order to the content universe by restricting sites like Google, YouTube and the Huffington Post.

There’s a telling passage (page 68 in the print version of Levine’s book) in which an agent laments the deal that record companies signed with Apple in the early 2000s.  He says:

“They thought, ‘It’s another way to sell music.’ But now I’m selling singles when I should be selling albums.”

I’ll come back to Levine’s core arguments another time; they deserve a full assessment.  But there’s no cultural birthright that provides media companies or content creators with a lock on the formats that people can choose from when legitimately purchasing content.

I bring this up because it seems to me that the idea of restricting Google or YouTube (a big part of the SOPA bill now being debated) or HuffPo parallels the arguments now going on about Amazon’s library and price-comparison initiatives.

We’re trying to restore the old order and a measure of scarcity by going to war with the supply chain for content management and distribution.  That’s not a recipe for success.  Neither is trying to create a parallel supply chain.

What publishers could still do, if they chose, is move from “write once, read once” to “write once, read many”.  This would include thinking about ways to make content accessible and interoperable across platforms and with an eye to reuse as well as new uses.

Honestly, I’ve said or written all of this before.  For a long time I’ve kept at it because (somewhat like Robert Levine) I believed that the so-called traditional media companies provided a social benefit that deserved special consideration.

At the most recent Books in Browsers meeting in October, I had a side conversation with someone who shares my interest in seeing a new approach to content creation and distribution.  I started to talk about what I thought traditional publishers could do, and he stopped me mid-sentence to say, “I don’t want to see them figure out how to change; I want them to get out of the way so that the rest of us can get on with it.”

It’s funny how life turns out, but I’m starting to understand that point of view.  Three decades of trying to make things incrementally better isn’t something I’d take back, but I admit weighing the odds of faith in the face of doubt.

For nine years, I served on a board of education in the community where I live.  It’s an interesting job, one that makes you sensitive to how information is provided and consumed at a local level.

School board politics are seldom predictable, but the middle third of my foray into public service was surprisingly quiet.  Success usually has many authors, but in this instance I think there was one: Maria Zingaro, who joined the local paper as a reporter at the start of my second term.

Community newspapers typically hire reporters with little or no prior experience.  Many are promising, but it takes time to master the local mix of governing bodies, committees, personalities, issues and agendas.  Unlike those before and after, Ms. Zingaro hit the ground running.

The stories she wrote were complete, nuanced and fair.  Often enough, that meant they exposed things that the school district was doing less than well.  But the result was not a groundswell of criticism.

Armed with reasonably complete, balanced reporting, the folks who had elected us made choices that were actionable and informed.  The didn’t stop watching or expressing concern, but they did so in ways that an elected body could address.

When I started to think about repositioning publishing (not just books, but also periodicals) as the “engine of the engagement economy”, Maria Zingaro came to mind.  Although most of what we do is not reporting, much of what we do can now be tied to outcomes.

That perspective helps reframe the challenge we face in publishing, as captured by Jane McGonigal:

In the economy of engagement, it is less and less important to compete for attention, and more and more important to compete for things like brain cycles and interactive bandwidth. Crowd-dependent projects must capture the mental energy and the active effort it takes to make individual contributions to a larger whole.

Writing in Advertising Age (November 7), John Battelle returned to the five “golden rules of publishing” he first described in 2006.  These included:

- Conversation over dictation
- Platform over distribution
- Service over product
- Iteration over perfection, and
- Engagement over consumption

In the article, Battelle adds to the original five with new, uncomfortable sixth: all brands are publishers.

How does this help us sell books?  I have only a limited answer, and I also think it’s the wrong question.  Battelle’s observations make it clear that if we don’t find a new role, selling books will become only harder by the day.

We have before us an opportunity to shift publishing from providing products to measuring our success in supporting outcomes.  I don’t pretend to have a business model worked out to make that possible, but I’ve seen what happens when someone decides that her job involved more than just writing to fill a container.  That’s worth fighting for.

(With thanks to Eli James of Pandamian and Joseph Pearson, founder of Inventive Labs, which launched Monocle.  Both Eli and Joseph pushed me to do more to explain “engagement economy”.  I am sure they’ll help me do more over time.)

Earlier this week, Don Linn posted ”A Tragedy of the Commons”, an effective assessment that builds upon the thinking behind ”The opportunity in abundance”, recently posted here.

In his post, Don tackles the role of industry associations at a time of significant change.  His assessment: “They’ve largely looked after their individual interests to the detriment of the industry as a whole.” It’s a point of view I agree with, but I need to offer a bit of disclosure first.

Last spring (and summer), when the Book Industry Study Group was looking for an executive director to replace Scott Lubeck, I was a candidate.  I interviewed with the search committee but did not make it to the next round, in which the BISG board’s executive committee met with a short list of candidates.  The job eventually went to Len Vlahos, who came to BISG after working with the American Booksellers Association.

I’ve worked in publishing for 28 years, almost half of that time as a consultant (sobering, I know).  I was interested in BISG because it is well-positioned to employ what has been called the convening power of associations.

Before I interviewed, I had already been writing the early drafts of what became “abundance”, and I tested my ideas with the search committee.  I didn’t prevail, and that’s a good thing.  Every organization wants a leader who can do what the governing body thinks is important.  BISG has that, and I wish them well.

I tell you this because I’d rather say it publicly and avoid the suggestion, whispered or e-mailed, that I write about industry associations because I didn’t get the gig.  That’s not the case.

As one of my interviewers told me, the BISG has its priorities: dealing with identifiers, rights and piracy.  If you know me, and a lot of you do, I’d last about 15 minutes fighting piracy.

So ... Don Linn.  He speaks plainly, and that isn’t always easy.  I’d like to give him some support.

Not only have most associations fiddled while Rome burned; they have been vocal about it.  Just last week, the AAR blog included a post calling publishers out for allegedly avoiding negotiations about digital royalty rates.  It’s a land grab; why not?

“Abundance” explains why not: we are eroding our competitiveness from the inside out.  We need an industry solution, not a cascade of power struggles.

The same thinking applies to BISG and the IDPF.  It makes no sense to have two industry standards bodies, one physical, the other digital.  But it’s also the case that few vertically sponsored associations vote themselves out of existence.  The IDPF recently went the other direction, electing to significantly expand its board of directors.  Magellan Media is a member, and we cast the only vote against expanding the board.

A narrow focus can hamper vision.  Even though two-thirds or more of the digital books sold in the United States are read inside a proprietary system that has at best a passing relation to the IDPF standard, the public discussions treat Amazon as some sort of outlier.

Amazon, the company that made digital reading a reality, did so by creating an end-to-end solution that avoided the interoperability hassles of earlier e-readers.  Publishers, ever eager to wrap DRM around content, bought in.  After they helped Amazon make a captive market, publishers balked at things like low ebook prices.

In these debates, associations take sides that mirror their membership interests.  Of course they do; that’s why they exist.  In stable times, that may be okay.

These are not stable times.  Acting as if they are will not help.  We don’t need to defend the necessarily narrow work of associations; we need to move past it.

(On October 28, I presented the following talk at this year’s “Books in Browsers” conference, which was hosted by the Internet Archive and sponsored by O’Reilly Media, among others.  A video of this talk is available on O’Reilly Media’s YouTube channel.)

Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up.  Our father’s father’s father tried, erased the parts he didn’t like.

Some of you may recognize the opening lyrics of “Cuyahoga”, a song by R.E.M. that appeared on its 1986 album, “Lifes Rich Pageant”.  Many of my blog posts are based in a lyric, and in this presentation, you’ll see a handful of musical references I found helpful in preparing for today’s talk.

A year ago, I stood here and claimed that we had entered an era of content abundance, one that is forcing publishers to confront weaknesses in how they create, manage and disseminate content.  I cited four implications of abundance:

• Our content must become open, accessible and interoperable.
• We’ll need to focus more clearly on using context to promote discovery;
• Trying to compete on the cost of content is a losing proposition.  We need to develop opportunities that encourage broader use of our content; and
• We distinguish ourselves when we can provide readers with tools that draw upon context to help them manage abundance.

Much of my thinking at that time centered on what publishers could do to succeed in a content-abundant universe.  Since then, I’ve been kicking around what abundance means for our industry – not just publishers, but also authors, agents, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, libraries and others.

Increasingly, I’ve come to feel that we need to find a way to all hang together, or surely we will each hang separately.  To accomplish that, we need four things:

• We need goals, a redefinition of what publishing is and why it matter.  That is, we need to reposition publishing as the engine of the engagement economy;
• We need rules, a set of principles that are based in fairness and recognize that we have to balance current requirements with some, perhaps many, future unknowns;
• We need feedback, a shared way to model new approaches, test assumptions and make decisions based in fact; and
• We need a hook, a reason to collaborate

We’ll return to these ideas, which draw upon recent work by Jane McGonigal, in a few moments.

I’m hardly the first person to think or talk about the implications of content abundance.  Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg who passed away in September, thought that portable petabyte storage capable of holding a billion ebooks would be readily accessible to a middle-class reader by 2021.

Technology advances bear him out.  2011 marks the 40th anniversary for not just Project Gutenberg, but also the introduction of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004.  In the last four decades, the number of transistors we can squeeze on a chip has grown from 2,300 to 3.1 billion, while clock speeds have increased 3,700-fold.

Much as abundance is the precursor to the development of context, capacity is the precursor to abundance.  Moore’s law got us to where we are, and while growth in digital capacity may slow, it is not going to stop.  This capacity is rewriting the rules of the publishing supply chain.

In an exchange that took place a few years ago, Hart predicted a reading-enabled future in which book prices plummet, literacy and education rates soar and old power structures crumble in the wake of scientific, industrial and humanitarian revolutions.  That’s kind of cool if you’re part of the proletariat, but it might be a bit unnerving if you’re an oligarch (or aspiring to be one).

Now, some folks could rightly claim that a little revolution every now and then is a good thing, and I won’t argue with them.  But I’ve been wondering if we might get a lot closer to the next Enlightenment without having to roll out a 21st-century guillotine.  That is, I’ve been wondering if there is an opportunity in abundance.

I started out thinking that the answer might be elusive.  Most of us would accept that the supply chain we’ve built to handle physical books is complicated.  It’s constructed to promote efficiency and lower transaction costs as a share of total revenue.  Hampered by the gravity of success, it isn’t built to adapt quickly or to promote investment in new markets.

Any supply chain is a system – a collection of processes, tools and participants.  The extent to which a system can be described as “complicated” is a function of nodes and connections.  The more participants and relationships you have, the more complicated the system.  But even a complicated system is predictable: if you can identify and quantify the inputs, you can reliably forecast the results.

By way of comparison, a system is considered “complex” if you can identify and qualify inputs but the results are not necessarily predictable.  Increasingly, the publishing value chain feels “complex”.  We can no longer understand the whole system by simply looking at the sum of its parts.

Though we compete on context, metadata is largely assigned and managed by arm’s-length intermediaries.  The current supply chain was not designed to provide the publishers with an understanding of how, where, when and why consumers access and consume content.

It is this unaddressed complexity that has begun to erode supply-chain predictability.  New technologies don’t just lower transaction costs; they eliminate some transactions entirely.  Ultimately, eliminating transactions means eliminating one or more parts of the supply chain.

Managing complex ecosystems requires new approaches, ones that Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler, both of the Boston Consulting Group, described this way:

Increasingly, industry structure is better characterized as competing webs or ecosystems of codependent companies than as a handful of competitors producing similar goods and services and working on a stable, distant and transactional basis with their suppliers and customers.  In such an environment advantage will follow to those companies that can create effective strategies at the network or system level.

When I started working through these ideas, I wondered whether we had the tools in place to effectively negotiate our way to a new order.  In a stable environment, most supply chain issues can be resolved as “two parties, one issue” negotiations.  Think about discount rates, shipping terms, library lending, royalty rates and territorial rights.

Sometimes, these two-party, one-issue discussions play out in a series of distinct negotiations between supply-chain partners.  While this makes individual negotiations more manageable, it also reduces the likelihood that options beneficial to anyone not at the table might be introduced.

Magazine publishers faced this situation early in 2010, when Anderson News and Source Interlink, two of the largest single-copy wholesalers, asked for new terms for handling newsstand copies.  Publishers balked, Source Interlink backed down and Anderson News invoked its BATNA – best alternative to a negotiated agreement – and closed down its distribution business.

I feel for Anderson.  Newsstand distribution is a tough business, and Anderson left it claiming they were losing money.  For several reasons, magazine publishers act in counter-intuitive ways.  They push too many copies into the supply chain, and the average magazine sells only a third of its draw.  The cost of handling returns can be enormous.

But with Anderson’s overnight exit, magazine publishers lost 40% of their newsstand coverage, a situation that took months and millions of dollars in lost sales to sort out.  We worry about the loss of retail space at Borders, but we haven’t reached the real cliff yet …

As we transition from print-only to a blended product and service supply chain, focusing on our immediate needs risks the loss of a significant supply chain cog – libraries, wholesalers and retailers included.  In the current, complex system, we don’t fully understand the value added by each of these partners.  Losing them can and does create a set of unintended consequences.

Abundance hasn’t quite gutted the old rules, but it has rendered them inadequate.  As Peter Brantley pointed out last year, we’re trying to extend agreements made 40 or even 70 years ago.  Yet we live in a time when new entrants, new content forms and new distribution options have created a maelstrom of variety.

Using serial negotiations between two parties makes it impossible to revamp our supply chains so we can respond to content abundance.  What we need is a new approach: many parties, negotiating many issues simultaneously. 

In the last 50 years or so, a lot of good work has been done to explore and refine the development of multiparty agreements.  In relatively stable systems, well-specified procedures – auctions, sealed bids and limited markets – can be used to resolve disputes.  But the success of “many parties, many issues” negotiations depends on access to data, transparency and an overarching sense of fairness.

An example dating back to the 1960s, the so-called “law of the sea”, sought to establish a system of payments for the right to mine extra-territorial sea beds.  Early in the negotiations, participating nations agreed that the “common heritage of mankind … should not be prematurely exploited by those who happen to be ahead.” That’s a notion many publishers might find comforting.

As an international negotiation, “law of the sea” involved literally hundreds of participants and waded through dozens of significant issues: how mining might be financed, what royalty rates might be paid, what happens to royalty rates over time and how the proceeds, if any, might be allocated.  The discussions needed to be “win-win”, exploiting differences among assumptions, tradeoffs, risk preferences and need for capital.

Ultimately, these complex negotiations benefited from the analytical underpinnings of a model developed entirely outside the negotiations themselves, in this case at MIT with support from the Department of Commerce.  The model was introduced at a critical juncture and provided data that helped the negotiations focus on long term strategic and collective interests, not positions.

An interesting example, perhaps, but you may be thinking, “We lack a mechanism to make that happen.”

Or maybe we just haven’t made it yet.

It’s not that hard to leap from game theory to game design.  Jane McGonigal’s recent book, Reality is Broken, examines opportunities to use the principles of game design to create a better and more immersive reality.  I’d like to go back to those four things I said we needed to do to reinvent publishing:

First, we need a goal.  “Survival” is really not adequate.  It doesn’t motivate or sustain, and it presumes a zero-sum game (or worse).  I’d like to put a not-so-radical idea on the table: abundance, digital formats, Amazon and Apple all challenge prevailing business models, but the super-threat is people not engaging in immersive reading and text-based study, the precursors to critical thinking.

We live and work in a world in which we have a narrow window to influence or convince people to do what we want them to do.  We talk about the quality, value and importance of our work, and we view the act of publishing as validation.  But the measure that matters starts with how what we do is received.

So I propose a far bigger, collective goal: Reposition publishing (which for me includes physical and digital forms of book, magazine and newspaper content) as the engine of the engagement economy.  To make that happen, we need to increase the expectations we place on ourselves and on our readers, along the way “architecting the experience” of consumer interaction with our published works.

Second, we need rules.  For a start, I like my four implications of content abundance.  If we truly want to become the engine of the engagement economy, then being open, discoverable, agile and useful are defining characteristics.

But we also have to recognize that change will create winners and losers, even as we need continued support for the prevailing supply chain infrastructure.  Figuring out how to migrate successfully will depend on inventing options that ultimately are based in agreements about what is fair.  It will also require data that may challenge how we assign value to various roles in the new supply chain.

It’s also worth testing the extent to which various participants believe that growth in reading is possible.  While I can position it as an imperative, the extent to which the industry grows or shrinks strongly influences the willingness of various participants to collaborate, combine or trade assets.

Authors, agents, publishers, wholesalers and retailers are all part of the same industry, but it’s not yet clear if our belief systems are compatible or conflicting.  Does Andrew Wylie, the agent, really believe that digital royalties should be 50% and the cost of distribution should be zero?  Do publishers really believe that royalties today need be the same in perpetuity, or can a different model be implemented?  Are libraries a source of book sales or a net drain?  Questions like these are the starting point.

Third, we need feedback.  McGonigal notes that some games are designed to give you feedback first as a way to learn what to do and how to play.  We need that now, just to manage a complex supply chain.  The longer the lag between action and response, the more likely it is that we’ll inadvertently take actions that are with some frequency not in our best interest.

This is where models can help.  The breakthrough moments in the “law of the sea” negotiations started with engagement: participants could make their assumptions explicit, plug them into the model and see the impact on their return as well as the impact on everyone else.  Iterate enough times and the win-win solutions, where they exist, can be identified.

To make this happen, the roles of industry associations and standards bodies will need to change substantially.  At the least, now is the time to look at pooling funding and potentially establishing a meaningful, data-driven R&D effort.  R&D isn’t just about technology: some basic research about how people find, assess and consume content might give publishers reasons to re-evaluate their arm’s-length engagement with libraries.

Finally, we need a hook.  Participation is voluntary here.  Companies, institutions and individuals decide whether or not to play.  If we want to reposition publishing, we need to provide various forms of intrinsic motivation.

And we have to be willing to give lots of people a seat at the table.  The fundamental structure of the existing supply chain is under attack.  We need to figure out ways to reduce both transactions and transaction costs, or retail entities will continue to do it on their own.

The role of supply-chain intermediaries will need to evolve.  For a period of time, possibly a long time, we’ll need support for the physical distribution of content.  We may need fewer companies providing that support, and it is likely that we’ll have to adjust terms to better reflect the cost of doing business on a smaller scale.  If we treat these negotiations as we have in the past, however, the likelihood of an Anderson News moment only grows over time.

That’s why the time is now to figure out how we get “Publishing, The Game” started.

McGonigal talks about building “superstructures” - a highly collaborative network built on top of existing groups and organizations.  These superstructures bring together two or more different communities that don’t already work together to help solve a big, complex problem, what she labels “super-threats”, that no single existing organization can address on its own.  The new entity harnesses the unique resources, skills and activities of its subgroups, but it is fundamentally new – an idea not tried before, an untested combination of people, skills and scales of work.

I called the prospect of people not engaging with our content the publishing manifestation of a super-threat.  I’d argue (pretty strongly) that it represents a super-threat not just to publishing, but to the way we function as a country, an economy and as a part of a world order.

We have a responsibility to address this threat, not just so that we can make money, but because we’re the ones with the ability to solve it.

Other industries facing an uncertain future have banded together to form and fund superstructures.  The Gas Research Institute, for example, was authorized in 1976, at a time when the natural gas industry was highly fragmented among producers, wholesalers and distributors.  The latter often held a local monopoly.

By 1981, GRI was spending $68.5 million on research and a total of $80.5 million on oversight and R&D.  This represented about 0.2% of the wellhead price of gas that year, valued at the time at a bit more than $38 billion.

GRI undertook research and development in four areas: supply options (near term, mid-term and long-term); efficient utilization; enhanced service; and basic research.  Funding, drawn from a surcharge on sales as well as some government grants, accelerated to something north of $100 million in the mid-1980s.

If you look across all of publishing in the United States, it’s about a $40 billion business.  Imagine what we could do if we could create and sustain an organization with $80 million a year in funding.  It’s also likely that an industry-wide commitment to addressing engagement would garner the external funding that most parties have been understandably reluctant to spend on narrower causes.

This is the opportunity in abundance: a fighting chance to remake our industry and ourselves in a way that reflects, to borrow the phrase, our better angels.  To get there, we’ll need to cross some relatively uncharted waters.

McGonigal identifies a host of “fixes” for the reality that is broken.  The publishing industry is already testing some of these solutions, albeit not in a structured way.  I’d like to focus on three areas where I think we have started to re-frame our thinking.

First, more satisfying work.  Earlier this month, at O’Reilly Media’s TOC conference in Frankfurt, Jason Epstein positioned on-demand technology (including the Espresso) as a vehicle that would help publishing foster many smaller imprints.  Although it still bets big, Hachette’s Twelve limits its lists to allow adequate time to focus on the books it signs.  These ideas potentially restore human scale to publishing.

In a less well-known way, think of Benetech, which works with publishers to make content accessible to the blind.  As Kassia Krozser points out, Benetech makes content accessible in ways that benefit readers beyond their target audience.

In an e-mail exchange, Kassia invoked curb cuts, conceived to help people in wheelchairs, but providing benefits to anyone who pushes a baby stroller or a cart full of groceries.  What is good for one segment can also be good for the greater population.

Second, a better hope of success.  Reading is hard work.  Innovations like Wordnik, Flipboard, Small Demons and Safari Online make it easier to find what you want, when and where you want it.  They help you filter and decode a vast array of content on terms that make sense for you.

In a similar fashion, we’ve entered an era of “rights everywhere” – not as a barrier, but an opportunity.  Solutions like those embodied in Valobox – in effect, progressive reading as a transaction – will become commonplace.  It’s a different approach from the arm’s-length way we manage rights today, and it will require a rethinking of upstream (author and agent) relationships.

Complex systems demand a diversity of thought – variety, in effect, is the only way to manage a complex system.  Considering a wide range of perspectives helps reduce the risk of failure.  A game-like reinvention of publishing give us a chance to crowdsource experiments.

A third area in which we’ve begun to think differently is stronger social connectivity.  The experiments abound.  Look around this room.  You’ll see and have heard from representatives from ReadSocialAPI, Readmill, SocialBook, Goodreads, Readability, BookRiff, Cursor, and more.  Bob Stein has been working for 20 years to push the boundaries of social connectivity in reading.

We all know the common question: who wants (or needs) another platform?  I’d like to reposition all of these plays with a different question: How do we make sure our platforms are at the center of public and private conversations?  How do we make sure that our content is visible, available and relevant?

I started my remarks talking about the way that music seeps into my thinking about words.  In Annie Liebowitz’s photo essay, American Music, musician, poet and author Patti Smith captured it this way:

Our music grants us a coat of invulnerability, a spring in which we bathe with abandon, methods of response, moments of respite, and a riot of self-expression.  It is the porch song.  Plunging youth. It is thick-veined hands squeezing clusters of notes from an equally thick neck.  It is the Les Paul. The tenor sax.  It is a platter spinning in space, etched with the words “Tutti Frutti”.

Patti Smith writes beautifully about the power of music, evoking images that may make you wonder how we will ever compete against a tidal wave of creation and consumption and media alternatives.  It’s worth noting, though, that she chose to do so … in a book.

Words inspire, motivate and change.  They can help us shape a new reality, but first we have to see abundance as the opportunity to reshape our business.

Let’s put our heads together.  Let’s start a new industry up.

(With thanks to Don Linn, Laura Dawson, Kirk Biglione, Sheila Bounford, Kassia Krozer, Anna von Veh, Ashley Gordon, Kat Meyer and Peter Brantley, all of whom helped in the development of this talk.)

The Internet Archive is hosting its “Books in Browsers” conference, this year themed “Beautiful Books”.  A full agenda is available online, and (in partnership with O’Reilly Media) the meeting is being streamed live on October 27 and 28.

The event takes place in San Francisco, and all of the times are local, so ... do the math.

The better part of three decades ago, in my waning days of business school, I was looking for my first job in publishing.  To that point, I had made a small career in energy and environmental consulting, but I really wanted to work for a publisher.

At the time, Daniel Burke, who passed away yesterday, was the COO of Capital Cities, which at time owned a set of newspapers as well as Fairchild Publications.  He had graduated from Harvard Business School, so I wrote to him asking for advice on how I might find work as in newspaper production.

Shortly after I wrote, I got a call from his assistant, who arranged for me to fly to New York.  When we met, Burke’s first question was “How can I help?” I started my pitch, and about halfway through he stopped me, laughed and repeated the question.

I laughed, as well - he made that seem both possible and natural.  I said, “I need a job in publishing.”

Burke leaned forward and said, “I get dozens of requests a week to work here, but no one has ever asked me to work in production.  I don’t have a job for you, but I wanted to see what someone who wants to work in production actually looks like.”

I probably looked as dispirited as I felt at the moment, but if he noticed, Burke paid it no mind.  He went on to tell me something that have stuck with me ever since.

Burke told me a bit about his own career, and how he had moved from knowing all of the details of running a single business, to most of the details of running a set of businesses, to some of the details of what was already a pretty big publishing operation.  He talked about how it can be both frustrating and scary to be at a distance from an operation or a decision.

And he said, “You’ll face this someday too, and when you do, resist the temptation to squeeze too tight.  The people you rely on will know more than you do, and you’ll have to trust them.  Let people make mistakes where you can.  It helps you learn, and it helps them learn.”

And with that, he sent me off to Red Bank and Kansas City to meet with the staff at the newspapers they owned there.  I didn’t get hired (though I did eventually land a job in magazine production at Time Inc.), but Burke’s advice has stayed with me.

We all have opportunities to influence publishing aspirants.  His passing is a useful reminder of the importance of making the most of those opportunities.

For a meeting next week at the Internet Archive, I’ve been working on a brief presentation I’m calling “The Opportunity in Abundance”.  It’s one of my typically egg-headed mashups of trends in publishing, trends in technology, ideas cribbed from other businesses and some oddball research.

In developing the idea, I’ve talked about it with pretty much anyone who will listen.  (This may explain why people are no longer agreeing to have lunch with me.) After one of those conversations, Sarah Wendell sent me a link to a post about Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, who passed away in September at the age of 64.

Hart’s pioneering work in digitizing and sharing e-texts as much as 40 years ago provided a foundation for a lifetime of work exploring the implications of content abundance.  Moreover, he saw our era as “an” information age, the fifth in a series created by technology changes and in his view stifled by the over-zealous application of copyright law.

In this regard, Hart stands alongside William Patry, whose 2009 book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, was the subject of an earlier post here.  If there is a lesson to be learned from Hart and Patry, it might be that efforts to re-create scarcity, whether through law or other means, are short-term solutions at best.

A brief note: Sara Wendell, who was kind enough to send me the link about Michael Hart, is currently on tour promoting her book, Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels.  Just sayin’ ...

I’ll be in Frankfurt the week of October 10, joining two panels at O’Reilly Media’s one-day Tools of Change in Publishing conference and then attending the book fair.

One of the panels, “Grappling with the ineffable: A transatlantic dialogue about new directions in content planning”, was put together by Sheila Bounford of NBN International.  She asked me to join Alastair Horne, Innovations Manager with Cambridge University Press, in a conversation about the implications of my prior work around “Context first”.

As a bit of a primer for those attending that panel, I wanted to collect some relevant links in a single post.  If you are a follower, these links aren’t new (just curated):

- The full “Context first” text

- A narrated screencast of the “Context first” presentation

- Four posts that are drawn from content prepared for a “Futurecast” meeting hosted by OCLC in June.  These posts present extended language about: “open, accessible and interoperable” content; the need to “use context to promote discovery”, a business need to encourage “broader content use”; and the value of “tools that help manage abundance”.

- And finally, a three-post set of answers to questions about “Context first” posed by Canadian publishing web site Quill & Quire.  The posts answered questions about context vs. container; made a business case for context; and explained why context is here to stay.