Recently Hugh McGuire sent me a link to Carl Malamud’s talk, “10 Rules for Radicals”.

In responding to come comments on a recent blog post, I linked to Malamud’s talk and highlighted one of his ten rules:

“Get standing.  Have some skin in the game, some reason you’re at the table.”

As I noted in my response, Malamud uses “standing” in the legal sense - you are engaged in a way that gives you a right to file a grievance.  It need not be so limited.

I wanted to highlight Malamud’s work on the front page of the blog because I think his rules can be quite useful to the many among us who care about the future of publishing.  His entire talk is instructive, and I encourage you to follow Hugh McGuire’s advice (to me) and read it.  But if you need a teaser, here are three on-point rules:

- call everything an experiment;

- when the starting gun goes off, run really fast; and

- don’t be afraid to fail.

There is more, and it is based on a good history.  Make time to click on the link.

Writing last week at Digital Book World, Emily Williams posted a thoughtful piece about ”Copyright, books and the unpredictable future”.

Williams, who co-chairs the rights subcommittee for the Book Industry Study Group, outlined the history of negotiations over format and geographic rights to help structure an answer to the question: are ebooks like paperback rights, critical to the whole, or does the format represent something different, as territorial rights are now?

In her post, Williams does a very nice job of talking about publishers who have shifted from “life of copyright” negotiations to shorter terms with broader controls over formats and markets.  The interplay of breadth with time frames is something few observers have captured as concisely.

It’s beyond the scope of her post, but Williams’ analysis made me wonder if the current copyright protections, most recently extended to nearly a century, will stand in a rapidly changing environment.  As covered by William Patry’s recent work, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, the push to limit the use of works for extended periods ultimately limits innovation.

Consistent with Williams’ thinking, those limitations will come under greater pressure as the range of uses and formats grows.  The old wine may conform to the shape of new bottles, but it feels as if most of the new bottles will be smaller and their contents will be consumed more quickly.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), an event that took place this year in Los Angeles.

Although we’ve been members of Association Media and Publishing for some time, this is only the second ASAE annual meeting that I have attended.  We joined ASAE a couple of years back after Amy Lestition, executive director of Association Media and Publishing, recommended doing so.

Membership has given us an opportunity to broaden our understanding of challenges and opportunities in the association space.  The organization provides an almost overwhelming opportunity to learn and become engaged, particularly in the Washington, DC market.

ASAE’s abundance can also be a challenge.  In the end, we are looking to work with associations on their publishing and media efforts.  Necessarily, ASAE wears many other hats all the time, and a fair share of what comes across my in-box is “nice to know” but not really “need to know”.

Internet access at the annual meeting was pretty good, especially given the sprawl of the Los Angeles Convention Center. As a result, there was a pretty robust stream of comments and links to blog posts, collated under the hashtag #asae10.

While not a comprehensive round-up of summary posts, this cross-section proved helpful and illustrative:

• A new blog, Association Advocacy Chick, offered her thoughts on “What ASAE10 meant to me”

• At One-Girl Wolf Pack, Teri Tally provides her perspective as a first-time attendee;

• At The Wobbly Jelly Theory, Robert Barnes offers “Learnings, musings and afterthoughts”;

• At Socialfish, Prolific association blogger Maddie Grant offered her cons (“Has ASAE lost its mojo?”) and pros (“Top ten things that rocked my world at ASAE10”); the cons post was extensively re-tweeted;

• Also at SocialFish, Jamie Notter wrote about “Social leadership” as informed by his experiences at ASAE10;

• BlogClump, written by Matt Baehr, added to the work done by Maddie Grant;

• And Toni Rae, who was featured in the somewhat controversial “Guilt by Association” video that popped up in general sessions throughout the meeting, provided a couple of windows into how much work (and how little gratitude) can affect perceptions of meetings like this one.

The ASAE blog, Acronym, also covered the meeting.  If you’re interested in a reported view of the event, it’s not a bad place to go.

Reading the tweets and blog posts, a couple of themes emerged for me:

There is a tension, perhaps not always healthy, between the exhibition and education parts of the annual meeting.  As leading sponsors of often large annual meetings, associations are heavily courted by exhibition venues, and there is some main-stage competition to appear as showy as possible.

The other is a desire on the part of ASAE members to be included – a number of the posts talk about finding a home (both at the meeting and within ASAE) that is of greater value than the association itself.

The second observation got me thinking about the nature of participation.  Larger, established organizations can be slow to change, and even when they are faster, they move on a limited number of fronts at once.

With 22,000 members from 11,000 organizations, ASAE is hard-pressed to “represent” all the interests of its members.  Borrowing from Patty Griffin, hoping that ASAE will come to embody my interests is a useless desire.  I need to advocate (if I care deeply) for my objectives, or move on.

This point was illustrated in Maddie Grant’s lament that a conference flashmob didn’t get much attention in ASAE’s show daily.  If the interest is the experience – a surprise event at a scripted show – then it was a great success.

But if the interest is official attention for an experiential moment, I think we’ll all be waiting a long time for an answer.

A few months ago, The Atlantic changed its policy to require that interns get paid, and I wrote a short piece lamenting the complicity of educational institutions in fostering the “pay to play” nature of for-credit internships.

This summer, my niece has been living with us while she searches for a paid position in publishing.  She is a bright, hard-working young woman who graduated last May from a college you’d immediately recognize as quite good.

While in school, she did all the things you’d expect from a person who wanted to work in publishing, including a leadership role at the campus newspaper.  She reads voraciously, follows the industry closely and is fun to be around.  Really.

Throughout the summer, she has worked as an unpaid intern at two different publishing entities.  Neither has shown any inclination to hire her.

In fact one supervisor, apparently dissatisfied with what he was getting for free, pulled her aside recently and suggested that she “wouldn’t want him to be unhappy with her work”.  Nurturing, these internships are not.

To be able to live on two unpaid internships, my niece is working nights and weekends as a barista in a downtown coffee shop.  Apparently the internship bug has not yet invaded coffee shops.

At dinner last night, she told a joke making the rounds among her fellow interns:

Two publishing executives come back from a nice lunch to find their mutual intern at her desk, sobbing.  They ask her what’s wrong and she says, “My dad lost his job and he can’t afford to send me here any more.”

My reaction?  “Shame on us.”

Regular readers know that I am almost reflexively data-driven.  I want facts, not anecdotes, to underpin what I write.

Take this post as a partial exception.  I may be telling a story about my niece, but we all know what’s going on in publishing right now.

The economy is weak enough that bright, motivated people are doing work for free in the slight hope that it will result in something paid down the road.  Publishers are more than willing to take advantage.

I’ve heard people I respect say things like “we could get an intern in here to do this (real work) for free”.  I’ve seen major copy-editing projects handed over to people willing to do the work for nothing, in exchange for a line on a resume or a possible opportunity at an unspecified date.

I’m old enough to know that people are not drawn to publishing for the money.  There are plenty of fields, in New York and elsewhere, that pay much better.  As a colleague observed (somewhat tongue in cheek) a couple of weeks back, “We were attracted to publishing because it gave us the chance to have lunch with bright, interesting people.”

Fortunately, publishing still attracts bright, interesting people.  Unfortunately, we are treating them with contempt.  Unpaid spots at magazine and book publishers are being handed out like door prizes.

This makes no sense.  Smart, motivated employees are the lifeblood of publishing.  At a time of immense upheaval, the few among us who actually understand how “social” media has become are telling each other jokes about the two executives and the unpaid intern.

Employers wonder about the work ethic of the so-called millennial generation.  I wonder about the morality of taking work from people we can’t or won’t pay.  I’ll repeat myself: shame on us.

Marny Smith, PR manager for Ryland Peters & Small (Cico Books) and a student in the publishing part of NYU’s school of continuing and professional studies (SCPS), recently interviewed me about our work and my thoughts about publishing in general.

Although I wouldn’t normally link to an interview, the conversation wound up covering a range of topics I typically blog about, including how we work with publishers, the challenges we expect publishers to face in the next few years and some of the people who are doing interesting work in publishing.

I’ve recently finished William Patry’s 2009 book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars.  The book has been widely praised, and I had been looking forward to reading Patry’s work.

Starting with the introduction, Patry explains copyright as a monopoly granted by the legislature to encourage the creation and dissemination of knowledge.  Throughout the book, he illustrates how longer monopolies are less likely to lead to innovation, growth in output and the dissemination of knowledge that copyright was created to support.

Patry dedicates the core of the book to describing how copyright holders have repeatedly used “moral panics” to argue for extensions of their monopoly.  In Patry’s view, their interests of copyright holders are natural but (when wholly granted) antithetical to the public interest.  He calls on the federal government to reform copyright and restore it to its Constitutional purpose.

While Patry is trained and works as a lawyer, the book is written to make it accessible to anyone who cares about understanding copyright.  It is astoundingly well researched, and the footnotes alone (saved for a section in the back) are a lesson in the history of copyright.

If you follow our work on piracy, this book provides the context that I wish we had when we started researching the subject.  If you own any copyrights, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars is a must-read.  I hope Patry’s argument has already started the ball rolling toward more sensible copyright laws.

TechCrunch picked up remarks made by Nicholas Negroponte that predict the demise of the print book in the next five years.

Part of Negroponte’s role is to challenge our thinking about media but the film and music metaphors he uses break down for me a bit.

The media consumption experience for photos and music didn’t necessarily change when film and vinyl (and soon enough, CDs) disappeared.  Albums still get filled with printed photos, even if we create the physical form ourselves.  We can play digital music on the same equipment we used for albums and CDs.

Switching from physical to digital for long-form reading is easy for some and hard for others.  It takes me several hours to read a book, and the devices I’ve tried are at best tolerable for me.  If I am going to spend a long time reading, I prefer print.

I anticipate a time when books are no longer printed for inventory, but I don’t think that means print as a medium is dead.  Print will still attract a smaller market of people who prefer the format and are probably going to pay a higher price for it.  They’ll also actually own their books.

Crain’s New York Business, a publication I consider a “must-read” each week, just published a short profile of the first-week sales of the e-book titles published by Odyssey Editions on an exclusive basis with Amazon.

According to Crain’s, only one of the 20 titles sold enough copies to appear in the top 1,000 Kindle titles for the week; the sales rank of the others ranged from 2,073 to 11,653.  The newspaper asks the question, “Much ado about nothing?”

The piece quotes an industry consultant (not me!) who offers up the claim that titles ranked below 1,000 sell fewer than 25 copies a week.  Although their list prices range from $14 to $16, the titles all sell on Amazon for $9.99, so you can imagine someone saying, “All this fuss for $250 a week?”

Or $13,000 a year.  Across 20 titles, that’s $260,000 for books that probably cost much less than a tenth of that amount to digitize.  And there are literally millions of books that are not yet available digitally.

If Crain’s had asked me, I’d have said that the marginal books are not selling 25 copies a week; they are probably moving ten or fewer units.  So I’m not making the point that e-books will soon rule us all.

But Odyssey’s effort, with little money upfront and no ongoing physical costs, may well be creating a $250,000 business in its first full year of operation.  That prompts me to ask a different question: ”Why isn’t every publisher already doing this?”

As has been widely reported, the Washington Post Company is looking to sell Newsweek, which is reported to be losing as much as $70 million this year.  Bids were due at the beginning of July, but a decision is still pending.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that choosing a buyer is somewhat complicated by an apparent desire to sell the magazine but keep it essentially intact.  In a cogent critique, Jason Fell of Folio: makes the case that this is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Publishing brands seem to have a blind spot when it comes to weak performance.  People are demonstrably willing to pay for content: check out The Economist, Harvard Business Review or People, as examples.

If a target audience is not willing to pay for your content, it’s not an environmental problem.  It’s probably the content.

And if a magazine like The Week is making money with a few dozen staff, it’s more than reasonable to ask if Newsweek needs to have 325 people on board what is sadly a sinking ship.

I’m not privy to the evaluation going on at the Washington Post Company, but it seems from this overlook that both the seller and the bidders are trying to figure out a way to tweak the existing model, at a time when the existing models may no longer have relevance.  A publication bleeding more than $1 million a week cries out for reinvention.

Edited later on August 2 to add: No doubt feeling significant pressure from this blog post, the Washington Post Company agreed to sell Newsweek to Sidney Harman.

Last weekend, I went to see Salt, the new action-thriller movie starring Angelina Jolie.  No plot spoilers, but I did leave the theater disappointed.

At dinner afterward, we talked about what bothered us about the movie.  For me, the plot violated a convention that makes movie-going fun – a certain predictability that allows surprises but still validates the underlying goodness of key characters.

Earlier this week, I posted a somewhat predictable observation about the symbiotic relationship between flawed piracy studies and lazy reporting.  Commenting, bowerbird asked in part: “Knowing that, what do you do now?”

As I responded at the time, “That’s the operative question, isn’t it?”

There’s a convention in publishing, somewhat reflected in this blog, that leads us to say “all is well, except for the parts that are not.” Over the last two months, I’ve struggled with the idea that anything, let alone all, is well with publishing.

Today’s publishing landscape increasingly looks like Vulcan shortly after the Romulans injected Red Matter into the planet core.  As Vulcan collapses, we publishing types are debating where the mountains used to be.

Before I started writing this blog, I made three semi-public rules of thumb, one of which was and remains: no snark.  Positive criticism, yes, but I’d avoid being critical for the sake of a headline, or a punch line.

Unfortunately, the middle ground can also sound muddled.

One of my favorite books, Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus, talks about the transformative role that literary and cultural icons have played in shaping American history and its evolving narrative.  In this category, he includes Lincoln, Faulkner, Melville and Elvis Presley, of whose collective works he wrote:

We feel ennobled and a little scared, or very scared, because we are being shown what we could be, because we realize what we are, and what we are not.  We pull back.

Since this year’s edition of BookExpo America, I’ve wondered who in publishing speaks for what we could be.  It’s not a question of who can predict the future (many people compete for that distinction), but of who can articulate for a broader audience the possibilities for publishing as cultural motherlode.

Some folks put that burden on Richard Nash and Cursor (I know I have).  Still, he’s just one guy, and he could use some help.

This is a time of transformation in the creation, management and dissemination of content.  Focusing on periodic dust-ups over rights, royalties and terms of engagement largely guarantees that most of us won’t have a seat at the next table to be set.

Naturally, I walk a thin line.  I try to help magazine, book and association publishers do things faster, better, cheaper – generally, incrementally better.  That’s a good thing.

Still, a clearer voice could help.  I should get up.

Joe Wikert, who works at O’Reilly Media, also authors a blog, Publishing 2020, which is recommended reading.

On Publishing 2020, Wikert recently asked “Where are all the iOS magazine subscription apps?” He wondered out loud if Apple’s 30% “cut” is discouraging publishers from pursuing the subscription route.

I don’t see Apple’s cost as the deciding factor.  Our analysis shows that a cross-section of publishers spends (on average) 59% of their circulation revenue to promote and fulfill print subscription copies.

The same group of publishers typically spends a comparable share of newsstand revenue (55%) on single-copy expenses.  Looking to take 30% of gross revenue, Apple starts to look like a bargain.

The more likely culprit: publisher inexperience building apps.

Subscriptions are a contract: you give me money, and I deliver an agreed-upon number of issues.  Before committing to a subscription model, publishers need to know what’s involved in making that happen, not once, but every issue.

That doesn’t mean that publishers should take forever, but Apple has not been particularly proactive in providing specifications or direction for its app store.  This ball started rolling only in April.

Edited August 3 to add: Apparently it’s more complicated underneath the hood.

Toward the end of the management class I teach at NYU’s M.S. in publishing program, we cover three cases, including one on Harlequin at the time it is considering a launch of Mira, a trade imprint.

To that point, Harlequin had been known for series romance fiction, much of it sold directly to consumers.  There is ample evidence in the case that the market is changing to favor single-title romances and named authors, and Harlequin assembles a task force to consider its options.

Ramping up single-copy sales is complicated by many factors, including a multi-year trade distribution deal that Harlequin had made with Simon & Schuster as part of an agreement that settled a “romance war” between the two firms.  At the time the case is written, S&S is one of the dominant publishers of single-title romance novels.

I teach the case to draw together structural lessons taught throughout the semester.  It’s a good opportunity to apply Michael Porter’s “five forces” framework.  It’s also a preview of 2010’s interdependent publishing world.

Generally, students recognize the significant differences between a direct and a trade model, but very few discuss the sales and margin impact of a long-term agreement with a distributor whose interests diverge from Harlequin’s.  I give them a break: they are students, at NYU to learn, and supply-chain analysis is hard.

They are also playing with Monopoly money: no harm, no foul.

Flash forward to 2010: Amazon is busy making the entire book business a “direct-to-consumer” model.  This isn’t new; they have been doing it for 15 years.  By most accounts, the company is now the largest retailer of physical books and the dominant player in the digital space.

What are Amazon’s priorities?  It doesn’t hide them.  In 2007, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos described a company that is “congenitally customer-focused” whose enduring priorities are selection, low prices and fast delivery.

Compare those priorities to the ones in place at most publishing houses.  It’s easy to see where interests start to diverge.  And if you apply Porter’s framework to Amazon, you quickly see why the company has become publishing’s best-known and most significant frenemy.

A direct customer focus has paid off for Amazon.  Customers describe buying books from Amazon in ways that they seldom do when talking about bricks-and-mortar stores.  And like it or not, the sense that books should and can cost less is now ingrained in our consciousness.

The recent controversy involving an agent selling exclusive e-book rights to Amazon (you know the one) has focused largely on royalty rates, the role of agents and the exclusive nature of the deal.  I think that debate misses the point.

The publishing supply chain has shifted.  The interests of the company best positioned to benefit from those changes are not aligned with those of most publishers today.

Publishers can defend, change or co-opt, but they can’t stand still.  Issue all the press releases you want, but realize this isn’t about e-book royalty rates.  It’s about Amazon.

After about a month of dancing, NewsCorp. announced at the end of June that it was selling Beliefnet.com to a new entity, BN Media.  Behind the new firm are Cross Bridge Media, a provider of inspirational videos, and Affinity4, a web marketer.

In reporting the sale, the Los Angeles Times noted that Beliefnet “no longer fits with [NewsCorp’s] digital strategy.” Much of the coverage that preceded the sale focused on NewsCorp’s steady divestiture of a series of unrelated digital assets, including Rotten Tomatoes and Photobucket.

I think the problem with Beliefnet is not that the digital strategy changed, but that NewsCorp never really had one.  Its efforts focused on integrating Beliefnet with Zondervan, HarperFaith and Fox Faith, using Beliefnet as a distribution channel for physical product.

In pushing its physical products, NewsCorp may have undermined the sense of community that was a hallmark of Beliefnet as an independent entity.  Traffic dropped significantly: in the nearly three years that NewsCorp ran BeliefNet, it lost 400,000 monthly uniques (14%).

Unfortunately, the acquiring firm has a profile that does not suggest a big shift in strategy.  In its reports, the L.A. Times also noted that “fewer than half of the 50 people who work at Beliefnet are expected to lose their jobs as a result of the acquisition.” If those departing are heavily drawn from the content side of the business, Beliefnet’s next half-life will be even shorter.

Full disclosure: We provided consulting services to Beliefnet in 2006 and early 2007, before the firm was acquired by NewsCorp.  The content of this post relies entirely on published reports.

Because it would be easy enough to spend my waking hours critiquing the project methodology of anti-piracy studies, I’ve focused most of my time and energy calling for transparency, data-sharing and patience in not drawing conclusions before they are fully baked.

The most recent anti-piracy study broke last week, when the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory announced that it had found only 0.3% of all files shared on BitTorrent sites were legally distributed.  Claims made as a result of the study appeared in ArsTechnica and ZDNet, among others.

TorrentFreak took a look at the study, found it flawed on several levels and published a complete and detailed assessment of the problems it found.  They lament both the study and the willingness of interested media to publish its claims without digging deeper.

The two observations are inter-related.  On the one hand, studies like this one (and others) make no sense.  The methodologies and conclusions are pretty easy to refute, as TorrentFreak points out in a relatively short post.

But professional and mainstream media outlets continue to demonstrate an uncritical willingness to repeat these conclusions.  A willingness to simply repeat what the press release said encourages both sloppy and ultimately misleading studies.

Of course, if this is a public-relations effort with a legislative endgame, the loudest and most dramatic conclusions can be of highest value.  On that front, it makes perfect sense.

Next Wednesday, July 28, Peter Meirs, Vice President of Production Technologies for Time Inc. will lead a discussion on e-readers and distribution of content at Association Media and Publishing’s New York Educational Program.  The program description:

Across the board, demand for mobile content is expanding rapidly. A market jump-started by e-readers like the Kindle now includes an array of multi-function mobile devices, such as iPhones. In addition, low-cost netbooks are becoming increasingly popular as mobile reading platforms. Meirs will discuss how associations can use mobile delivery of their content to maintain and enhance member engagement.

I know Peter Meirs pretty well and can guarantee this will be a great program.  Peter currently oversees digital magazines, emerging media technologies, the Time Inc. digital archive group (E-MaG), the Digital Development Group, the OMS Print group, Time Inc. paper and production information systems (TimeXchange) and production systems development.

He is also a founding member of the PRISM XML standard working group and has responsibility for Time Inc.’s efforts with electronic insertion orders and the AdsML advertising specification. Since joining Time Inc. in 1992, he has overseen its digital advertising and transmission systems, directed TIME Magazine Editorial Operations and managed Time Inc.’s conversion to a fully digital production workflow.

The New York Educational Program takes place from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Commercial Finance Association, located at 370 7th Avenue, Suite 1801, New York, NY 10001. The program is complimentary for members and 30 dollars for non-members. You can register for the program online.  Lunch will be served.

In the July 8 issue of Rolling Stone, correspondent Michael Hastings profiled General Stanley McChrystal, who at the time of his reporting was leading the military arm of the United States war efforts in Afghanistan.  In front of Hastings, General McChrystal openly criticized both the war strategy and some administration officials.  In short order, he was relieved of command.

There is some debate about how much the general understood was a matter of record, but there is no debate that the story broke in Rolling Stone.  Interestingly, the story first appeared online not at Rolling Stone but at Time.com and Politico, each of whom posted PDFs of the story.

That is, they pirated it.

Apparently, Rolling Stone had sent advance copies to various news organizations but wanted to release its online version only after the physical newsstand copies went on sale.  Single-copy sales for Rolling Stone are healthy enough, averaging over 100,000 copies sold per issue in the second half of 2009.

The story broke pretty fast, and various news organizations struggled with how to “cover” a story for which the content was effectively unavailable.  Time.com and Politico decided the story was the story, and so “fair use” could justify copying an entire article and posting it on their sites.

Rolling Stone objected, and the two competing news sites did take down the content.  A spokesperson for Time Inc. said that chairperson Ann Moore “believes it was an honest mistake and we don’t believe it will happen again.” (Helpful hint: don’t try using that excuse with the RIAA.)

For me, though, the question is, “How did this affect sales at Rolling Stone?”

One report indicated that Rolling Stone was selling “five times” its average sales on the newsstand, “easily shaping up to be the biggest-selling issue of the year”.  In the three days after Time.com and Politico posted the purloined PDFs, Rolling Stone’s web site saw traffic spike from 120K to something closer to 1 million visitors per day.

Let’s agree: the PDFs were taken down pretty quickly.  Let’s also agree: we don’t have any way of measuring what would have happened if they had not been published at all.

But many news organizations covered the story (and the story about the story) quickly.  Once its newsstand copies were available in major markets, Rolling Stone itself made the content in question available for free on its own site.

Newsstand distribution deals are somewhat customized, but it’s fair to guess that Rolling Stone keeps 40% of the cover price on its single-copy sales.  If it really does winding up selling an additional 400,000 copies of the current double issue (priced at $4.95), the incremental revenue approaches $800,000.

Not bad for pirates’ wages.

Across the street from where I work (and blog), an elementary school has been dismantled.  The new building is probably going to be a lot taller, and all summer long various works crews have been digging, drilling and blasting their way into the bedrock often found in midtown Manhattan.

Around the neighborhood, we’ve grown accustomed to the long whistle that signals another round of explosives is about to be set off.  Each blast rattles adjacent buildings, including ours.

A few short whistles signal “all clear”, after which a thick rubber dam is pulled back from the blast area.  One machine divides the blasted material into even smaller chunks, while another scoops up the material into the next available dump truck.  It’s a batch operation, but it works steadily enough that you could mistake it for a continuous process.

Yes, I’m also a construction geek, but that’s not the reason I write about it here.

Much of my career has been dedicated to improving how things work, an elevator pitch shortened over time to “faster, better, cheaper”.  It started with things like the timeliness of printing instructions, moved on to shortening the time required to deliver subscription copies, and more recently has focused on optimizing cross-platform content workflows.

In 27 years of “faster, better, cheaper”, I’ve learned that getting people to change what they do, how they do it and what tools they use is pretty much impossible without either absolute power or some controlled destruction.

Few of us have absolute power, and those among us who do hold it are understandably reluctant to use it to improve something like content workflows.  That leaves us with controlled destruction.

You may be thinking, “But the old school/new building isn’t like publishing.  We can’t just shut down for a year and come back when everything is arranged as we want it.” On that level I’d agree.

But content workflows are more like the sidewalks, streets, subways (there are six lines running within four blocks of this site), water mains and electrical and communication subsystems that still have to function as this controlled destruction takes place.  Those things stay “up” because people have mapped them, identified where they might be affected and worked around them until the new construction is put in place.

That’s where publishing – in this case, both books and magazines – can go badly off track.  We favor authoring tools that are cheap, or that are two releases (or more) behind, because “they work”, “the staff knows them” and “it’s a tough budget year”.  We skip investments in accessible content repositories (whether purchased outright or rented using third parties) because “we’ve paid for these file servers”, and “the staff knows where everything is.”

We also find that it’s hard to map what’s in place already.  And over time we discover that distribution of our content, hard as it is in one format (print), feels nearly overwhelmingly difficult as we take on formats that include the web, digital files, in components, syndicated feeds, you name it…

Nearly a decade ago, a consulting colleague noted that “big bangs make big holes”.  I’m not advocating big bangs.  Most publishers can’t handle them, and the few who can understand the complex nature of rebuilding everything at once.

But the content workflows that once made sense no longer do.  We need approaches that are more flexible, lower-cost and capable of evolving over time.  Pushing those developments into the future only increases the cost, complexity and urgency of change.

Publishers would do well to have already started the change process in earnest.  Otherwise, the long whistle may signal the end of a business, not just a process.  If we’ve learned anything in the last two years of economic turbulence, things really do go boom, like that.

At the New York Times, Ashlee Vance recently reported on Ray Kurzweil’s efforts to bring the Blio platform to market.

Kurzweil attacks the e-reading space from a predictable perspective (existing e-readers have failed to maintain presentation formats), and that’s puzzling.  I’d expect a well-financed inventor who sees a day when “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology” would also see a day when we use each medium in ways that recognize its strength.

“Format as brand” is not new: companies like LibreDigital and Adobe have been hard at work trying to replicate the physical word in the emerging digital one.  But as I wrote last fall, these efforts are built on a fundamentally flawed premise:

Readers want to address a need or solve a problem, not replicate the reading experience of a broadsheet, or an 8-3/8 x 10-7/8 magazine or a 6 x 9 book.  New formats provide new opportunities, and defining the brand in terms of what worked in print certainly leaves the door wide open for disruption.

Existing content and companion e-readers fail to take full advantage of the potential value of the new medium, but a new viewer that better emulates the physical product is just as wrong.  Kurzweil may provide a soothing option at a turbulent time, and on that basis Blio may succeed as a publisher-driven option.  But it’s an interim option, not a solution.

Earlier this year, Macmillan president Brian Napack outlined a seven-point plan to “stop piracy”.  At the time, I wrote a brief post suggesting that one of the seven points, “Build a viable consumer marketplace”, should be given greater prominence in the company’s call to action around instances of digital piracy.

I also suggested that Macmillan gather data on what helps and hurts paid content sales.  Regular readers of our work know this is a common refrain with respect to our thoughts on piracy: we don’t know what we don’t know.

So it was more than a little disappointing to read Macmillan’s recent posting for a new position, ”Director, Digital Piracy”.  The job description is long on enforcement and wholly silent on viable consumer marketplaces or data collection to establish the impact of piracy on paid content sales.

Although it’s just one company, and it’s just one job, the omissions parallel the received wisdom that Authors Guild president Scott Turow has been presenting in his first few months in office.  Like the AG, Macmillan could use its leadership position to sponsor research, improve understanding and target enforcement where the data shows that it makes sense.

Instead, it wants to hire an MBA with publishing experience whose brief will include “Review print, production and distribution process to eliminate file leakage, counterfeiting and re-importation activities” (interpretation: we’ve traced the source of piracy, and it’s coming from inside the house).

The business school I attended spent a lot of time teaching us newbies that decisions made without data are better labeled ”guesswork”.  Let’s hope the newer MBAs who might land this job learned the same thing.

Over the weekend, TorrentFreak posted an extended interview with independent film director Sam Bozzo, whose most recent film (Hackers Wanted) has been pirated in a couple of different versions.

This isn’t Bozzo’s first pirate experience.  Blue Gold: World Water Wars was pirated shortly after its initial release.  Although Bozzo was initially worried about the impact, he appealed to the BitTorrent community, explained the independent nature of the film and solicited donations, which he received.

In Bozzo’s view, piracy gave Blue Gold “free advertising” that built the following for his film in a way that may otherwise have eluded him.  In his words:

“In a nutshell, I believe the only films that are hurt by torrent sharing are mediocre and bad films. In contrast, the good films of any genre only benefit from file-sharing.”

Bozzo’s experience is but one data point, more anecdote than data.  His story is interesting in part because his films are the kind you might think are more likely to be hurt (not helped) by piracy.

The story is also interesting because it points to the technology as an opportunity to break down the walls that can separate content creators from their natural audiences.  As Bozzo notes, some college students who saw Blue Water changed their majors in response.

I’m not starry-eyed about piracy as salvation, but piracy undoubtedly exists.  It’s encouraging to see someone riding a wave that chases strangers, perhaps until there are no strangers anymore.

Although pay walls will not save publishing, publishers do need to find a way to charge for content.  We’ve written a number of posts about the topic, including:

Better, not bigger;

Tumblin’ down (something there is that does not love a wall); and

The reader decides.

The value of charging for circulation is made clear with Newsweek, which the Washington Post is working to sell.  The magazine, a product of low circulation prices and declining ad revenue, is reportedly losing millions of dollars annually.

Recent bids have come from a number of places, none of them “traditional” publishers, who may figure that turning around the circulation story is tough sledding, at best.  But getting people to pay more really is key.

At the New York Times, David Carr offers his perspective on what Newsweek could do to improve the magazine’s value proposition (a precursor to getting people to pay more).  Although he doesn’t link his ideas to circ price, Carr’s eight suggestions at least provide an alternative to the current approach, which isn’t working.

You don’t have to go very far to find a magazine that has figured out a way to align value and price.  The Week, created in the last decade, provides an effective overview of current events for $50 a year (more if you renew).

The Week demonstrates that it is possible to charge for content, if the content you charge for is valued by the people whose wallets you’d like to tap.  The Week solves a problem for a cross-section of people who want a simple summary of what happened last week.  That’s their “brand”.

That doesn’t mean that Newsweek should try to become The Week, or for that matter, the Economist.  As Carr notes, spots like that are taken.

But if Newsweek is going to survive, it will have to find a way to improve its perceived value and increase its circulation price.  That effort starts with the reader. Whoever buys Newsweek will have to look outside first to build value within.

Dear Mr. Turow,

Congratulations and best wishes on your election as president of the Authors Guild.  This is an interesting and in some ways challenging time for publishing, and the AG is positioned to serve as a well-reasoned and informed voice for authors.

As it happens, the need for reason and data at a time of uncertainty prompts me to write.  Among other pursuits, I study digital book piracy: its instance (how often and where does it occur?), as well as its impact (what’s the effect on paid sales?).

As a prosecutor and an author, you’ve demonstrated a superior ability to build a case, underscoring the importance of vetting every piece of evidence. In your new role, you’ve said a number of things that clearly position “piracy” as among the biggest threats to your members.

But the claims you make about piracy aren’t based on any real evidence.  I’d like to offer some data that argue for a different point of view.

First, though: I am not a pirate.  I value intellectual property and believe its prudent defense can return value to its creators.  But I’ve also come to believe, in this increasingly digital landscape, that the greater threat to many authors is obscurity, not piracy.

I do believe that there are markets in which digital book piracy is a net loss - college textbooks may provide the most direct example.  But I also believe that there may be markets, and authors, for whom piracy helps improve awareness, trial and paid sales.

That’s why we started studying the impact of piracy on paid sales almost two years ago.  On an admittedly limited sample (something we’d like your help to grow), we’ve found an apparent correlation between piracy and subsequent growth in paid sales.

Now, you recently told GalleyCat’s Jason Boog that “…the larger problem for us is the pirating of books”.  I ask, simply, “How do you know?”

There are no reliable studies of the impact of piracy in the book business.  Because our sample set is limited, I include our own work to date in that bucket.  The studies that are cited most often are based on sampling techniques that try to track the instance of piracy, then apply an assumed number for “substitution rates” (lost sales).

The Government Accounting Office recently “assessed the assessments” of digital piracy and found them all lacking.  That’s not the final word, but it’s an indication that conclusions drawn on the limited data available are premature, at least.

In talking with GalleyCat, you went on to say that “(piracy) has killed large parts of the music industry.” But, the music industry is not dead, and there are studies that suggest that the more likely shift in buying patterns occurred when vinyl owners finished replacing treasured albums with CDs.

As replacement sales declined, purchase patterns also shifted from whole albums to individual songs.  This was a trend that the music industry actively resisted, in the end fostering the piracy it wanted to prevent.  The lesson here could be more readily distilled as: “Don’t take actions (like delaying the release of e-books) that frustrate consumer demand.”

At a recent BookExpo panel you said, “The transcendent issue for all of us is piracy. Piracy killed off the record store business.” There’s no doubt that there are far fewer music stores today than there were a decade ago.  But: cause and effect?  The links are not there.

Even a decade ago, most music stores had a limited selection of titles, a problem that only accelerated as album sales declined.  Along the way, Apple introduced a digital storefront that is easy to use, offers a wide selection and can deliver immediately.  Think Amazon and Kindle.

Finally, you’ve noted that “Musicians make up for the copies of their songs that get pirated by performing live. I don’t think there will be as many people showing up to hear me read as to hear Beyonce sing.” It’s a clever line, and it distills an argument that many authors have made about piracy and enforcement.

This line of thinking, though, mixes cause and effect (musicians performed long before they recorded), and it sidesteps some business arrangements that have long favored labels over artists.  It also excludes some innovative pricing and packaging experiments by bands like Nine Inch Nails, approaches that some publishing people (Richard Nash’s Cursor comes to mind) have embraced and extended.  Publishing is not just about buying the physical book.

After hearing me out, you may still feel that every copy should be paid for.  The moral argument is a fair one, but it runs counter to the ways that content has been long promoted.  Galleys, blads, advance reading copies, sample chapters – these are all considered legitimate (even mandatory) ways to help build awareness of new titles.

Publishers routinely print and distribute a few hundred to tens of thousands of galleys to help promote their books. ARCs can be redistributed; some are used for purposes other than pure promotion.  As one librarian said, “There’s nothing better than BookExpo America for collection management.”

This isn’t to suggest that you declare librarians persons of interest.  But the reflexive “stop pirates” argument doesn’t really work, especially when the pirates are inside the house.

I understand that you want to send the message to AG members that you are on top of the hot button issues they are likely concerned about.  I would hope that you agree that the membership deserves the truth about piracy, its effects, and even potential uses your members or their publishers can make of existing piracy.

So, here’s what I think you should do: keep piracy on the agenda, but change the language you use to describe it.  The goal is not to “stop piracy”, but to understand its impact and use enforcement in markets where doing so has the greatest positive impact.

And work with authors to distinguish between the instance of piracy and its impact. A pirated file is not necessarily equivalent to a lost sale. Most authors want to make money, but I’d wager that all authors would like to be read.  Discovery, even with a pirated file, may lead to more sales (something J.A. Konrath is finding, at least for now).  This is an area where more research data would be helpful.

In that spirit, think about having the AG and the AAP put some money behind impartial data gathering and assessment exercise.  I like the work we’ve been doing, but it need not be us.  Use your influence, both as a well-known author and as president of the AG, to lead and contribute to an objective analysis of piracy.

This is the time to put piracy front and center at the Authors Guild.  We can do as the music industry did, presuming a single answer and defending an existing model.  Or, we can choose a data-driven, more flexible path.  I prefer the latter, and I hope I can convince you that you should, too.  Even with the best of intentions, the walls we build up can lock us in.

Sincerely,

Brian F. O’Leary

Hugh McGuire, who is always doing interesting things, recently pointed me to a post by Frank Chimero.  (Well, he pointed lots of people to it).  Chimero had been asked the question, “What is the future of print design?”

Chimero introduces a number of important notions, including the idea that ”really good literature requires an artifact”.  In making the claim, though, he also lays out an argument that much of what we design in print doesn’t “deserve an artifact”.  By extension, those artifacts are over-designed or over-engineered, with status that exceeds their value.

Don’t click away just yet.

Chimero makes a useful distinction: some content does not merit being designed and published in physical form.  Other formats and channels may be more appropriate.

I was thinking about Chimero’s views while reading Teleread’s recent discussion (some may say dust-up) about e-book pricing.  The dueling posts and subsequent comments debate what lower ebook prices mean for publishers, retailers, readers and authors (pretty much in that order).

Chimero claims that we “invent things before we know what they are for”.  Ebooks may be one of those things.

In debates about things like ebook windowing, the underlying assumption is that the book as object (ideally, hardcover) is the right starting point.  We assume that the recent, meteoric rise in e-book purchases is a function of things like price and portability.

But what if at least part of the growth represents something else: individual recognition that the book as object is not always desired?  What if the ebook is just something I want right now, at a (very) reasonable price, to pass the time, to test drive, maybe to sample before I decide if the ephemeral should become (my) object?

We’ve built content industries based on assumptions about cover art, fine typography, high-quality paper and appealing display.  What if those attributes mattered only for the select few publications that had earned the privilege to be objects?

So Garrison Keillor, who of late has been working overtime to redefine ”Minnesota Nice”, recently trained his sights on book publishing, which he declared dead.

Starting a food fight on the eve of BookExpo makes for great theater.  Reactions came quickly from most parts of the publishing industry.  How could Garrison Keillor say such things, after all we have done for him?

Well, at least it wasn’t Oprah Winfrey.

Typically, I refrain from broader assessments of the health of publishing. There’s usually not enough data to do it, and in any event predictions are not something I do easily or well.

But the reaction to Garrison Keillor’s remarks, and our comfort with having Oprah Winfrey validate our work, actually are data points.  They’re telling us something about what matters in book publishing.

At a BookExpo panel on the future of book packaging, Mel Parker acknowledged that new authors increasingly had to come to publishers with a clearly defined “platform” if they expected to get published.

His was a moment of stark and refreshing honesty.  I’m not arguing for platforms, but Parker’s assessment underscored the degree to which big-time publishing focuses on scale and risk aversion.

The shift has been in the works for some time.  An S&S executive claimed (in 2005!) that self-publishing is his industry’s farm team.  He may not have imagined a time when the farm teams could decide to form a league of their own.

We all want to believe in the spirit of publishing evoked in the better moments of Jonathan Galassi’s late lament.  But Max Perkins would not have cared if Garrison Keillor thought his work was irrelevant.

If the value of traditional publishing was truly apparent, Keillor’s words would be at worst a glancing blow.  But we protest too much.  Our collective reaction suggests strongly that the era of independent, brave thinking in publishing really is over.

Mediagazer has compiled a list of the top 100 sites covering, well, the media.

I’ll skip the riff arguing that the site should have been called ”Navel gazer” and write instead about the incredible fragmentation evident in the top 100 list.  The largest referring site, the New York Times, captured less than five percent of the market.  Only the top 24 picked up more than a single percentage point.

On the one hand, this is not surprising.  Worldwide, literally thousands of media options compete for time, attention and share of mind.  With so many options, demand can get spread around pretty easily.

To me, the fragmented market signals at least two realities of the evolving media landscape.  The first: a market spread this thin is beyond “one size no longer fits all”; it’s a smorgasbord at which we each choose our information meal.

The second: the cost and complexity of covering the waterfront, already high, may become prohibitively so.  This may drive the rate at which less expensive, viral marketing tools are tried and adopted.

Admittedly, the aggregation of traffic across web sites ignores the potential concentration across geographic or industry segments.  Of course, if relevance is a brand attribute, border-less coverage may become a third reality.

As BookExpo 2010 opens, American Bookseller Association (ABA) membership is actually up slightly.  Its growth comes at a time of significant revenue and cost pressure within the publishing value chain.

Tough times can bring out the worst or the best in businesses, and the current recession/depression appears to have spurred both innovation and a focus on bread-and-butter cost management among independent booksellers.  That’s a breath of fresh air when compared with the knee-jerk responses to change offered by some publishing leaders.

A second, positive sign: IDPF’s co-located one-day event, ”Digital Book 2010”, sold out this year.  More than 580 publishers, suppliers and industry consultants spent the day before BookExpo exploring the possibilities of digital content, with hope, not hysteria.

Both of these point to the helpful light at the end of the tunnel: publishing will not always shrink.  The companies that prosper are more likely to be the ones whose staff have spent the lean times preparing to grow.  Defending the old order is no recipe for success.

So Wired, a publication I’d expect would get things right when it comes to reporting on piracy, recently asked ”Is the iPad Driving E-Book Piracy?” Their near answer: ‘a resounding “kinda“‘.

In trying to establish the effect the impact of the iPad on piracy, Wired reporter Charles Sorrell cites flawed data points.  For example, he notes that after the iPad went on sale, e-book downloads were said to spike 78% on BitTorrent.

Interesting, yes, but the spike may best be compared to the one-day lift in Christmas sales for Kindle titles (something Sorrell also wrote about), or the change in pirated content tied to the widespread availability of a new cohort of devices.  We’ve also noted before that measuring the instance of piracy is not the same as measuring its impact.

Sorrell also writes that “where geeks go first, the general public will follow. This happened with music.” He goes on to say “Now almost nobody I know buys CDs. They pirate, and even my most hardcore book-loving friend is now a Kindle convert.”

There is considerable discussion, even debate, about what really happened to the music business.  I appreciate the appeal of a grandmother test, but “almost nobody I know” doesn’t represent adequate reporting.  Industry statistics show a decline in album sales, but there is also healthy growth in digital sales, most often as individual songs.

Sorrell comes to a conclusion that differs from these weak data points: “Blaming the iPad is stupid ... If it causes a rise in book piracy, it is only because it is [facilitating] demand. The book industry should embrace this and give us what we want: cheap books, published day-and-date with their paper equivalents, along with all back-catalog titles made available. And preferably DRM-free.”

While I think that’s the right conclusion, I’m not sure the post does the subject any favors.  As noted in a recent post about content dust bowls, we need to invest in the news and information we create.

At BookExpo, the American Bookseller Association is hosting a pre-show “DIY Authors Conference and Marketplace”.  A variety of vendors working in this space are presenting, accompanied on some panels by authors who have made self-publishing and direct sales work for them.

Two breakout sessions caught my ear this morning.  Talking about his company’s author-friendly technology platform, Michael Ashley of FastPencil explained how they are working to take the guesswork out of “write once, read many”.  They are also working to make direct sales work for even the one-title author.

In a parallel panel, author J.A. Konrath explained in some detail how he makes much more money selling e-books at lower price points ($2) than traditional publishers have said should be the case for digital content.

Konrath was blunt in his assessment.  By pricing e-books at $14.99, “New York publishing” (his words) has put up a barrier that discourages sampling and limits serendipity.

Asked to offer advice to the authors assembled here, Konrath was equally blunt: “Don’t write s***”, adding “It’s not true that there are no more gatekeepers.  There are new gatekeepers; they’re called readers.”

Even good books can get lost in the significant volume of new and repurposed titles made possible by new tools of production and distribution.  For those that are found, the most influential reviewers are increasingly every-day readers, even at two bucks a book.

If you follow the mobile space, you probably know that HP recently agreed to buy Palm, Inc. for $1.2 billion.  That’s a lot of money in a small house but not a lot of money to buy what was once a leading name in hand-held devices.

After the announcement, SFGate posted a Dan Frommer/Business Insider assessment of the ”10 Reasons Palm Failed and Had to Sell to HP” (I guess the folks who do search engine optimization at Business Insider got the message about making your headlines really specific).

I was an early adopter of Palm products, but I still have my Treo 650 largely because I live in a Verizon household and the iPhone is locked up with another carrier.  Frommer’s article is sobering and a useful reminder to publishers: the technology game is a long-term play, with plenty of twists and turns.  Linking content and technology is not for the faint of heart.

The Economist recently ran an article outlining the rise of “content farms”, companies that “produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it.”

A similar story is told at 48 Hours Magazine, which recently crowd-sourced its content from about 1,500 submissions contributed over a weekend.  The magazine expects to sell the final product for $10 or $11 via a “print on demand” option, Magcloud.

Although experiments with new or different business models are always welcome, I worry about the underlying premise.  Conventionally-produced content is not too expensive; it’s too narrowly deployed.

Crowd-sourced and “write for hire” content models focus fundamentally on filling content holes on the cheap.  I’d rather see publishers developing more agile content models that support their ability to “write once, read many”, deploying news and information in a variety of ways across multiple media platforms.

Content farms can work, and firms like Demand Media and Associated Content can and probably do make money commissioning content to fill holes.  Still, their solution feels temporary, or perhaps barren.

In the 1930s, planting the same crops year after year, without a longer-term view, undermined a great resource and helped turned real farms in dust bowls.  I’d hate to see the same thing happen to content.

Edited May 25 to add: bnet reports that two Hearst newspapers have signed up with Demand Media for provision of commissioned content.

Edited June 6 to add: Yahoo recently agreed to acquire Associated Content, one of the companies profiled in this post.

E-reading, digital downloads and cloud-based distribution of e-content are all growing.  So, too, is the call for greater clarity about the privacy of data related to what we’re reading, and how.

Organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) address privacy as a wheelhouse issue, and they’ve been tracking services like Google Books, Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader to better understand their privacy profiles.  The differences are not small.

More recently, changes in Facebook’s terms of service have made even some loyalists wonder out loud about the future of privacy in the world wide web.  A peek under the hood of Facebook’s privacy options tells that story too well.

So when Ad Age recently reported that magazines are looking at options to sell content within Facebook’s news feed, I started to think about privacy.  Are publishers really ready to handle the myriad of options, preferences and objections associated with viewing and monetizing content at a granular level?

This could be a case of unintended consequences.  Much as digital readers expose a multitude of shortcuts that rendering to print often masks, social media sites may be the canary in the coal mine at the intersection of content, monetization and privacy.

This doesn’t make the Facebook effort wrong, but the thing that makes social-media content “monetizable” – the ability to link interest and action – opens a window on a discussion most publishers have yet to think about having.

Futurebook, a blog recently started in association with UK-based The Bookseller, jumped right into the thick of a things with an early post, “DRM is not all that”.

Contributed by Nick Hardaway, the post argues that DRM restrictions “unmistakably make ebooks worth less while pushing up the price”.  I agree.

There may be instances in which DRM restrictions make business sense for content providers: high-priced titles with small or defined audiences come to mind.  But for the average book, restricting access and use appears to drive down price.

An additional note: Cory Doctorow, who writes more often and more forcefully than I do about DRM, recently posted a broad critique of the social consequences of DRM, content filters and intermediary liability.  If you’re interested in a fuller understanding of DRM, take a few minutes to read Doctorow’s post.

A condensed, two-day version of BookExpo returns to New York next week.  Pre-show events take place on Monday, when I’m attending a first-time “DIY Authors” day, and Tuesday, the new home of IDPF’s co-located Digital Book 2010 conference.

The city is bracing for an onslaught of sober assessments and sweeping generalizations. A data geek, I’m somewhat prediction-challenged, so I’ll not be jockeying for a position with the publishing future crowd.

Instead, here are four pre-show data points:

- China Mobile recently launched a mobile reading platform that it hopes will attract over 200 million users.  The provider claims that 155 million devices are now used for mobile reading, with almost half used at least once a day.  Most book consumption occurs under a subscription plan.

- In 2009, CBS and Viacom paid three people, including Sumner Redstone, who controls both companies, a total of $110 million.  News Corp paid two people (one of them named Murdoch) a total of $32.6 million.

- Amazon’s business mix now favors electronics and general merchandise.  Books and music combined (“media”) make up less than half of the company’s total sales.

- Microsoft has a rubric that measures your humor proficiency.

These may be weak signals, or not signals at all.  But if the songbirds keep singing like they know the score, one or more of these data points may prove useful.

Last month, I wrote about the GAO report that assessed various “efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods”.  One take-away: I was encouraged to read a report that called for data-driven assessments of the true impact of piracy.

In that same spirit, two other posts are worth reading.  Writing at The Media Institute, UC - Berkeley professor Peter Menell critiques the GAO critique, describing the report as “limited and cautious”.  Professor Menell points to several other research studies that are generally more likely to see a quantifiable impact from piracy.

Professor Menell argues that incomplete assessments weaken the debate around the impact of piracy:

“Intellectual property law and policy are fundamentally about balance and adapting to change.  But balance cannot be assessed without a framework and baseline.  The GAO Report provides a useful starting point toward that end.  It highlights the complexities of calculating economic losses from illicit activities.  Rather than polarize discussion, all players should work toward constructive discourse.”

A good example of that “constructive discourse” can be found at Copycense, ”the online journal of code and content”.  In February, the site posted an extensive, thoughtful critique of a Princeton study authored by Edward Felten and Sauhard Sahi.  The two had published work that found only 1% of BitTorrent files were “non-infringing” with respect to copyright.

Helpfully, Copycense asks a number of questions about the study’s design, data collection methods and statistical analysis, all of which are seen as critical to establish before developing conclusions that might drive policy and practice.

We all have biases.  Both The Media Institute and Copycense call for disclosure (and breadth of discussion) to make those biases easier to spot and address.  With respect to piracy, that’s needed now more than ever.

Recently, Mashable ("the social media guide") featured a post by Yuli Ziv, the founder & CEO of Style Coalition, covering ”5 Reasons Google and Search Won’t Dominate The Next Decade”.

While I wasn’t sure that Ziv’s observations constituted fundamental weaknesses or the evolving nature of search, her thoughts got me thinking about the things Google still can do well ...

Since Ziv’s post, Google put a few more bones on the structure of Google Editions, its plan to sell book content both directly and through publishers’ web sites.  Although Google Editions has long been a bit of an open secret, CNET provides a good perspective on the most recent announcement, while PC World offers a somewhat more tongue-in-cheek review.

Following up on the initial coverage, Internet Evolution’s Robert McGarvey, who earlier this year interviewed me about piracy, called to ask about the potential of Google Editions.  By the time he spoke with me, Yuli Ziv’s assessment had started to sink in.  I told McGarvey (in part):

“Amazon is good at selling us books when we look for books, but Google may be positioning itself to sell us books when we are not looking for a book, just for information on a topic.”

That is, books return as an act of search serendipity, and Google solves a problem in a way that I didn’t necessarily think of in advance.  If you read our blog much and think this rings a bell, you’re right: it’s the basic premise for lean consumption.

At Book Madam, Julie Wilson recently linked to remarks made by President Barack Obama and reported on HuffingtonPost.  Speaking to graduates of Hampton University, the President expressed concern that:

“…with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

The emphasis – “none of which I know how to work” – is mine.

Commencement addresses are seldom important enough be remembered (there are exceptions), and I appreciate President Obama’s attempt to connect with the graduates, most of whom were probably thrilled to have a speaker whose name will be remembered 25 years from now.

Unfortunately, saying “none of which I know how to work” undercuts the President’s own objection (how do you know they are a distraction if you’ve not used them?).  It also underscores the problem that afflicts a cross-section of content providers who can’t resist chasing the “new shiny”.

On the demand side, devices may distract, but if we are distracted, it’s not the device’s fault.  We are responsible for how we choose to spend our time (probably the President’s intended message).  That we have devices is not bad; it’s how we choose to use them that matters.

On the supply side, devices will not save publishing.  They present challenges, and they provide opportunities, but the same can be said about shifts in the supply chain or the decline of the single-copy sales channel.

On either side, failing to understand how the technologies work can’t be excused as some quaint generational shift.  If devices truly are important to a business model, the people leading content companies need to embrace the technologies, not just sign off on them.

A shallow understanding presents the real threat: that we’ll keep taking our eyes off the ball to pursue the latest and greatest development.  Devices and features will proliferate.  If content providers don’t learn to deal with that, devices may well become weapons of mass distraction.

Whenever we have a big news story, it feels as if the story arc inexorably heads toward a media review of the media’s role in covering the story.

The most recent example (until the next one): heavy flooding in Nashville, TN following a weekend during which the city got stuck under a storm system that dumped 15 inches of rain in a day.

As it happened, I was traveling to Nashville on May 4.  My plane landed in sunny, nearly cloudless weather that gave those of us with window seats a birds-eye view of the most extensive flooding I have ever seen.

At Newsweek, Andrew Romano is right: the media outside of Nashville did not do its job.

I had paid attention to the news, and I knew that there had been severe weather.  I had heard of flood warnings, but when I landed, entire areas of the city were under water, something largely unreported before I left.

In being right, though, Newsweek risks perpetuating a second media tradition: hand-wringing our way out of meaningful change.

If there is a business model for effective reporting (and I think there is), writing about the need for change is only the first step.  What is Newsweek, or any other media entity, planning to do differently in the future?

That’s not to pick on Andrew Romano, who raised the issue.  I wish he’d been in the taxi I took back to the airport on May 6.  The driver told me of a cousin who had seen flood waters rise so quickly he barely had time to grab the family dog.  In waist-deep water, the pet panicked, broke free and was lost.

If I can hear and tell that story, so too can the businesses we pay to bring us news.

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC), often considered one of the more complete and balanced news organizations, is working to strengthen its use of outbound links to help better tell its stories.

The BBC does this now; the formal policy addresses what observers see as a mix of the practical (internal cost reductions) and political (for-profit media companies would like a little love).

At the Nieman Foundation, Jonathan Stray reports the BBC perspective, which underscores an interest on being a “window on the web” for BBC users as well as a resource that provides access to primary source material.  In the BBC’s view, wider access helps inform and ground its readers, even as it sends traffic elsewhere.

Although Stray and some comments to the Nieman and BBC posts hint at the debate about “walled” versus “open” sites, I don’t see the BBC strategy as a factor in that debate.  Whether I pay for access or can retrieve content freely, I want to see both external and internal links.

Posts that are mostly or entirely a wall of text tell a story, but it is hard to argue that they use the power of the web to tell the whole story.

Don Linn, posting at Bait ‘n’ Beer, called on publishers to focus on the “unremarkable”:

- Developing and implementing XML workflows (the tools for ”write once, read many”);

- Investing in digital asset management platforms; and

- Making clean and consistent metadata a core component of a publisher’s content workflows.

Although Linn’s post rotates around a conversation I was lucky to hear, his thinking on these issues stretches back much further.  He rightly points out that we don’t make content for devices, or eras.  Our targets are broader, and elsewhere.

We’ve written before about the growing number of non-traditional publishers - companies as well as individuals - whose content output poses a challenge and an opportunity for established publishers.

The growth of lower-cost, niche content providers certainly challenges the prevailing model for book and periodical publishing.  As the volume and accessibility of content improves, prices may decline.  Abundance helps consumers but it probably hurts publishers.

One option for traditional publishers: grow their ability to implement and leverage enterprise content management (ECM).  An effective argument for developing those skills was recently posted by Carl Frappaolo on ebizq.net, the ”insider’s guide to business and IT agility”.

Writing for a broad audience, Frappaolo calls on content providers to link business intelligence with ECM to drive personalized and contextual publishing.  He also suggests developing and deploying tools that allow content providers to “fine-tune the presentation and make-up of content”.

With established circulation and sizable backlists, traditional magazine and book publishers could be working right now to develop these skills and tools.  As non-traditional content providers come online, established players would offer approaches that improved revenues and margins.

This would take traditional publishers out of what is now their core activity, but it would also provide them with a defensible niche in a content-rich world.  In the meantime, they would be developing an approach that forever moves them beyond the printed page.

Generally, I’m not a big fan of lists (even in blogs, though I have succumbed from time to time).  But This Recording recently posted one list worth reading closely.

They set out to chronicle the ”15 best print magazine runs of all time” (ambitious enough), but in many cases they limited it to the years when their favorite magazines were truly at the top of their games.

The choices they make include perennials (The New Yorker, Time and Esquire, among others) as well as departed icons like Life, Sassy and Spy.  Each magazine is written up in a loving, honest and accurate snapshot of an era.  Including two magazines I’ve worked for doesn’t hurt their appeal.

One thing that struck me, and perhaps this was their intent: great things don’t last.  All of the magazines on their list had a prime, and while a handful persist, it’s hard to argue that the survivors are as great as they once were.

If that’s our media reality, I am increasingly comfortable with it.  New tools, new channels, new markets, new ideas: these all pose challenges, but they open the door to new opportunities, as well.

The current environment makes me wish I were just starting out in publishing.  Then again, maybe I am.

This is not a post about that flat device.  Really.

In January, I joined a sketchy crowd that mumbled, ”Devices will not save publishing”.  Apple launched one anyway.

In the time since I first wrote about devices, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has published its annual report on American journalism (13 chapters, printable from the web).

If you’re crunched for time and can’t read the full report, check out this pretty cool infographic.  The story about what will save publishing shows up at the bottom of the chart.

The study found that 61% of the respondents read the news online.  Of that 61%, 37% have contributed to the creation or dissemination of news or commentary.  A quarter have commented on a news story, a sixth have posted a link on a social media site, and one in 11 have created their own content.

That’s the future of publishing: the ante for a subsequent conversation.  Some of that conversation will improve the value (and price) of published content, and some of that conversation may be monetized.  It will take place across many devices, with the future favoring ones that support two-way exchanges.

So, devices saving publishing?  It’s still reader madness.

Liza Daly, whose consulting practice developed Bookworm as well as the IBIS reader, has posted a couple of useful tutorials on e-book preparation.

The first, a video of a presentation she gave at Booknet Canada’s Tech Forum, provided an effective overview of the primary mobile platforms, how they differ and what to keep in mind when preparing e-book files to be read on them.

The second tutorial, ”Build a digital book with EPUB”, dates back to 2008, but it was behind an IBM registration wall until recently.  In it, Daly walks through the basics, offering a how-to that can quickly inform even the least digital publishers.

Daly speaks reasonably often at industry events and conferences, and her presentations always offer value and something new.  She was recently elected to an open spot on the IDPF board of directors, good news for the many of us rooting for the deployment of EPUB as a digital reading standard.

Potential disruption of the traditional publishing model is a recurring theme on this blog.  So, too, is the power and risk of weak signals – data uncertain enough to suggest a range of possible implications.

Through their Radar brand, O’Reilly Media employs a data-driven approach, parsing weak signals while searching for insight.  Their analytical approach to publishing helped put us together for work on the impact of piracy as well as 2009’s StartWithXML project.

O’Reilly has analyzed and published the nature and source of the titles in Apple’s recently opened iBook store.  Their work represents a snapshot in time, something that will change as the store matures and the mix of participants evolves.

I’ll acknowledge my own risk of confirmation bias, but the O’Reilly post showed that a wide range of mid-sized and smaller publishers are among the early leaders in getting titles into the iBook store.  Particularly notable is Smashwords, which helps individual authors and small presses participate in the e-book space.

There are some problems with the initial analysis (a comment by Michael Cader points out that the publisher segmentation is a mixture of imprints and parent companies), but that doesn’t change Smashword’s share or relative position.

As new digital distribution channels evolve, we’re again facing the practical question, “Do I need the middle?” Publishers have struggled to go directly to consumers, as it often requires a new set of skills.  Direct sales also challenge the established trade model.

Unencumbered by these concerns, authors may find that Smashwords, Lulu.com and other services offer “just enough” publishing infrastructure to get started, while digital content stores provide distribution without the overhead of inventory and warehouses.  The parallels suggest that “good enough” solutions take hold in the strangest places.

Edited May 12 to add: For a sense of the skirmish taking place at the frontier of self-publishing, take a look at Tracy Buchanan’s ”Why self-publishing isn’t a good start” and the response she gets from Sue Collier.

When it comes to concerns about digital book piracy, one of the more common refrains is, “We don’t want to have what happened to the music business happen to us ”.

There are a number of risky underpinnings to that statement.  The book business is demonstrably different from the music business, in ways that could affect the instance as well as the impact of piracy.

There is also a gap – some say a large one – in determining the true impact of piracy on the music business.  Judging from a recent ars technica report, this information gap persists.

In 2009, music sales actually grew in 13 major markets across the world, including several (Australia, Mexico, the United Kingdom and South Korea) where enforcement was either lax or nonexistent.

In France, the country most noted for its “three strikes” law, music sales actually declined.

Still, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a global trade group, trumpeted the news, which it felt showed “… how an improved legal environment can help impact on legitimate music sales”.

Borrowing from yesterday’s post, there’s a bit of confirmation bias taking place here: we look for markets where sales are up, select those countries in which enforcement is stronger and draw the conclusion that enforcement deters piracy and drives paid sales.

As with our research on the impact of piracy on paid book sales, there is a lack of data and a potential oversupply of conclusions.  Of course, there’s no shortage of opportunities to live in interesting times.

A recent post themed to work by Richard Adin, who writes at An American Editor, prompted an exchange about the future of great literature.

Adin continues to develop his arguments on the potentially negative impact of e-books on great literature.  This post isn’t responding to the newer work; it’s a follow-up to Adin’s concern (expressed in a comment):

“Can you name a single work of fiction that was published in 2009 that has a broad consensus that it will be read 100 years from now? I can’t think of one. Yet we had no problem coming to that agreement with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye almost immediately after its publication.”

I don’t have an answer to everything (thankfully), and I promised Adin I’d think about it.  And so I have.

I’ll start by drawing a distinction between making great literature – something writers do – and making literature great – an activity that I think of as contextual, personal and shared.

A proliferation of media, formats and devices will not deter writers from making great literature.  If anything, democratizing the tools of production has made creation of great literature easier.  Moreover, writers who create great works are motivated personally as well as financially.

The alchemy of making literature great has always been evolving. Even if Catcher in the Rye was deemed an instant classic in 1951, it didn’t crack the top 10 fiction books in that year or any year that followed.

I’d also argue that it was a “classic” in a context of male-dominated and overwhelmingly white publishing professionals.  The book meant something to the people who made publishing and buying decisions in 1951, and as one of a small set of books made available that year, it caught on.

This is a publishing example of what Stephen Jay Gould and others have described as confirmation bias: we believed in this book; we promoted it; it caught on; our judgment is confirmed.

This isn’t to say that Catcher in the Rye isn’t great, or important, but the book is made great by the people who read it, connect with it and communicate about it. Longevity may be a sign of great literature, but it is not proof.  To the extent that Catcher remains a touchstone for a generation of new readers , it does so by establishing connections with readers in the context of a much different world.

Lots of books can establish those connections, reaching a variety of different audiences.

A personal example: While I was in high school, an English teacher, likely distressed by my overly structured prose, recommended what would become my favorite book, Look Homeward, Angel.

Many have argued that Look Homeward, Angel is far from great; some have even argued that Maxwell Perkins is as much the author as Thomas Wolfe.

But the book is great for me, at least in part because I read it at a time when my world seemed as small as Eugene Gant’s home town.  In the book, I found possibility, potential and inspiration.  In reading Wolfe (or Perkins), my outlook changed, and so too did my writing.

Undoubtedly, a proliferation of media, formats and devices alters the alchemy of making literature great.  With millions of options, the importance of established filters diminishes.  What will replace those filters has yet to be determined, and so the new order can and sometimes does feel chaotic.

That doesn’t make me pine for the old order, in which a learned few decided what we should be able to read.  As it happens, standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold.  I’m looking forward to the conversations that occur among the learned many, some of whom will be fueled only by the passion that a connection with literature can create.

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) recently published the results of the fourth wave of its ongoing study, “Improving Ad Performance Online”.  The most recent report is available for download, but before you go grab a copy, read this MediaWeek writeup.

In it, the OPA claims that “ad networks demonstrated little impact when it comes to driving traditional branding metrics”, while scores for content-driven OPA member sites were consistently higher.

The qualifier: “albeit marginally”.

We’re talking about single-digit increases in responses to questions to divine brand favorability, purchase intent and message association.  As Mediaweek points out, “Ad networks scores were generally within less than a single percentage point.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think this means what the OPA thinks it means.  The lesson learned might be that the web doesn’t help much when it comes to branding messages.

Yesterday I dreamed of digital tools that would help collate my interests.  There’s also a content provider angle.

O’Reilly Media’s Mac Slocum recently interviewed Ted Roden, author of ”Building the Realtime User Experience”, about the implications of ongoing shifts away from a “website-centric model” to something more user-oriented.

Although much of Slocum’s interview covers the user experience, Roden answers two questions about what publishers need to consider and how they will track results.

On the first question, retooling editorial processes to make effective use of different platforms will clearly require new skills and an evolving set of experiments.

With respect to analytics, Roden points out that the tools are coming.  Publishers will need to determine what to measure and how those measurements will inform operational practices.  They will also need new skills to understand how to manage in a direct-response environment.

The interview was condensed for its appearance on O’Reilly Radar, so be sure sure to read he comments, including one in which Roden answers a criticism about focusing too greatly on monetizing user experiences.

Monday Note recently posted a perceptive (if somewhat wordy) analysis of print vs. web in the news and information space.  In “Reconciling efficiency with serendipity”, editor Frederic Filloux claims:

“The fundamental fracture between print and digital media lies exactly here: paper is a fantastic vector for a reading experience driven by curiosity; the web is a cold medium utterly efficient for a search-based, focus-driven reading.”

Filloux pines for a “unique console” that could replace what he describes as a “jury-rigged system of bookmarks, RSS and microblogging feeds.”

Like Filloux, I’d pay good money for that “unique console”.  Almost every day, I come across articles, blog posts or factoids that resonate, inspire or challenge how I think about a variety of topics, including publishing.

I keep track of them in a variety of ways, none satisfying and all error-prone.  Just yesterday, I came across a forgotten Word document with links I compiled two months ago for a presentation I am completing this week.  How’s that for serendipity?

Filloux’s analysis and my own experience were top of mind when I read a Los Angeles Times article about GetGlue, launched late last year by AdaptiveBlue.  The Times notes that the “… web plug-in and its companion website (are) the virtual substance that holds together key resources about a particular movie, book or album.”

This got me thinking about truly reconciling efficiency with serendipity, at the dawn of the semantic web.  If GetGlue can track information about products (in their case, media offerings), how far can we be from a desktop plug-in that collates interests and suggests thematic groupings based on things like bookmarks and RSS feeds?

People who love print understandably lament its decline, particularly as paper is replaced by a less serendipitous alternative.  The new model (whatever it is) won’t save the old one, but it may better serve an audience with varied interests but not enough time to explore them all.  We just need the tools.

Okay, this post is a bit geeky, but there is a broader message.

Last week, both bnet and ars technica reported on a patent application by Apple.  The idea: make computer displays out of four colors (CMYK) rather than three (RGB).

Designers and editors have long struggled to match display colors (currently RGB) to print output (CMYK).  The growth of desktop publishing tools forced users to confront the problem directly, and the result was widespread adoption of an RGB workflow, one that supported multiple uses and reuses of color images.

Because the CMYK color space is more limited than its RGB counterpart, a CMYK display would essentially throttle the color capacity to more closely emulate what one sees in print.  If you wanted to reuse an image, say for a web site, you’d need to convert it to RGB and figure out what it would look like in any of the other applications.

From that, bnet and ars technica concluded that a CMYK display could be a boon for print production.

First, I think both bnet and ars technica missed the point of Apple’s idea.  A commenter in the ars technica thread picks up on the more likely motivation: a subtractive, CMYK display might draw less power, a useful feature if you own one of those tablet devices.

But more broadly: in this era, it’s a costly conceit to design workflows that match the requirements of the lowest common denominator.  This idea may help print, and print is not dead, but print alone almost certainly is.

A CMYK workflow throws away data that could be useful in other media.  Color fidelity is an issue, but RGB to CMYK is controllable (with work).  If we’re really worried about consistent display of colors, let’s figure out how to synchronize all the displays in the world.  Or ... not.