Yesterday, Digital Book World featured a guest post by Chris Rechtsteiner, chief strategist for Blue Loops Concepts, that tried to characterize what is going on right now in the world of book publishing.

His piece, "Booksellers v. libraries? Publishers v. Amazon? These are the wrong battles to fight" makes a good point: "the real competition for booksellers, publishers and libraries is NOT READING" (the all caps belongs to Rechtsteiner; I prefer italics).

Rechtsteiner calls on booksellers, libraries, authors and publishers to collaborate to solve the problems that lead people to choose options other than reading for their leisure-time activities. I have to agree, going back to part of what I wrote in "The opportunity in abundance":

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.

So why did I title this piece "not helping"?

Well, Rechtsteiner mixes data (library patrons are more likely to buy eBooks) with hyperbole (they represent the biggest short-term threat to eBook sales through Amazon and others). His data (drawn from Bowker and Pew) is powerful, but misapplied: if the availability of free books was such a threat, why have publishers and libraries co-existed for so long?

If that were my only concern, I'd have found something else to write about today. But Rechsteiner claims that four months ago, "it mattered if libraries were or weren't a direct threat to booksellers. Today, this question is irrelevant."

Why is it irrelevant? Because Rechtsteiner just realized that "people not reading" is a bigger threat.

I really want the many entities in our industry to collaborate, and I am more than on the record about the need to shift our focus from production (of books) to demand for content-driven solutions. The argument is a tough one to make in any environment.

It's a hard argument to make because "people not reading" is not a four-month-old problem. It's likely a decades-old problem. The long lead time effectively makes our biggest challenge seem like an input, not a threat. That blocks our ability to change.

Book publishers could learn from the newspaper industry, which had 50 years of experience with declining circulation per capita but blames the 15-plus Internet years for its troubles. We may be working on Internet time, but the problems we are hoping to solve started long before browsers were invented.

The last couple of posts have looked at apps and their viability as options for dissemination of content across multiple platforms. My lens on apps is (naturally) focused on their utility for publishers, but even in a broader environment, the rise of HTML5 presents alternatives.

The opportunity was recently captured by Ben Bajarin, who posted on Time magazine's Techland blog:

Web developers ... are taking a hybrid approach to software development. That means they are writing the application in HTML5 + Javascript but wrapping all that code in a layer that lets it be installed as a native application from an app store as well.

This approach is less "either-or" than my last two posts, and that's probably a good thing. I don't see apps as a long-term solution for most periodical publishers, but those who do pursue them can balance the "walled garden" against the more portable approach embodied in tools like HTML5 and Javascript.

I wrote yesterday about a decision by Technology Review to move away from apps and toward broader use of HTML5. Generally, I think that's a good approach for publishers who aren't willing or able to pay the escalating cost of trying to control everything.

That said, I still see good uses for content-driven apps:

• When the underlying content is variable, subject to change or useful to analyze in structured ways over time; and
• When analysis is user-driven, based in available content and not necessarily something a publisher can predict.

The first case is one that many database-driven publishers have already addressed. Content providers like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg create and manage content in ways that support structured analysis, even up to minute the content is created.

By comparison, data aggregated for a single issue (monthly or weekly) is driven by its source format (print). As a result the content is not organized in a way that supports structured analysis.

The second case is a bit more intricate. A decade ago, I worked on a project that examined opportunities to query content from the Bible (various English-language translations, for example) and present side-by-side comparisons of the King James Version and the Good News Bible, as test cases. We also looked at presenting an English-language version alongside the notes made by the translator.

Because the Bible and its translations represent highly structured content, displaying different versions requires a relatively straightforward style-sheet application. The thing that varies is not the style sheet, but the source content, which is chosen by the user.

A host of historical and current translations of the Bible are available, and markets are small enough that it makes little sense to maintain comparisons for all of them. But an app that could draw from multiple sources to create a diglot certainly would empower users and increase engagement with the content.

Publishers thinking through the creation and use of an app might ask themselves two questions:

• Is our content useful to analyze in ways that are separate from the ways we have chosen to display it? and 
• Can we create a uniform app that offers user-determined ways to engage with our content?

In this light, developing a single-issue app seems harder to justify.

Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, last week posted "Why publishers don't like apps". In it, Pontin offers a well-reasoned argument against the app-ification of content.

The subhead tells the main story: "The future of media on mobile devices isn't with applications but with the web." Pontin recalls the unprofitable and unsatisfactory experiences that characterized the use of apps at Technology Review, vowing that they will soon switch to HTML5 and discontinue their support of mobile apps.

Pontin might have strengthened his argument by exploring why publishers do like apps (and digital editions): they sustain the notion that an editor can control the way that readers engage with content. Drawing on an earlier post, I'd call that 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.

Pontin does note that digital editions have gained relatively little consumer acceptance. But his criticism of apps in part resides in the publisher-side challenge of designing for multiple devices and aspect ratios. That problem starts when you plan for one format (typically, print) and then try to extend those design decisions to other, varied platforms.

Prior posts illustrate how much I appreciate the work that Pontin has done to assess the media landscape. I also think that Technology Review is making the right choice for its content. Maybe I'd just be happier with an article titled "The escalating cost of trying to control everything".

With a colleague, I've been working with a client who values its "net promoter score" (NPS), a measure of the relative likelihood that its customers will recommend them to someone else. Touted by its proponents as "the one number you need to grow", NPS is used by a range of consumer-facing companies to track and grow their base of committed customers.

A bit of an industry has grown up around NPS, and there are detractors. Given my penchant for rich and nuanced data, it's hard for me to believe that "one number" governs an assessment of success or failure. Still, NPS scores can be clarifying, expecially if they force a company and its staff to question what they are doing.

At Harvard Business Review's blog network, Bill Lee contends that true success with NPS comes not from creating promoters (which is what the score measures), but from engaging promoters in referral activities that grow a company's customer base. Lee offers three ideas to help companies make this happen:

• Be intentional about customer promotion (he cites a study in which only 10% of those who say they are "highly likely" to refer someone actually follow through);
• Look for customer value beyond promoting (references, testimonials and speaking opportunities are examples); and
• Move beyond promoters to defenders.

Although magazines have been cited for their "direct relationships" with customers, in my experience few periodical or book publishers are prepared to work with customers at this level. The limited number of publishers who are succeeding emulate the better practices of trade and professional associations.

That is, they build a clearly defined audience, surround it with services and products and communicate across a variety of channels. They make value evident in every interaction with a customer, who is a member. They don't treat social interactions as something that happens after a product is published.

Content dissemination is moving toward permissions-based subscription models, ones that periodical and book publishers struggle to understand. The new models are driven not by supply, but by demand.

If I asked a reader "How likely is it that you would recommend (name a publisher) to a friend?", how many people would score it a 9 or a 10? I think the answer is close to none, because perceived value comes first.

I've written from time to time about The Atlantic, which has done a number of things to increase both its visibility and its value over the last few years.

The magazine's online presence was profiled earlier this week by Mashable's Lauren Indvik, who covered their ability "to capitalize on the growing importance of social networks, rather than search engines, as sources of traffic." Bob Cohn, editor the digital side of The Atlantic, characterized the situation this way:

“Before, it seemed Demand Media was going to own the Internet by assigning stories based on search returns. It was a cynical approach to journalism… We’re no longer writing to get the attention of Google algorithms. We’re writing to get you to share it, to digg it.”

Or as Scott Havens, their SVP of finance and digital operations, described it: "Now it’s about how we can spin a story so that it goes viral.”

I'm no fan of content farms liked Demand Media, and certainly The Atlantic needs to find a model that lets it earn some money. But substituting the tyranny of a game you were losing (SEO) for the tyranny of a game you can win (going viral) doesn't seem like a breakthrough.

There's an intrinsic appeal to "writing for humans", as Cohn describes it. But if people are looking for a quick fix or some form of validation, those humans are not necessarily the best barometer of good journalism.

A couple of days ago, Kat Meyer sent me a link to a Mashable post about the sailing ship "Blueseed, a brave new utopia for startups that will be anchored in international waters." Written by Chris Taylor, the article describes plans to create a place where startups are not subject to any laws.

The concept is funded by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal (he sold it to eBay in 2002). According to Taylor, Thiel is "famous for his libertarian views." In publishing, Paypal is now famous for something else: its efforts to shut down Smashwords' ability to sell erotica.

It can be easy to dismiss the value of erotica, but Taylor's invocation of a book (Brave New World) offers a timely reminder. Aldous Huxley's widely praised work is also listed by the American Library Association as its 52nd highest most-challenged book.

There are lots of definitions for libertarianism, including one that says it emphasizes "freedom, individual liberty and voluntary association." In that spirit, I guess an iconic offshore boat makes sense.

Still, I struggle with the idea that solving problems starts by picking up our marbles and heading elsewhere. After all, it wasn't the government that tried to censor Smashwords. It was a company.

At the start of last week I posted a piece about "reinventing journalism", in which I covered remarks made by executives at Google and Facebook. The original article was written by Robert Andrews and appeared at paidContent.

I had an immediate and pointed reaction to Andrews' coverage of remarks made by Facebook's journalism manager, Vadim Lavrusik:

“People want analysis from journalists,” Facebook’s Lavrusik advised. He showed data from the social network’s recent engagement with news brands suggesting "posts with journalists’ analysis receive 20 percent more referral clicks (than others).”

As I posted last week: "It doesn't really surprise me that Facebook wants to encourage practices that drive traffic, but that's not what we need most as we try to reinvent journalism."

I should have kept my powder dry for Steve Hills, president of the Washington Post. In a story first reported by Lucia Moses at Adweek, Hills hosted a dinner at his home at which he "... urged more traffic-driving slideshows over original Post photos".

Reaction has been predictably swift: at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal started a column by noting "Readers aren't stupid. They know when your product is cheap." Madrigal goes on to say that this ad-driven, traffic-focused mentality shifted two years ago (to which I respond, apparently not).

It's hard to make an argument against more traffic, but it doesn't make sense to use gimmick-driven ploys that don't take into account the reader experience. Maybe the Post needs a short-term hedge, but let's hope that it's just for the short term.

You may be wondering why I didn't jump all over the announcement that Macmillan was going to stop using DRM on several of its imprints by the middle of this year. In some quarters, it was treated as a Big Event, a sign that the era of closed systems and poor reader experiences was coming to a close.

I think that Macmillan's decision makes good business sense. By starting with a limited set of imprints, the publisher has a chance to test the impact of selling DRM-free titles across a number of dimensions: sales, reader satisfaction and instances of piracy are examples.

But if I sound cautiously optimistic, it reflects a sense that the tide has not turned when it comes the use of DRM or the study of the true impact of piracy.

As I've covered before, DRM locks publishers and readers into specific platforms. It does not suppress piracy. Linking the two, as many commentors did when Macmillan made the announcement, conflates two different activities.

As publishing becomes more digital, there's a fear that piracy will inevitably increase, in the end denying authors and publishers revenues. This world view governs the priorities of organizations like the AAP, Britain's Publishers Association and of course the Authors Guild.

TechDirt has done some good reporting on the apparent dichotomy between proclaiming strong growth in digital markets and calling for crackdowns on piracy, which threaten to undermine revenues. As Glyn Moody noted yesterday, the relationships between availability and lost sales have been explored in only the most limited ways.

To help fill that void, TechDirt compiled a research report, "The sky is rising", that claims that "all of the creative industries are thriving".  Their analysis shows that, in a period of apparently rampant and growing piracy, media sales grew. The number of new works grew. Digital sales grew.

There is nuance in the way that the impact of piracy can be assessed, but any analysis starts with data, much of which we have yet to develop. There's room in the middle to figure out what is really happening, but until we start to meet there, Macmillan's decision feels less like a turning point than it might.

'Big data', one of the themes at last week's "Making Information Pay" conference, has been making the rounds for a while, but it is still pretty new for most publishers. To help break the ice, the Book Industry Study Group arranged for presentations from Information Builders, Readerlink and Bookseer.

While I found all three sessions to be valuable, Peter Collingridge's description of Bookseer, a marketing metrics tool, probably resonated most with the publishers in the audience. As impressive as it is to hear how Readerlink processes seven million lines of data every day, it's harder to apply their experiences to the publishing business we're in right now.

Still, now is a good time to be trying some new things. Collingridge closed his remarks with an excerpt from one of my recent posts:

"Ultimately, making changes without collecting data is the publishing equivalent of using sonar without listening for the response. If we want to take pricing seriously, we should acquire the tools and skill sets required to make analysis practical and informative."

That post was inspired by an interview by Josh Stern at DigiDay, who interviewed the CEO of Parse.ly about "Publishing in the Big Data Era". If you're trying to figure out what to do about 'big data',  Stern's interview is worth a look, or even a second look.

Updated on May 8 to add: Peter Collingridge has joined Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O'Reilly Media and Pearson, as their new VP of Product Development. A tweeted remark by Andrew Savikas indicates that Collingridge may continue to work on Exact Editions properties, such as Bookseer.

In the past, I've written (and ranted) about the use of unpaid interns in publishing. In today's New York Times, Steven Greenhouse returns to the subject, this time examining the use of college graduates in unpaid positions.

Greenhouse captures Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, explaining the growth in post-college internships:

“The people in charge in many industries were once interns and they’ve come of age, and to them unpaid internships are completely normal and they think of having interns in every way, shape and form.”

As Perlin makes clear in his book, he doesn't support the argument that "just because everybody does it ..."

I'm not arguing against internships; I'm arguing against unpaid internships. Greenhouse reports on the case of Diana Wang, a graduate of Ohio State, who worked 11-hour days at Harper's Bazaar, supervising other interns who "ran around Manhattan picking up items from various fashion houses and showrooms."

The current minimum wage in New York is $7.25 an hour (there's an effort underway to create a 'living wage' in the city, but that's not law at the moment). If Hearst, owner of Harper's Bazaar, paid Wang straight wages (no overtime) for her 55-hour week, they would have been out $412.50 a week or $21,450 a year, assuming they never gave her a week off.

This isn't just a case of old media exploiting the opportunity to land free labor. Greenhouse talks about the "success" that Emily Meithner had interning for free at Gawker and Flavorpill before landing a paid job at Sterling Publishing. Meithner credits those internships with providing the skills and experiences that helped her get hired.

The reality is that any good job gives us the chance to gain skills and experiences. That's what makes any of us qualified to do more and better work in the future. It's not a question of whether internships are meaningful. I think people who are doing something of value should be paid for their work.

Last month Little Pickle Press, a start-up children's book publisher based in California, asked me to contribute a post on a topic of my choosing. After a bit of digging, I decided to write about "Digital content for children: How publishers find their audience".

My work was made easier by the research that Bowker has been doing in this area (a presentation that captures the research can be downloaded here). Their data helped inform a core part of my post for Little Pickle:

"But across digital platforms, things like best-seller lists, online reviews and retailer recommendations are replacing the important role that in-store displays play for physical books. To maximize digital sales, publishers will need to cultivate both retailers and reviewers in ways no longer connected to shelf space."

I go on to say that cultivating communities can be an effective strategy in building an audience for digital (as well as physical) content.

In the interest of disclosure, I've been doing some work for Little Pickle Press over the past year or so. They didn't specify the topic for this post, but I chose it in part because (as a new entrant) Little Pickle has a distinct advantage in reaching audiences with digital-first and digital-only content.

This is a challenge for traditional publishers: it's hard to do both print and digital well, and it's impossible to stay with what you know and be confident that you'll survive in the long term. As they organize around communities, new entrants have an advantage here, one that scale doesn't necessarily mitigate.

I posted on Wednesday that, as part of the Book Industry Study Group's "Making Information Pay" conference, I'd be giving a brief update of a metadata project we have been part of the last three months. The meeting took place yesterday, and I've posted the presentation materials on Slideshare (something that has become more difficult in the time since the service got bought by LinkedIn.)

The study included in-depth interviews with over 30 supply-chain participants as well as online surveys conducted in both the United States and Canada. The project builds upon prior best-practice work done by BISG, NISO and OCLC.

The interviews uncovered several consistent themes, including:

• Supplier (publisher) concerns with added or modified metadata
• Recepient reports that metadata quality still needs work
• Separate feeds for physical and digital products
• Significant "forking" in using the ONIX standard
• A slow start for ONIX 3.0 migration in the U.S.

We're working now on the final report, which will include at least five opportunities to improve metadata processes and five other initiatives that could help the supply chain "future-proof" its use of metadata. These ten recommendations are summarized in the MIP presentation.

In addition to the report, BISG anticipates scheduling follow-on discussions to help explore both the findings and recommendations. A calendar for those efforts is being developed; I'll post information here as it becomes available.

Last week I was able to join a two-day Klopotek Publishers' Forum, held for the ninth time in Berlin. The program organizer, Helmut von Berg, created an agenda that migrated from the general to the specific across two languages (German and English), with plenty of opportunity throughout to engage with the 300 participants.

From those attending, some very good summaries are available online:

• Outsell's David Worlock, who moderated a question-and-answer session about "Context first";
• Say Books' Anna von Veh, winner of the "traveled farthest" award (she came from New Zealand); and 
• Siobhan O'Leary of Publishing Perspectives, writing about the German-language part of the program.

As you'll see in the write-ups, it is impossible to describe the event and not mention the venue, a conference center in a building designed by Frank Gehry. Throughout the two days, tourists stood outside the building to gain at least a glimpse of the center.

Last month, I described a project we have been doing to examine how physical and digital book metadata is created, managed, modified and employed throughout the supply chain. The work is being done for and in concert with the Book Industry Study Group (BISG).

Tomorrow, BISG is holding its annual "Making Information Pay" conference. Its two primary themes are "The promise and challenge of big data" and "Essential information for data-driven business decisions".

As part of the second theme, I'll be presenting a short overview of project findings and a summary of our primary recommendations for improving book-industry use of metadata. After the meeting, I'll make the presentation materials available on Slideshare.

I'm particularly looking forward to a presentation by Peter Collingridge, "Book marketing is broken: 'Little' data can fix it". Collingridge founded Book Seer, one of the examples that came to mind when I lamented the lack of analytical infrastructure among publishers yearning to 'control' pricing.

The conference takes place from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium (1221 Sixth Avenue in New York). Registration is still open.

Last week I attended "Digital Now", an association-specific conference put on for much of the last decade by Fusion Productions. Part of my participation was tied to my role as a board member with Association Media & Publishing, but I also got to sit on some non-publishing sessions along the way.

One particularly memorable breakout presentation described "Engineering For Change" (E4C), an initiative launched by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). E4C "provides a forum to connect, collaborate, solve challenges and share knowledge among a growing community of engineers, technologists, social scientists, NGOs, local governments and community advocates, who are dedicated to improving the quality of life all over the world."

The effort has garnered support from a host of allied organizations, notably the IEEE, whose mission parallels that of ASME. The collaboration is designed to give participating engineers the opportunity to work with others "to improve the quality of life all over the world".

The presentation touched upon both successes and some challenges in bringing a cross-section of institutions and individuals to the table. The initiative is new, and they are still considering how deeply to commit to outcomes rather than providing resources.

That part of the conversation strikes close to home, where authors and publishers committed to fostering reading are sometimes at odds with practices (library access, more affordable books) that would help them achieve those ends. There aren't any perfect answers, but if two 130-year-old organizations can try something like this, I'd like to think we can, too.

Writing at paidContent, Robert Andrews recently covered several presentations made at a meeting in Madrid that the Paley Center hosted for media executives. Focusing on remarks made by two executives at Google and Facebook, Andrews describes "How tech’s giants want to re-invent journalism".

Some of the questions raised by Google's Richard Gingras resonated with me:

“Do we not deserve to rethink the architecture of what a ‘story’ is, the form of presentation and narrative to meet the needs of people who are consuming, not just by articles?...  As Larry Page once said to me,” ‘Why don’t reporters do more footnoting?’”

In this regard, Gingras invokes Clay Johnson's call for readers to seek and evaluate original sources. Johnson argues that reporters should footnote, giving readers access to source documents and other resources that would help them parse coverage. In The Information Diet, Johnson also explains why reporters don't footnote: newspapers prefer to keep readers on their ad-driven web sites.

Somewhat less encouraging were remarks made by Facebook's journalism manager, Vadim Lavrusik. As Andrews reported:

“People want analysis from journalists,” Facebook’s Lavrusik advised. He showed data from the social network’s recent engagement with news brands suggesting ”posts with journalists’ analysis receive 20 percent more referral clicks (than others).”

I believe the data, and it may well be the case that people "want" analysis. But Clay Johnson would argue it is more likely that people want to be told they are right.

Secondary and tertiary reporting and analysis tends to create an echo chamber that amplifies what we already know at the expense of the underlying data that might challenge our beliefs. It doesn't really surprise me that Facebook wants to encourage practices that drive traffic, but that's not what we need most as we try to reinvent journalism.

Earlier this month, I was visiting Rhode Island School of Design for what I'd call "admitted parents day." The campus tour walked through the school's library, where they were setting up an exhibit called "Bibliophilia - Books We Love and Why".

The library had been collecting cards from students, faculty and staff as part of a celebration of National Library Week (I know; I missed it!). While we were there, a wide range of books was being put on display. Each book was accompanied by the card that a book lover had completed to explain why the particular title mattered.

There were serious cards, whimsical ones, a few cryptic contributions and a set of responses that were college-student strange. But .. they were all about books. May that tradition continue.

Livres Canada Books has published an English-language version of "Territorial rights in the digital age", a research paper I wrote earlier this year. A French-language version will follow next month.

The report, which Livres Canada Books is offering for C$30, extends work done last year in a companion paper, "Exporting digital books: A guide to best practices". The rights research, which included a survey of Canadian publishers, was designed to answer several questions, including:

• What are the downsides of territorial rights?
• Do territorial rights as currently managed risk limiting sales?
• Do territorial rights potentially alienate “early adopters” of digital content?

Two things seemed increasingly apparent as I researched the topic and wrote the report. First: the visibility and availability of digital content cuts down on the amount of time available to sell territorial rights.

Tighter windows are driven by consumers, who see digital books published anywhere but are frustrated trying to buy them in territories for which rights have not been cleared. In my view, not being prepared to meet demand is a factor in extra-territorial piracy.

The second: there are a number of markets in which sales of non-native language digital content make "worldwide" sales a promising possibility. It is unlikely that most English-language books would sell well enough in Germany to justify a local agreement, but sales of digital books (either directly or through e-tailers with a presence in a given market) could realize revenue that would otherwise be lost.

On their own, these two ideas give many publishers reason enough to rethink the future of territorial rights. Local knowledge may still trump direct sales, but the barriers are lower in this digital age.

Screenwriter David Simon, known for his work writing television series that include Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire and Treme, launched his blog this week by arguing that charging for content is a defense of copyright. Well, he actually re-launched the blog, something I'll come back to in a minute.

As reported by Jason Boog at GalleyCat, Simon claims "anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere." He goes on to say:

"If at any point in the future, this site offers more than a compendium of old prose work and the odd comment or two on recent events — if it grows in purpose or improves in execution — I might try to toss up a small monthly charge in support of one of the 501c3 charities listed in the Worthy Causes section."

I like Simon's work (Homicide was one of a few must-watch series for me in the 1990s), but his argument falls flat for a reason articulated at the Copyright Clearance Center's recent conference: copyright is not a business model.

Dating back to the Statute of Anne, copyright became law as part of an effort to balance the private incentive to create new work with the public good that comes from unfettered access to knowledge and creative effort. It was not written to guarantee that creative works earned enough revenue to sustain their originators.

Simon's assessment that "Writers everywhere do this to make a living, and some are doing fine work and barely getting by for their labor" is not about copyright. It's about a set of business models focused on reducing the cost of content, including the wages paid writers.

Although Simon dismisses "free" as inimical to the needs of writers, he's actually using it here to serve an end. "If it grows in purpose or improves in execution" is a test, a test of the power of free to build an audience.

He's entitled to do that. He's also entitled to post (with permission) a review of Treme from the Times-Picayune, something Simon did when he first launched his blog in 2010.

Of course, one might reasonably ask why he didn't just link to the Times-Picayune site, a move that would have potentially given them traffic and a shot at earning digital dimes. Instead, he posted it for all us to see for free. Apparently the principle matters, unless it doesn't.

Earlier this week, Josh Stern at DigiDay posted an interview with Sachin Kamdar, the CEO of Parse.ly. Kamdar answered a range of questions tied to "Publishing in the Big Data Era". Along the way Kamdar recommended that publishers:

• Integrate social with other metrics (like sales data)
• Avoid treating social as a silo
• Use technology to help drive analysis
• Proactively use social platforms to extend brand

Understandably, Kamdar wants publishers to consider his company's analytic platform, Dash. While I don't have a point of view on Dash, there are home-grown analytics packages already on the market  (Book Seer and Bookigee, author-facing in its current incarnation, come to mind).

Publishers have yet to beat a path to their doors. In 2010 some of the larger concerns rushed to gain control over pricing, but publishers as a whole have been slow to implement technologies that would let them understand the broader implications of changes in price.

Ultimately, making changes without collecting data is the publishing equivalent of using sonar without listening for the response. If we want to take pricing seriously, we should acquire the tools and skill sets required to make analysis practical and informative.

Craig Mod, whose work is consistently challenging and informative, posted recently about what happens to works that don't in some form exist online. In "A pointable we", Mod talks about a "long, intimate" interview with Japanese author Murakami Haruki that exists only in print.

Mod's apt summary phrase, highlighted by Kat Meyer on Twitter, is "To not exist digitally means to be walled off." In a comment, I wonder if the stronger construction might be, "To be offline means in part to not exist." That gets us closer to the choices made in going or staying offline.

I went on to say that the idea here reminds me of what the Bladerunner replicant Roy Batty says as dies:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Librarians, appropriately, worry about "who will preserve the web?" Digital persistence is a significant issue, but the tradeoff here is one outlined by another commentor.

Shared, something continues to exist. It is not in its original form, perhaps, but it exists at least as a contribution to who we are. Offline, that's much harder.

In February, I posted "Market opportunities", which described an article about making reading work for low-literacy populations. The post is one of several I've written this year that try to explore the purposes of publishing.

In a similar vein, I was interested in reading “Library terms that users understand”, a site built by John Kupersmith “to help library web developers decide how to label key resources and services in such a way that most users can understand them well enough to make productive choices.”

Drawing upon the results of 51 different usability studies, Kupersmith outlines seven “best practices” for libraries. These include:

• Test to see what terms users understand, and avoid terms that users often don’t understand
• Use natural-language equivalents
• Explain or enhance potentially confusing terms
• Provide alternate paths to steer people toward useful answers
• Be consistent in your use (or non-use) of terms

While these may not seem like breakthrough moments, having a web-page selection that says “Find books” is more accessible than one that reads “Interlibrary loans”. The user wants a result, not a process.

I don't quite have an end point for these ideas. Publishing itself is changing, probably by the day, and in writing about it I'm hoping to develop a horizon that we collectively might move toward.

Yesterday, I linked to Eric Hellman's post about "Publishing's Amazon-powered future". In it, Hellman outlined how publishers are fundamentally misunderstanding the retailer's long-term competitive strategy.

In his post, Hellman makes the point that "Amazon has alway been willing to lose money to achieve that scale." It's a point that came to mind when I read an Internet Retailer report about a new offer Amazon introduced this past week in Germany:

"The Amazon Student Membership program gives students a free one-year membership to Amazon Prime, Amazon’s loyalty program that offers unlimited free next-day delivery and other perks. After a year, students can sign up for Amazon Prime for 15 euros (US $19.64) a year—about half the regular price— and keep that discounted price for the next four years."

"Through the program, German students can also get 20% higher value for products they turn in to Amazon via Amazon Trade-In and use the credit they receive to purchase products from 25 categories on Amazon.de."

The IR post points out that this offer parallels one made two years ago to students in the U.S. An offer doesn't have to be new to underscore the point, though. If Amazon is all about scale, what are we about?

On Thursday, Eric Hellman published "Publishing's Amazon-powered future", a perceptive post about the things he feels most publishers miss about Amazon's competitive strategy. I retweeted a link after it came out, and I wanted to revisit it here, as well.

Hellman's work is always worth a full read, and I encourage you to take some time with his post. I'll borrow his thoughts about Amazon:

"Amazon is fundamentally a company about scale. The common thread between (Amazon Web Services) and the internet book seller of 1995 is the identification of markets with large inefficiencies that could be eliminated by using the internet to amass scale. Amazon has alway been willing to lose money to achieve that scale. But this isn't predatory in the sense that having achieved market dominance, they raise prices. Instead, it's ruthless in that once scale is achieved, the resulting efficiencies can't be matched by anyone else."

"It seems clear that Amazon has identified the publishing industry as a target ripe for further forcible efficiency improvements. But the nightmare narrative being spun by the publishing echo chamber is tragically unaware of how Amazon works. Maybe it's because publishers imagine that Amazon will do what they would do if they had Amazon's market power. But Amazon won't extort huge sums of money from powerless consumers. Instead, they will ruthlessly bring efficiency to every process involved in publishing. And then they'll invite everyone to use their ruthlessly efficient services."

This is the reason publishers can't beat Amazon: they aren't even playing the same game.

In researching "The opportunity in abundance", I found an article that drew upon research that Martin Reeves and Mike Deimler had done for the Boston Consulting Group. The authors were trying to describe competitive strategy in an internet era, and they noted:

"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."

In the presentation, I point to this as an example of how our complex supply chain gets fixed only by adopting new perspectives or approaches. Hellman adds another option: the inefficient get squeezed out of existence. His view seems more likely these days.

On Monday and Tuesday, I am in Berlin, participating in several sessions that are part of a Klopotek Publishers' Forum themed "Context enhances content". Forum organizer Helmut von Berg invited me to join the meeting and present "Context first".

I'll also have an opportunity to accompany Anna von Veh of Say Books in a session she calls "Improvising madly". In it, von Veh explains how structure in jazz provides the building blocks for improvisation, much as structure in content provides the building blocks for innovation and recombination.

Yesterday, Publishing Perspectives posted an overview of the meeting, in which I learned that the conference venue has its own story. It's always fun for me to present "Context first", but this will be the first time I've had a chance to offer it in a building designed by Frank Gehry. 

"Mobile content, ad sales will hit $67 billion in 2012", a post written by Robert Andrews at paidContent, got me thinking about how we talk about the size of markets.

Based on a report from Strategy Analytics, the article outlines the size and shape of the mobile market in 2012. The total market for is said to be $149.8 billion, broken down as follows:

• $82.8 billion in mobile data subscription sales
• $26.1 billion in app downloads
• $11.6 billion in mobile advertising revenues
• $29.4 billion in everything else (presumably content sales)

It was the last number that got me thinking, for two reasons. Despite the headline, the precise figure for "content sales" is actually not spelled out in the paidContent report. I wasn't able to access to the source document, so it's not clear to me what "everything else" is.

That's a data literacy challenge of the sort I posted about last week. Trade coverage often enough picks up the top-line data from these reports, but the devil truly is in the details.

The other thing that struck me: if content sales on mobile platforms are anything close to $29 billion, they would dwarf some of our existing, physical-product industries. Now that would be good news in a tough time. It just doesn't feel quite right.

Earlier today, I presented "The opportunity in abundance" to members of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia (ABPBC). Those attending asked a range of challenging and hopeful questions, pushing back against my beliefs around the value of DRM and the likelihood that publishing can ever regain ground lost to the new gatekeepers.

In the presentation, I ask the many members of the publishing supply chain to think about how what we do is actually received and used. It's an argument I'd call "high-minded", in that commerce to me is the result of value provided, not just the revenue due for having provided a good or service.

Toward the end of the time set aside for questions, a publisher asked if I might extend the outcome to include any social goods obtained: the value of literacy as a vehicle to help reduce the number of children living in poverty, for example. He argued, quietly, for a perspective that placed our publishing conundrum in a greater, more important context.

That we in publishing can help create, maintain and expand a social good is a hopeful reminder. Most of us came to publishing for the chance to work on something other than business models. Now is our time.

In defending themselves against charges of collusion, the publishers recently sued by the U.S. Department of Justice pointed to what they feel is a more competitive marketplace for eBook sales. In particular, they talk about the growth of independent eBook distributors, including physical bookstores.

On the Techland blog (part of the Time web site), Keith Wagstaff paints a somewhat different picture. Although the title ("How small e-booksellers could help break the Amazon-Apple duopoly") seems to forget that the second-largest eBook retailer is not named Apple, the article does a good job describing the detrimental impact of DRM.

If book publishers really want to grow a vibrant set of independent eBook sellers (and their supporters suggest that they do), making each one of them spend $10,000 or more to set up digital rights management systems guarantees a very small number will try.

DRM has not and will not stop piracy. It largest benefit accrues to those who can afford to invest in it, as it locks in customers. Keith Wagstaff has it right: if publishers want a vibrant marketplace, they need to lose the DRM.

Over the weekend, The Guardian covered Printout, a bimonthly gathering of print magazine enthusiasts. At a recent event, about 100 people brought their favorite independent magazines to show, share and discuss.

Although the article tries to draw a bit of a comparison with the iPad, the organizers saw less of a divide. Co-founder Jeremy Leslie noted:

"People like to say, 'This is dead and that is living. It's not as simple as that. As with most new forms, digital will succeed in various aspects. Print will continue to succeed in others."

Of course, it helps that the magazines they love are smaller, independent and creatively less restricted than most mass-market titles. If you're going to compete on physicality, it helps to offer something physical to remember.

Before Conde Nast acquired it, the indie Wired was oversized and read like a voyage of discovery. Forty-five years ago, Rolling Stone started as a newsprint tabloid, as counter-culture as its founder intended.

This isn't a lament; things change. The bigger a magazine aspires to be, the more its owners care about things like the size of newsstand racks and the cost of delivering an oversized publication. 

So it comes as no surprise that Steve Watson, also a co-founder, pointed to "lack of distribution" as a problem for independent magazines. Even here, the advent of new technology can help.

At O'Reilly Media's one-day "mini TOC" in Chicago, J.C. Gabel and Josh Schollmeyer talked about their efforts to revive The Chicagoan. They print only sporadically (twice a year is their plan), but their launch issue sold out after they used Twitter to spread the word about where the limited-run magazine might be found.

Of course, you still have to offer a magazine someone can connect with. Think about how Printout attendee Chloe McLaren described KnockBack, an alternative woman's magazine: "You can read it, still eat carbs and not wear dresses."  Now that's a niche.

Over the weekend, Mike Cane and Charlie Stross looked at book publishing in the wake of the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) to sue several publishers and Apple for collusion over eBook pricing.

Cane argues that publishers should insist on a single eBook format (EPUB) and standardize the use of DRM around Adobe's product. Along the way, Cane also asks the largest publishers to forsake Amazon entirely.

Stross, no fan of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, sees it another way: publishers need to forsake DRM and sell books that can be read anywhere outside the "walled garden of the Kindle store."

The DoJ lawsuit has provoked a widespread set of reactions that are generally pro-publisher and anti-Amazon (the firm that critics feel is the real monopoly). Both Cane and Stross encourage publishers to take responsibility for those terms they truly can control.

I've written earlier this year that platform-specific deals, enforced by DRM, hand the market to early movers. Although I think "standardizing" DRM serves to lower the value readers place on the files they buy, it's a lot better than continuing to make deals with e-tailers who want to lock readers in.

While attending South by Southwest a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about "The seven deadly myths of mobile", recapping a presentation by Josh Clark. In a keynote that opened O'Reilly Media's one-day Tools of Change event, Clark warned against watering down mobile sites.

Since then, a bit of a debate has developed between Clark and usability expert Jakob Nielsen. Some arguments resist condensation, and these two points of view are on that list of things you should read yourself. Suffice it to say that Clark has not changed his mind about making mobile content consumption a rich experience.

While offering a set of diverging perspectives, Clark and Nielsen do everyone a service by engaging in a spirited debate about the best way to meet the needs of mobile content consumers. It is possible that future delivery models may divide between "robust" and "streamlined" use preferences, but the options are something we all want to consider before deciding the best path.

About six weeks ago, I posted a profile of mobile traffic to the Magellan site. Working with our design partner, Dave Ross, we had reconfigured the site toward the end of January to support reflowable content to mobile devices.

In the month after we launched the new design, the share of site visits from mobile made up about 27% of all traffic. In the last few weeks, the share has fallen slightly (to 24%) but remains relatively constant from day to day.

On March 11, the majority of traffic to a post about "the seven deadly myths of mobile" came from mobile sources. It probably didn't hurt that the post was written at and about a session I heard at South by Southwest.

More recently (March 25, a Sunday) mobile visits made up almost half of the traffic to a post on "the future of mobile". Lesson learned: if you want to drive mobile traffic, write about mobile.

(Okay, that may not be quite the lesson to learn.)

Mobile page views per visit remain about a third lower than those for other platforms. Time spent on site, while higher than was the case in January, is about two-thirds lower when the source is mobile.

Part of the divide reflects a moving target: since the redesign, non-mobile time on site (up 40%) and page views per visit (up 15%) have improved substantially. The lag in mobile engagement may reflect the bare-bones navigation used there.

We're continuing to tweak the mobile presentation of our content. Sporadic feedback has been positive, but I'd like to see more consistent engagement from visitors who come to us on mobile platforms. Look for another update later this spring.

We've written before about the apparently inexorable growth of mobile commerce and consumption, a trend that Direct Marketing News recently labeled a "surge". An article by Juan Martinez noted:

"According to a February 2012 Consumer Electronics Association M-Commerce Forecast, 90% of consumers own a tablet, a smartphone or a cell phone. Of these consumers, 37% are engaging in some form of mobile commerce. On average, consumers spent $642 on mobile purchases in the past 12 months — a whopping $124 billion overall."

Something didn't seem right about one of these numbers, so I divided $642 into $124 billion and saw that it represented something north of 193 million consumers.  Divide that by the 37% who are said to be engaging in some form of mobile commerce, and the total market balloons to over 520 million people.

I'm as bullish on mobile as the next guy, but those numbers don't make any sense.

I tried to get the source document from CEA, but it's a pricey report for a blog budget. In any event, my core point really isn't whether CEA or Direct Marketing News made a mistake. It's about the importance of maintaining some financial literacy.

This is a theme that grows out of Clay Johnson's thesis in The Information Diet. As information becomes abundant, we have an increasing obligation to question and assess what we are told. I support formal curation, but even that won't save us from having to do some of the legwork ourselves.

For the last two months, we have been working with the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) on a project that examines how metadata is created, managed, disseminated, modified and used throughout the supply chain.

Over the last several years, BISG has led the development of best-practice guides for both metadata senders and recipients. This project is designed to test how widely those practices are employed.

The study covers both the U.S. and Canadian markets. To date, more than two dozen in-depth interviews have been conducted with publishers, wholesalers, retailers, industry service providers and some digital-only participants.

Earlier this week, BISG opened a survey written to collect information that parallels the in-depth interviews. A link was sent to BISG members, but the survey is open to anyone with an interest in improving how metadata is handled in the book industry supply chain.

The survey can be accessed online and is open until April 20. It should take ten to 15 minutes to complete.

Results of the survey will be included in a presentation at BISG's "Making Information Pay" conference, to be held May 3 in New York. The results will also be part of a final report that BISG plans to release in June.

In the last couple of months, I've had three chances to hear Clay Johnson speak about the ideas behind his recent book, The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. Johnson introduces his ideas something like this:

"We're all battling a storm of distractions, buffeted with notifications and tempted by tasty tidbits of information. And just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness."

Both in his book and in his presentations, Johnson talks about how our need to be told "we are right" guides what we are given as news and information consumers. We're not challenged with original sources or unbiased reports because, in fact, we'd really prefer to be validated.

It's a sobering message sadly verified in a study that Time Inc., publisher of Time, Sports Illustrated, People and Entertainment Weekly, among other titles, conducted with Innerscope Research.

The study followed a small sample (30 people) whose media habits were measured over the course of a day. Biometric sensors collected data about emotional responses to various media platforms.

The results: so-called digital natives, defined as those 20-somethings "who grew up with mobile and digital technology as part of their everyday lives", switched their attention among media alternatives an average of 27 times an hour.

Interviewed by Bill Mickey at Folio:, Betsy Frank, Time Inc.'s chief research and insights officer, noted:

"It's not the most satisfying thing for us to learn that they're changing platforms 27 times an hour. That seems almost impossible to fathom. But it tells us as content producers and advertisers what we need to be thinking about ... engaging them quickly and not taking too long to get to the point and doing something emotionally immediate."

In the same article, Time Inc.'s executive director of consumer research and insights, Barry Martin, underscores Johnson's assessment of most media:

"We're in the relaxation business. We've heard time and again that women and men talk about magazines as a great time to relax. And to see that in the biometrics is compelling because the emotional engagement with magazines is much higher than any other media form when it was used solo."

The first time I heard Clay Johnson speak, I hesitated a bit because he is fighting on the consumer side of the equation. After reading his book and listening a couple of more times, I have to say I was wrong. There's no saving media companies whose management is relieved to be in "the relaxation business". It's time to look elsewhere for change.

Two notes: My first several roles in publishing all took place at Time Inc. in the 1980s and early 1990s. I've not worked with anyone interviewed for these two articles.  And, I tried to find the source document that generated this coverage.  I'm still looking, and if I am able to provide access, I will update the post.

Last weekend, I posted a bit of a rant about the MPAA and its chairman, former U.S. senator Chris Dodd. On Twitter, Pablo Arrieta responded by pointing me to Declan McCullagh's recent coverage of White House plans to target 'offshore' web sites it feels are guilty of pirate activity.

'Offshore' has such a nice ring to it, a step up from 'foreign'. It may help the next bill succeed where SOPA failed. But the bones of the White House plan, based on a report by United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, hew pretty closely to the ideas embodied in SOPA and PIPA.

It applauds ISPs like Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon and Time Warner Cable, who are now the the front line for enforcing access restrictions and takedown orders. McCullagh notes:

The White House did say that it wouldn't endorse a bill that endangers freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risks, or negatively affects the DNS system. On the other hand, it says elsewhere that "combating online infringement"—not protecting free speech—is a governmental priority "of the highest order."

We lack even the most basic evidence to understand the impact of piracy. In fact, the Government Accountability Office weighed in on piracy estimates, calling all of them suspect.

Yet the government is getting ready to once again propose new laws. Crappy data makes for crappy laws, something Bill Patry pointed out in more eloquent terms in his most recent book.

So why would online infringement become "a governmental priority of highest order?" In McCullagh's report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Julie Samuels puts it plainly: "It's pretty easy to read between the lines."

I'm not arguing against appropriate enforcement, but shutting down access to sites without due process is an effective form of prior restraint.  If we can muster enough collective energy to push through bills that erode legal protections, surely we can take a bit of time to offer evidence that explains why we need to do so.

Today, I'm part of a one-day Tools of Change conference (dubbed "mini-TOC") that O'Reilly Media is hosting in Chicago.  The program includes a variety of speakers addressing topics somewhat tailored to the publishing community in Chicago.

In the afternoon, I'm presenting "Using content to acquire new members (and do other fun stuff)". After Washington, D.C., Chicago is the second-largest market for national associations, and my session addresses some ways to leverage content to serve other purposes. If you're interested, I've put the presentation up on Slideshare.

In preparing my remarks, I had a chance to revisit association publishing posts I've made over the last three years. A cross-section makes for a useful "mini-bibliography":

• "My association wish list", five items to guide association publishing
• "From outbound to surround", the results of a Forrester Research report
• "Communicating association value", building an an ASAE article
• "Consumer-facing titles", documenting a new magazine from the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery
• "Best foot forward", borrowing from Scott Oser's thinking about publication audiences
• "Write once, read many", a call for content agility in publishing
• "Leverage the power of content", recapping a presentation by James Heib
• "Surround your members!", a comparison of asssociation and B2B publishers
• "Make your content sticky", rules for digital content design
• "Sell the book", which includes an argument for use of POD technology

These links provide at least a head start; feel free to add any others you think inform the discussion.

I attended Catholic schools for 12 years, and I spent far too many mornings serving as an altar boy at 6:30 a.m. masses. Still, I did not turn out to be a particularly religious person.

This isn't intended as a criticism of anyone who may be. My faith in established institutions fractured early, and believing on my own has made putting Humpty Dumpty back together again a bit of a challenge.

There's a commercial and social envelope around Christmas that masks the absence of an institutional allegiance. I don't defend it; I observe and sometimes benefit from it. Easter, tied as it is to loss and redemption, is a different story.

Around the time I was starting college - my first time not taking a religion class every day - Patti Smith released her first album, Horses, who opening line ("Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine") caused as much controversy as an American artist could hope for. But the lines that most resonated for me came a few moments later:

My sins my own/They belong to me ... Me

Absent an institutional faith, I've probably overadjusted, substituting an Emersonian bias toward self-reliance. Take that too far, though, and you find yourself walking down the road with Ayn Rand, who might take exception to John Fletcher's thought that "Our acts our angels are".

So on Easter, my personal faith honors those taken too soon, friends like Shelley Riecke and Walter Lucas, for whom making and maintaining meaningful connections was their life's work. It honors Pat McCarthy and Connie Connell, mothers whose work here is done, leaving us to pick up the mantle and make it our own.

And it honors Brother Jim Kelly, a member of the Xaverian order lost to cancer late last year, for whom "Yours in Christ" was more than a signature.

I don't have an easy way to correspond across faith, acts and the institutions that house both. Today, I don't need to. My colleagues, my friends, my family shared a dream of life. That's still here to celebrate.

(With thanks to Laura Dawson, whose renewed blogging is an inspiration.)

At The Hollywood Reporter, Pamela McClintock recently got to interview "Hollywood's top lobbyist", MPAA chairman Christopher Dodd. Her coverage is worth reading, if only to gain a sense of how spending 36 years in Washington shapes what someone thinks about dropping names.

McClintock asks Dodd if SOPA is dead, to which he says:

"I regret that Steve Jobs isn't around today. At least he understood the connection between content and technology. The fellow who started eBay, Jeff Skoll, gets it [Skoll is founder and chairman of the film company Participant Media]. There are not a huge number of people who understand that content and technology absolutely need each other, so I'm counting on the fact that there are people like Jeff and others who are smart and highly respected in both communities. Between now and sometime next year [after the presidential election], the two industries need to come to an understanding."

Talk about the "new choke points": Dodd doesn't event pretend that copyright is a bargain between content creators and the society whose laws grant the right. It's just something for representatives of content and technology to work out.

In the interview, McClintock follows up with Dodd to ask if "conversations are going on now". The former senator can barely avoid saying "yes":

"I'm confident that's the case, but I'm not going to go into more detail because obviously if I do, it becomes counterproductive."

Public opposition to SOPA has taught the MPAA to make sure it has the tech players in line before trying again. That is sobering, but there's no surprise here.

As is frequently the case, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM has written a perceptive post about the disconnect between the folks developing "a Netflix for magazines" and the demonstrated demand for more granular content.

Designing content access to reflect "what readers want" has been a persistent theme here. There's a lot to be said for the "lean consumption" model, one that emphasizes "minimizing customers' time and effort and delivering exactly what they want, when and where they want it".

This doesn't say that a digital magazine delivery model that emulates the current newsstand browsing experience can't succeed. To do so, it has to solve a problem a reader actually has. Otherwise, it may make bundled magazine content even more of a commodity play.

Toward the end of 2011, I wrote a post about "the new choke points". It grew out of an opinion piece by Dan Gillmor that had been published by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

In his post, Gillmor saw 2012 as "the year of the content-controller oligopoly". He named several potential choke points, including search engines, wire-line ISPs, mobile carriers and Apple.

The idea that distribution entities could be used to throttle the dissemination of content is not new, but digital technologies make widespread throttling possible and effective. SOPA may be on hold, but efforts to control the choke points persist.

At CNET, Greg Sandoval reports on efforts by the film and music industries to create the "Center for Copyright Information", which is expected to "assist in the effort to combat online infringement". As Sandoval notes:

"Administrators will help evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation measures, the ability of entertainment companies to accurately identify violators and pitching the graduated response program to non-participating ISPs. Antipiracy experts at the studios and music labels say that the graduated-response program is vital to protecting movies and music. They believe that since ISPs are the gatekeepers of the Internet, they are in best position to thwart illegal file sharing."

For those who aren't familiar with "graduated response", Sandoval adds:

"A graduated-response program is supposed to begin with the ISPs sending a series of letters to customers who are flagged for allegedly downloading pirated songs or films. The letters will endeavor to educate the accused that downloading unauthorized content is illegal. The ISPs will then gradually begin ratcheting up the pressure for those who are alleged to have committed multiple piracy infractions."

The emphasis on "allegedly" is mine.

Who gets to decide whether posted content represents an infringing use? Well, apparently it starts with the Center for Copyright Information. Rather than go to a court to complain about infringement, content owners can sidestep the law (which is pesky) and just lean on ISPs to shut off anyone whose activities are found objectionable.

I've written many times that I respect copyright. More broadly, I respect the law. Prior restraint, dimunition of fair use and employing penalties whose cost may outweigh the benefits are all tactics that Dan Gillmor predicted in his post. They make me think the disease may be less onerous than the cure.

Writing at Folio:, Bill Mickey reports that Next Issue Media (NIM) has announced an "all you can access" plan for a total of 32 magazines published by four of its five parent companies (Time Inc., Meredith, Hearst and Conde Nast).

Readers will be able to access digital versions of 27 non-weekly titles for $10 a month. Five weekly titles can be obtained digitally for an additional $5 a month. At least for the moment, part-owner News Corp (a limited fan of digital) has yet to contribute a title.

Mickey reports that the service expects that it will continue to offer mass-market publications:

"More titles are expected to be added later in the year, but NIM says it will maintain a more curatorial approach to selection. The focus will be on magazines that have mass appeal, rather than going for catalog depth."

It will be interesting to see how effectively Next Issue Media can sell access to mass-market titles, many of whom have cut subscription prices to maintain print rate bases. It could be that digital access provides a convenience that resists price comparisons.

Toward the end of the article, Mickey raises another question: how to divide royalties:

"Just thinking about how the royalty breakdown under this plan will work out among the five publishers—and those that may join in the coming months—is enough to give you a headache. The concept is clearly a no-brainer for customers, but how publishers will divvy up each monthly fee is unclear."

The folks at Next Issue Media might try talking with Safari Books Online, the joint venture O'Reilly operates in partnership with Pearson. If you struggle with the idea of a book publisher schooling the largest magazine publishers in the United States, Safari Online has been offering "subscription access to thousands of online books and training videos from dozens of the world's most trusted publishers" for the last decade, divvying up use-driven royalties to publishers and authors alike.

On March 13, Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it would no longer print its 32-volume encyclopedia, electing to discontinue the physical product and sell whatever it could of the remaining 4,000 sets in stock.

According to the New York Times, the news has set off a bit of a buying spree.

The encyclopedia, whose sale staff has been largely disbanded, had been selling at a rate of about 60 sets a week.  At that pace, the inventory on hand would have lasted through mid-2013.

Now, print aficionados have upped the sales to more than 1,000 sets a week.  At $1,395, the selling price is unchanged, but people are calling in, handing over credit-card information and waiting for 130 pounds of paper to arrive on their doorsteps. Inventory is expected to run out later this month.

Last week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales described the end of the print version of Encyclopaedia Britannica as "a sign of a new beginning". It may be a new beginning, but it remains one whose funding sources are somewhat obscure.

If anything, the sales boom provides solid evidence that scarcity sells, particularly in a niche market. Unfortunately, we're no longer in an era in which we can safely limit all of our editions. For most products, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but for a substitute.

In the current issue of Adweek, Lucia Moses describes Bloomberg LP and Thomson Reuters as "the future of news". She makes a good case for the claim.

According to Adweek, the two companies employ 2,400 and 3,000 journalists, respectively. Both are global, and each pays more journalists than the New York Times and the Washington Post, combined.

Early in her article, Moses compares the two firms to traditional newspapers, noting that "consumers remain steadfast in their refusal to pay for news online". I think this under-describes the problem.

Consumers have shown a significant willingness to pay for content that they value. As Moses notes, both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have been relentless in their efforts to package content in ways that their readers find useful:

While print brands still struggle to adapt their content to digital platforms, these companies are churning out articles and sharing editorial costs across multiple outlets, from Web to TV to print. “This is the newsroom of the future, where television, print and digital are really connected,” says Larry Kramer, founder of CBS MarketWatch. “Each one may not have to be profitable, but they will all contribute.”

It's more than useful to distinguish between what we value as publishers and what consumers are willing to pay for. For sixty years, long before online news, consumers were slowly defecting from newspaper subscriptions. That was the time when we should have been asking why.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the North Atlantic Treated Organization (NATO) pursued a "two-track" strategy on nuclear disarmament: push the Soviet Union to limit its arsenal, while simultaneously deploying multiple-warhead missiles that were difficult and expensive to defend against.

The strategy had its detractors, at least some of whom felt that positioning new missiles in Western Europe increased the risk of a first strike by the Soviet Union. By the end of the decade, though, the combination of accelerated military spending and economic and social unrest had taken its toll.

In a way you might find less orchestrated, consider the worldwide terrorist attacks that have come to define the last two decades. With increased spending on security, defense and inspection, the measures have added trillions of dollars to the cost of doing business.

In both cases, the viability of existing institutions was or is being undermined by a set of externally imposed costs. Rather than becoming more efficient and competitive, we're defending against the elusive.

That idea came to mind when I met a group of librarian lawyers last week. I hadn't really thought of it before, but libraries increasingly are turning to in-house lawyers to advise them on rights clearances and related liabilities.

Absent a coherent directory of rights, things like copyright extension, the DMCA and limitations on both access to and the distribution of eBooks have greatly complicated what libraries may and may not do. It's natural to turn to legal counsel, but it doesn't solve the problem.

Consistent with the ideas in "The opportunity in abundance", this might be a good time for the publishing community to pursue its own "two-track" strategy: Invest in resources (like a rights directory) that solve problems downstream; and repurpose the money freed up to offer better services.

I don't want to deny lawyers a library gig, but I'd like to see them employed to add value more than to defend against potential liabilities.

At yesterday's On Copyright 2012, sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center, competing claims about book piracy took center stage for a while. That's not too surprising.

Generally, publishers and many authors see the instance of piracy as closely correlated to lost sales. While the data that establishes the impact of piracy is far from conclusive, it's hard to hear Maja Thomas talk about Hachette issuing "hundreds of thousands" of takedown orders and not imagine that there is a true cost in there somewhere.

On the other hand, it is also hard to not ask where the pirated content is being downloaded. Selling books online makes every title visible from the moment it is published somewhere. The prevailing approach exploits territorial rights in stages, making it likely that readers in other markets will not be able to obtain a book using legitimate means.

Last year, the American Assembly released Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, a study that cited high prices and relatively low incomes as the primary cause of piracy in these markets. Price, legitimate availability and perceived value all play a role in the instance as well as the impact of piracy.

Of course, you don't have to leave the United States to find people who read books without paying for them. At any given time, there are millions of books on loan from libraries that have paid publishers for the right to stock them. As a reader, all you have to do is wait your turn.

At the last session of the day, an On Copyright attendee asked what it would take for publishers to sell eBooks to libraries. The consensus answer: "friction", meaning that publishers wanted libraries to make it more difficult to borrow a digital book.

In digital realms, things like waiting times, terrioriality and availability are all forms of "friction". Make the hurdles for library eBooks high enough, and at least some of the people who were willing to read legitimate copies for free will find their way to pirate solutions.

Publishers should be moving quickly to make eBooks available through libraries. As I offered in "Context first", windows open and close quickly:

Content is no longer just a product. It’s part of a value chain that solves readers’ problems. Readers expect publishers to point them to the outcomes or answers they want, where and when they want them. We’re interested in content solutions that don’t waste our time, a precious commodity for all of us. Perhaps most daunting: readers expect that their content solutions will improve over time. They don’t care that much (or at all) about how it happens.

At a closing reception, a lawyer who works for a larger library put it plainly: libraries are publishers' first and best defense against digital book piracy. If you're a publisher concerned about piracy, making it more difficult for libraries to lend eBooks is a huge step in the wrong direction.

Note: When posted on March 31, libraries were described as "publishers' last and best defense". On Twitter, Pablo Francisco Arrieta (@xpectro) suggested that the better phrase is "first and best defense". I agree, and I've changed it here.

Today, the Copyright Clearance Center is hosting On Copyright 2012, whose theme this year is "Advancing the creative economy". The opening keynote, delivered by John Howkins, challenged the audience to think seriously about finding new ways for getting paid for creative works.

Howkins, who wrote The Creative Economy in 2001, talked briefly about using "big data" as a basis for monetizing community. His example - a game designer that has migrated from paid sales to free distribution with daily collection of (literally) millions of data points - needs work to develop how it might play out for published works, but the idea is intriguing.

Both in his prepared remarks and in answering a question after his presentation, Howkins downplayed the impact of piracy on published works. He characterized the estimates of revenues lost to piracy as greatly exaggerated. That perspective may be the most helpful in advancing the creative economy.

(If you're reading this on March 30, the program is being streamed live at the first link in this post. An archived copy is expected to be made available after the meeting ends.)

Earlier this month, Dennis Abrams of Publishing Perspectives posted a profile of Bookigee, which is "developing services and analytics to help the publishing industry".

In the article, Bookigee founder Kristen McLean previewed the talk she was about to give at O'Reilly Media's one-day Tools of Change conference in Bologna, Italy.  Echoing a common and growing theme, McLean noted ...

"... the use of hand-held devices overseas is going to leapfrog over our use of home computers – that’s an rapidly growing trend which means that emerging markets are not going to be interested in normal publishing routes."

She goes on to ask, "How do you meet the challenge?”

Part of the answer involves outfitting writers with the tools they need to understand where and how their books are being sold. Bookigee's launch product, WriterCube, will provide data-driven insights to authors who are increasingly expected to manage their own marketing.

Abrams does ask McLean "Why not start with publishers?"; she explains that writers need the help, and now. There's a question hanging in the air, though: If tools like WriterCube take off, where can publishers continue to add value?

Toward the end of "Context first", I listed four implications of content abundance for publishers. The last of the four claimed that "publishers will distinguish themselves if they can provide readers with tools that draw upon context to help them manage abundance".

An example was recently covered by Folio:'s Bill Mickey, who reported on a partnership between the Associated Press (AP) and database technology provider MarkLogic. The two teamed up to create a fast tool that supports targeted queries of the AP's 500 million pieces of content.

This particular tool is (at least for the moment) a business-to-business application. Still, it is a good example of how a content provider can give users the ability to search, combine and repurpose content in an efficient way.

Creating existing formats in a cost-effective way is a given, but there is a hidden value in content agility: it gives publishers the ability to tap into markets that don't yet exist.