At the Associations Now blog, Ernie Smith recently wrote about wheretowatch.org, a new website developed and marketed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). As Smith notes in his lead:

After spending years focusing on fighting the sources of video piracy, the MPAA is trying something new: publicizing consumers’ legal avenues to view their desired content.

This is a smart move. Consumers want choice, and a healthy number of legitimate viewing alternatives are available.

While the website may have been motivated by the strong collective response that led Congress to suspend consideration of SOPA and PIPA, it's a productive way for an industry association to respond to a shifting marketplace. The association can direct consumers to a variety of services offered by its members (and maybe even some offered by non-members).

It remains to be seen if this is a change of heart for the movie industry. A quick check of Google's transparency report showed that last month, Fox, NBC Universal and Walt Disney asked the company to remove a combined 1,146,173 URLs across 7,686 domains. It may be hard to convince companies issuing millions of takedown orders a month that innovation is a better strategy.

I've posted previously about the Media Guru breakfast series, which is organized by Quantum Media and hosted (more or less) monthly by the Harvard Business School Club of New York. 

Before the program begins a summer hiatus, Forbes Media president and CEO Mike Perlis will speak on June 13. Topics will likely include Perlis' long and varied career in digital and print media, his stint as a venture capitalist and his ideas about the future of content creation, management and dissemination.

Perlis became Forbes' first non-family CEO after spending a decade at SoftBank Capital, where he served as a general partner. Before joining SoftBank, Perlis was president and CEO of Ziff-Davis Publishing until its sale in 2000.

Earlier in his career, Perlis was publisher of GQ, president of the Playboy Publishing Group, publisher of Runner’s World and Men’s Health, and chairman and CEO of IDG Peterborough. He began his career in media as the co-founder of New England Publications in Camden, Maine.

Perlis currently serves on the boards of BuzzFeed and Mojiva. He was chairman of Associated Content before its sale to Yahoo! and served on the boards of GSI Commerce (sold to eBay) and The Huffington Post (sold to AOL). A member of the board of advisors of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, Perlis is also a trustee of Outward Bound International.

These events typically feature media business leaders speaking in informal sessions about the business and art of media. Talks include a moderated set of questions and answers as well as discussion with the audience. The program content is generally off the record.

The breakfast takes place at The Harvard Club, 27 West 44th St. (between 5th & 6th), New York. Doors open at 7:30 a.m.; the program starts at 8:00 am and ends promptly at 9:00 a.m. Anyone can attend, and registration is now open.

A 2008 study by the Center for Disease Control found that over 3.4 million Americans are visually impaired; of those, 1.3 million are legally blind. Fortunately, under U.S. copyright law, third parties may reproduce a work in "specialized formats" - Braille, large print, audio books and digital texts - to be used exclusively by those whose vision is impaired.

Over the last four years, Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay have led an international effort to extend this exception to countries other than the United States. For much of that time, the Obama administration supported the proposal, which would potentially make textual works available to an estimated 37 million visually impaired people around the globe.

You would think that markets of millions might interest book publishers, but the copyright exception exists largely because publishers have walked away from an opportunity to serve blind populations. In place of commercially produced editions, nonprofit entities like Benetech have stepped in to make books available in these specialized formats. Bookshare, the Benetech initiative, has digitized 193,000 titles, offering them in a mix of Braille, large-text and audio formats.

So it's curious, at least, that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appears to be softening its support for a worldwide exception for the blind. The argument: if we let an international treaty grant even this one exception, we risk pressure for more exceptions down the road. Worse, we open the door to worldwide adoption of U.S. standards for "fair use".

Yesterday, David Kravets of Wired posted an effective roundup of views on both sides of the proposed treaty. The Intellectual Property Owners Association says the changes "threaten to upset the fundamental balance on which our U.S. and global IP system is based." The MPAA fears "the exportation of U.S. fair use standards to other countries." 

Allan Adler, general counsel and vice president, government affairs for the The Association of American Publishers (AAP), argues that book publishers need even more protections before the blind can be served. These include:

• A promise that if a publisher enters a market with its own version of a work for the blind, all other versions would be withdrawn
• A guarantee that the World Intellectual Property Organization will build a database that advises the public on where commerical versions can be obtained
• Greater accountability on who gets to produce derivative works for the blind
• Agreement on where infringment (what the AAP calls piracy) will be adjudicated

While part of this is politics - "solve all my problems before I solve one of yours" - it's not hard to see what is going on here. Commercial hegemony lowers risk for the original publisher.

Bookshare, for example, or a local publisher would take on the cost and risk of making and marketing a title for the blind. If it sells, the original publisher could trump the work done by others and pick up found money. If it doesn't sell well, the costs accrue to the third party.

As Jim Fruchterman, Benetech's founder, told Kravets:

Our IP industries do not want the rest of the globe to have things like fair use and copyright exemptions. It’s a loosening of the control of intellectual property. Anything that helps poor people on IP is a threat.

Those defending the status quo argue that the changes represent a kind of slippery slope, eroding protections and threatening world order. It's hard to understand how fair use, prevalent in the single largest book market in the world, threatens the future of book publishing. I see a different kind of slippery slope, one that undermines why we came to work in publishing in the first place.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had surveyed the phone records of a journalist, James Rosen of Fox News, as part of an investigation of a leak of classified information about North Korea. The leak in question made public the possibility that U.N. sanctions could prompt North Korea to accelerate its nuclear arms development efforts.

The news comes only a week after it was revealed that, as part of a separate investigation, the DOJ had obtained phone records of Associated Press reporters. According to an analysis that appeared yesterday in The Guardian, the Obama administration has used the 1917 Espionage Act (the world hasn't changed much since 1917, has it?) to prosecute more leaks than all prior administrations combined.

When the prospects of SOPA, PIPA and now CISPA becoming law are debated, "You need not worry if you haven't done anything wrong" is a fairly common response. Reporters like James Rosen and the New York Times' Jim Risen feel otherwise, and according to The Guardian, they are not alone.

Toward the end of 2010, a time when the Wikileaks prosecution was just ramping up, I wrote a post that said in part:

In this era, strengthening the current rules and emphasizing enforcement at the cost of the Constitution are popular options, but I have another idea. Maybe we could work on having fewer secrets.

"Fewer" is a far cry from "no" secrets. In an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, James Goodale, former general counsel with the New York Times, noted that the the Obama administration classified seven million documents in a single year. If the application of law tilts away from journalists, it is easy to see how they may be buried underneath an avalanche of unilateral secrecy.

Writing last week about the value of having data, I found myself touching once again on the wisdom of using DRM as a defense against piracy. Of course, this debate extends well beyond book publishing.

Earlier this month, the HTML Working Group of the W3C decided to release a "First Public Working Draft" of a specification for what it calls an encrypted media extension (EME). Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the W3C, refers to EME as "content protection", while its opponents call it DRM.

The W3C announcement was made on its own blog, and it includes an extensive debate about the merits of pursuing an EME specification. The discussion is direct and often detailed, with many commenters challenging the W3C's decision and questioning whether the organization is defending use of the web or legacy business models.

For his part, Jaffe responds to a great many comments, explaining the W3C position and on occasion clarifying his own blog post. While I tend to favor the points of view expressed by those critical of the decision to release the EME specification, the dialogue suggests that the web will continue to evolve in ways that fully please very few participants.

Four years ago, I posted a short piece that argued "every association should have a book publishing strategy". I noted that associations "often know and can gain access to potential authors", and newer technologies (print-on-demand, eBooks) have made book publishing more accessible and less risky.

This week provides an example of how association book strategies might work. AARP, the United States' largest association, brought along RosettaBooks as a publishing partner to sell and distribute its eBooks. The move makes sense for AARP, whose members are reading content on a variety of different devices and in multiple formats, all of which RosettaBooks has learned to support.

At another not-for-profit, PBS MediaShift, Mark Glaser announced plans to test a couple of new "how to" eBook titles. The effort is a bit of a pilot that might grow to produce as many as 20 new titles a year. Again, MediaShift has access to potential authors, a focus on topics of interest to its audience and no fear of the available technologies.

Not surprisingly, a Publishing Technology (PT) study found that the number of "branded reader communities is set to explode". Although the folks at PT see growth in direct sales as a function of reduced library and bookstore revenues, I think it is driven more by a desire on the part of publishers to capture a greater share of digital revenues.

When it comes to long-term growth and sustainability, though, neither strategy really makes much sense. The goals here should align with those of the communities served: sourcing authors and linking content to audience are the core competencies. On those fronts, motivated association publishers come with distinct advantages.

Yesterday in New York, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) hosted its tenth annual "Making Information Pay" meeting. The franchise has expanded in recent years to include a parallel higher-education event that takes place in February, allowing much of yesterday's discussion to focus on trade publishing in the U.S. market.

Speakers included: Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly; Ashleigh Gardner, recently named head of content at Toronto-based Wattpad; and Ken Michaels, President & COO with Hachette Book Group (and chair of the BISG board).

Before Michaels provided what he described as "a vision for our collective future", Ingram's Phil Olilla moderated a panel with Rachel Chou (Open Road), Andrew Savikas (Safari Books Online), Julia Cobletz (NOOK Press) and Dan Weiss (St. Martin's Press). Collectively, they addressed "managing the migration from P to E, E only and E to P." By the end of the panel, it felt as if the variety of things that work, don't work and might work had multiplied by a factor of four.

The half-day meeting also included a first look at some data extracted from the 2013 edition of BookStats, the joint data-tracking service offered by BISG and the Association of American Publishers. The top-line take-aways: trade sales revenues had increased and the rate of growth in eBook sales had slowed.

Generally, the Bookstats information presented by Outsell's Ned May was not rich enough to draw meaningful conclusions from the disclosed data points. To an extent, this is understandable: BISG, AAP and Bowker need interested parties to buy the full report and/or access to the database, or the service won't persist.

That said, I hankered for a three-year trend, at least, for major categories, formats and channels. As Mason illustrated in her opening keynote, context plays a key role in understanding data. Trends in sales, unit sales and unit prices are inter-related considerations. Presenting a small number of data points from just one or two areas limits understanding.

The new Bookstats information (through 2012) will be published later this month. When it is made available, I'll look at the updates and try to post some additional analysis.

During the meeting, BISG executive director Len Vlahos recognized the many contributions of outgoing deputy executive director Angela Bole, who joined the organization in 2005. Bole has been named director of the Independent Book Publishers Association, a role she will take up next month. As Vlahos noted, Bole has been a part of almost every BISG event, publication and report released in the last eight years. She'll be missed at BISG, though it's fortunate to have her stay in the book association family.

A bit of disclosure: I've done work for BISG, researching and writing a 2012 report on the creation, management and modification of metadata in the book industry supply chain. Both Ken Michaels and Ashleigh Gardner (then with eBook retailer Kobo) participated in that study. Len Vlahos and Angela Bole oversaw the work. Oh, and I use bit.ly to shorten links to posts like this one, though I've never talked to Hilary Mason about that.

Mathew Ingram, writing at paidContent, last week covered the launch of LinkedIn's news channels. Registered users can now choose to follow a curated mix of reports on a variety of topics.

This latest content initiative comes on the heels of last month's agreement to buy Pulse, the service that "aggregates news from different industries and presents it to viewers in a tilelike, graphical interface." The news channels won't win design awards, but some of the topic areas have already racked up more than a million followers.

This is the third month in a row that I've found reasons to write about LinkedIn. In March, Digiday's Josh Sternberg described LinkedIn as "a sleeping giant of publishing." Sternberg argued that when measured as a business-to-business publisher, LinkedIn offered its users a number of web-savvy advantages.

For his part, Ingram also drew upon comments made at paidContent Live by Dan Roth, who oversees LinkedIn's news initiatives. Focusing on contributions from what the site calls "influencers", Roth talked openly about the need for authentic voices, even (especially?) with contributions from well-known CEOs. The more things change ... 

Over the weekend Sean Cranbury, who thinks about piracy more than most, posted a link to a Toronto Globe and Mail article on anti-piracy efforts by Montreal-based Canipre (Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement). Written by Pierre Chauvin, the article describes how one of Canipre's clients (Voltage Pictures) is using the firm's data to request user information for 1,000 IP addresses served by Teksavvy, an internet service provider.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, this kind of response to instances of piracy (actual and alleged) is pretty common. To date, Canada has been slow to embrace the use of its courts to defend a business model. In Chauvin's article, David Fewer, director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, noted:

Copyright is supposed to be a framework legislation. It’s not supposed to be used for building a compensation model.

The court is still considering Voltage Pictures' request. Should Voltage prevail, Canipre is poised to build a healthy business tracking the instance of piracy. It already claims to hold "more than one million different evidence files", no doubt an arsenal ready to put fear into the hearts of Canadian pirates.

Unfortunately, the law may not matter that much, in the end. Now that Google has agreed to consider the number of takedown requests in its search algorithm, a small cross-section of copyright owners targets more than 13 million URLs each month for removal.

Canipre can just as easily sell its services to content owners anxious to flood Google with takedown requests. Maybe that's part of their plan.

The sad thing is, we still don't know the impact of piracy on content sales. Canadian publishers buying into the enforcement model might feel better about doing "something", but it would be more comforting to know for sure that it was the right thing to do.

At the end of last week, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue reflected on what we've learned (and not learned) from Macmillan's move to drop DRM from the digital books sold by its Tor imprint. Announced in January 2012, the decision took effect a year ago, affording Pogue an anniversary assessment.

Digital versions of Pogue's books have always been released without DRM. In fact, his publisher partnered with Pogue in 2008 and 2009 to see if the absence of protection cost Pogue sales. At the time, Pogue reported that he had found "many" pirated copies of one of his books, but he also found that his paid sales increased during the year he monitored them.

In his most recent piece, Pogue walks through "what people say about piracy", offering a set of arguments to battle these straw-man claims. While this technique is used a bit too often for my taste, I put it aside here to focus on his concluding paragraphs:

Even though we don’t know for sure, there’s mounting evidence that e-books are more like music files than DVD movies: removing copy protection doesn’t hurt and might help. And there’s very little evidence that copy protection is stopping piracy.

That doesn’t mean the issue is settled either way. The point is, there’s very little evidence. More publishers in more categories should perform more experiments like Tor’s. Let’s quit opining about what will happen, and find out.

This is a point of view he offered in 2009, as well, when he wrote that "publishers should try an experiment like mine." It parallels an argument I made in earlier work designed to establish "the impact of piracy".

Around the time Tor started publishing its DRM-free digital editions, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) put on its annual "Making Information Pay" (MIP) conference. The theme for the day was alternately "big data" and "using data well". One of the speakers was Peter Collingridge, who offered a talk that paralleled "The Surprising Power of Little Data", his contribution to Book: A Futurist's Manifesto.

Soon after, Collingridge gave up his day-to-day work on Bookseer, the data-analysis tool he had tried selling to publishers, and took up a senior role at Safari Books Online. While Bookseer persists, it is in maintenance mode, pending greater interest among potential customers.

On Wednesday, BISG  returns with another MIP whose themes include the power of data (Hilary Mason, chief scientist at bit.ly, will offer "Data gives us superpowers" as a keynote.) I'm optimistic that a greater focus on data will help publishers better understand the changing competitive environment, but I'm less sure that it will be adopted quickly enough to matter.

[Shortly after my father passed away in February, I posted a lengthy remembrance that told his life story in miniature. Dad was buried last Friday at a military cemetery in central New Hampshire. A veteran who served with the Marine Corps in Korea, he was accorded military honors. After the service, family and friends gathered in a nearby restaurant to share a lunch and tell some stories about the person we remembered. This is what I had to say.]

I’d like to thank everyone for coming today, to the interment, to lunch, and for making some time to remember our father. It means a great deal to Cassi, to Barbara, to my uncles Paul and Bobby, to me and to my five brothers and sisters, and to our extended family.

Let’s all take a moment to thank my sister Colleen, in particular, who has been worrying for months about this day, this lunch, that salad, maybe which dressing … She really took on every detail, and it shows. She’s stubborn for details.

If you knew my father, you knew he could be stubborn, too. I think they teach ‘stubborn’ in the Marines, but maybe Dad took the graduate course.

He had his rules. Cross him on a rule and he’d quickly give you a piece of his mind.

• Talk too much? “Stop yer yuk-yukking!”
• Talk when sports or maybe M*A*S*H was on TV? “Try and keep it down to a dull roar, willya?”
• Leave the front door open in winter? “We’re not heating the neighborhood!”
• Not taking responsibility for something? Dad would point his index finger and say, “You’ve got more excuses than Carter’s got liver pills!”
• And of course, “If you don’t like it, you can go pound sand.”

We’re Irish, so we’re predisposed to remember slights and hold grudges. Dad did some of that, but I came to see that the thing that angered him most was feeling like he was being talked down to.

And that cut both ways: he’d grab my ear any time he felt that I was acting in a way that was superior to someone else. In a turbulent household, my sisters and brothers and I were raised to see ourselves as equal to anyone else, but not better.

At times, Dad could be loud, profane and embarrassing. Growing up, we were sort of the Clampetts of West Peabody. I remember how we used to play whiffleball in the front yard, with small objects placed where each of the bases would be. One day, I was laying out third base and noticed the ground was all spongey.

It turns out the septic tank had overflowed to the point that it was starting to push to the surface. That night, I told Dad what I’d found, and he didn’t say a word. After I was done talking, he looked at me for a while, as if I’d been speaking the whole time in French. Finally, he said, “I think it’s time to move third base.”

Unlike me, more like most of my siblings, Dad could talk to anyone. More to the point, I think it was impossible for him to not talk to someone. Everyone was a prime target. Imagine if he was your usher for a pre-season game at Wide World of Sports. You’d know his take on the whole park before you sat down, and you’d have heard his life story before the game was over.

He was fiercely loyal. I remember a story he’d tell all of us, time and again, about his brother Bobby, who was an accomplished distance runner in high school and college. At one race, an indoor event with a tunnel covering part of the track, my uncle Bobby would go into the tunnel in the lead and come out in second or third place. He’d regain the lead, only to come out of the tunnel in third place again.

It turns out that my uncle – Dad’s brother – was getting tackled every time he was out of sight. The last lap, he sprinted free and won the race. At the finish line, my Dad said, Bobby stopped, turned around and clocked the guy who had been manhandling him in the tunnel. In various tellings, my Dad and/or my uncle Paul tumbled out the stands to join a near melee at the finish.

Honestly, facts and legends kind of collided in some of these stories, but the lessons never changed. Each was simple. Here, the smaller lesson is obvious: “Don’t back down from a fight.” But the deeper one also stayed with us: “We take care of our own.”

Dad didn’t do a lot of big things, but I’ve seen him do small things really well. In the middle of 2009, we had a family reunion in Boston, and the extended clan got Red Sox tickets that included a chance to stand on the warning track, shagging fly balls during batting practice. The Red Sox gave us each a souvenir glove, mostly to keep us from getting beaned.

Turns out there was no batting practice that day. As a bit of over-compensation, the Red Sox brought the 2004 and 2007 World Series trophies to where we were having lunch before the game. My Dad  [on the right in the picture that starts this post] and his brother Paul got to hold them while we took as many pictures as we possibly could.

After he put the trophy down, my father noticed a boy, maybe six or seven years old, on the outside of the place we were standing. The kid was taken with the trophies – I mean, who wouldn’t be? – and my father went over to talk with him.

A couple of minutes later he asked me, “Where’s your glove?” I said, “Right here.” He picked it up and started to walk away with it. I said, “Where are you going?” He turned back to me and said, “I’m giving it to the kid. He doesn’t have a glove. I’d give him mine, but he’s right-handed.”

Yeah, he had just been handed the 2004 World Series trophy, and he had an eye out for a kid he had never met.

Shortly after he passed, I wrote (somewhat sparingly) that Dad had lived a “varied and occasionally complicated life.” He made mistakes, and he recovered from a lot of them… “the odds of faith in the face of doubt”. When it came to living a full life, he didn’t leave a lot on the table.

It was Robert Louis Stevenson who said, “Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.” If there are lessons Dad would want you to take on your cruise, they might be these:

• Just put out the trash. It won’t kill you.
• Golf more. Work is okay, but mostly it’s just a job.
• Duct tape. Trust me. Solves almost any problem.
• Don’t be late. It screws things up to a faretheewell.
• Don’t put someone in a corner. They don’t like it, and you’re not gonna like it that much either.
• It’s never too late to make up for a mistake. Well, almost never.
• And (to borrow from William Butler Yeats) there are no strangers. Just friends that we haven’t met yet.

Thank you for being here, for all of us. Colleen hopes you liked the lunch. And if you didn’t like it…  Well, Colleen says you can go pound sand.

Perhaps sensing the need for an intervention, my Quantum colleague, Ava Seave, recently highlighted a May 21 event, "Managing the stress in our lives: Help from the experts". The program is hosted by the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York (CBSAC/NY), but it's open to anyone interested in attending.

Participants will have a chance to ask questions in a group setting. If you're shy about your particular brand of stress, the evening event also includes a chance to speak with an expert in a one-on-one setting. If that's not enough, there will be drinks and hors d'oeuvres at a restaurant that features Indian-Latin cuisine.

The program will cover both "bad" and "good" stress, focusing on ways to "fortify body and mind". I wonder if "post something useful every day" is on the list.

I don't normally do "wellness" posts, but work in publishing certainly can be a source of stress these days. The event could help, even if it winds up being more about using hors d'oeuvres to find your "off" button.

The discussion takes place from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at Vermilion Restaurant in New York (480 Lexington Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets). Admission is $25 for CBSAC/NY members and $40 for non-members. It's worth registering ahead of time, as the cost at the door will be $60. That price seems stressful.

The April issue of Internet Retailer, an industry trade title that covers the growing e-commerce market, profiled Japanese retailer Rakuten and its CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani. In North America, Rakuten has been active in acquiring Buy.com and eBook retailer Kobo.

Although the revenue figures provided in the article seem somewhat inconsistent, Rakuten is generally seen as Japan's largest e-commerce firm. Amazon has built a strong presence there, but it still trails Rakuten in Japan. Worldwide, Amazon is the undisputed e-commerce leader.

Both in its home market and elsewhere, Rakuten competes with a cooperative model that supports other retailers that use its platform. This approach parallels an aspect of the early Kobo model, in which the eBook retailer struck up local partnerships with book retailers to provide support and speed market entry.

Mikitani is scheduled to deliver a keynote at an Internet Retailer event, the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition. The meeting takes place in Chicago from June 4 - 7. That's the week after BookExpo America, but it might be worth a trip to hear first-hand how an Amazon competitor looks at its business.

Yesterday, New York Times reporter David Carr summarized the 2012 compensation afforded the folks - all men - leading media companies in the United States. For the chapter-and-verse recitation, you can read his work, but here's the short story:

Consider: the top 20 companies in the United States ranked by market capitalization include no media companies. But according to figures assembled for The New York Times by Equilar, which compiles data on executive compensation, media companies employ seven of the top 20 highest paid chief executives.

Carr understands and accurately describes the impact that incentive plans based on stock price improvements have on total compensation. This is a welcome change from a January article in which he celebrated the 2012 stock performance of many of these same companies.

As I pointed out in a response to his January piece:

... companies that are growing are the ones least likely to return capital to shareholders. They need it to fund their growth. When businesses start to distribute more of their cash to shareholders, they acknowledge “We can’t find any investments that trump just handing this money over to you.”

Well, sometimes they are saying “We’re buying back stock because a higher share price means we all get better bonuses”, but the point is the same. They aren’t investing in the future.

This is a theme Carr picks up in yesterday's article: "For the time being, traditional media business models are prospering and the leaders of the incumbents are fat and happy. But that might make them bigger, slower targets and in the end, easier to overtake." Point taken.

Last Thursday, Tim O’Reilly announced that the company named after him is shutting down its Tools of Change practice area and laying off Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert. In explaining this decision, he wrote:

We’re shifting the focus of our publishing tools group from hosting the conversation about publishing technology to bringing our own tools to market.

O’Reilly offers background that ultimately reveals more than he may have intended. He starts with the thinking that kicked off the Tools of Change franchise in 2006:

Publishing isn’t about putting ink on paper, and moving blocks of said paper through warehouses to readers. It’s about knowledge dissemination, learning, entertainment, codification of subject authority — the real jobs that authors and publishers do for readers… Our goal is to bring together people who are pushing the boundaries of publishing and those who want to learn from them, and to provide a table of contents (TOC), so to speak, on what modern publishers need to know.

Reflecting on the success of the TOC practice area, he writes:

Seven years on, “digital publishing” is well on its way to simply being “publishing,” and options for both publishers and readers continue to evolve and expand. Publishers are significantly more change-hardy than they were in 2006. And there are plenty of other events that are helping publishers keep up with new technology offerings in the space.

Seriously? That’s it? "Things are pretty much on their way, so we’re going to pack up our stuff and try to sell you a workflow solution instead"?

Out in the trenches, where I work, life looks a lot different from the world that O’Reilly describes. Very few established publishers are “change-hardy”. Most publishers still see digital technologies in terms of the prevailing supply chain, not as a means to disrupt that supply chain. With almost no exceptions, the page metaphor continues to prevail.

In that environment, the TOC community provided lifelines and a global network of resources. Just two weeks ago, I was part of an impromptu dinner in Berlin that included Sebastian Posth from Germany, Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks from the U.K., Hugh McGuire from Canada and (later) Laura Dawson, from everywhere. The conversation covered the landscape of publishing innovation, and it was made possible only with the connections forged through TOC.

Even if you believe that traditional publishing “gets” digital (if there is any ambiguity: I don’t), what about things like self-publishing, or the primacy of web standards as a vehicle for creating, maintaining and disseminating content of all types? The most recent TOC in New York featured two widely praised, day-long workshops hosted by key players in the self-publishing and W3C communities. The hallway conversations alone were worth the price of admission. Who is going to lead that kind of dialogue now that O'Reilly has shuttered TOC?

In Thursday’s post, O’Reilly claimed that “after TOC 2013, we realized that a conference was no longer the best vehicle for us to contribute to publishing’s forward movement.” In fact, the company had been working against itself for months before this decision was announced.

O’Reilly closed its 2013 event without offering a set of dates for the 2014 conference. No sustaining event does that. The ambiguity hurts ticket sales, puts sponsorships at risk and calls into question an organization’s commitment to the event.

Any events professional will tell you: the way O’Reilly handled TOC is insane. If the company wasn’t sure it wanted to keep running TOC, at the very least it should have put the franchise up for sale as a going concern.

Even if someone was willing to offer just $1 to take over the franchise (as I and many others would have done in a heartbeat), O’Reilly would have saved both face and the cost of severance. Two people widely respected by the industry would have kept their jobs, and the community would persist.

You don’t have to convince me that maintaining a community is hard work. Sustaining a publishing community is even harder, because there is no one thing that people universally recognize as “publishing”.

But once you’ve helped make a community, you have an obligation to nurture and sustain it. If you decide you want to do something else with your resources, you still have to provide for its care and feeding. You don’t shut everything down without making an attempt to at least provide for its welfare.

The thing that made TOC valuable - unique - was its ability to cut across a range of silos and present ideas that mattered. Despite what O’Reilly claims, that isn’t something other events do or even try to do. The ones that come closest are the events that pretty much mimic whatever TOC did first.

Shutting down TOC is more than a disappointment. The decision calls into question much of what the company claims that it stands for. Consider the content of a TOC keynote that Tim O'Reilly delivered in February:

Why are we here? It’s not to make our fortune. There are certainly some people who have forgotten that. But I like to say that making money is like putting gas in the car. You know you need to do it, but life is not a tour of gas stations.

We have to remember what publishing is really about, what writing is really about. I started writing books and then publishing them for other people because there were problems I wanted to solve. We still have a job to do. And that job to educate, and to entertain and to figure out how to gather the knowledge of the world and share it with other people.

In a report posted the next day, Andrew Albanese summarized a message that O’Reilly has tried to popularize: “Work on stuff that matters”. After the announcement, I had to ask myself, “So what matters at O’Reilly now?”

The answer? Selling publishers proprietary workflow solutions. And what doesn’t matter? Owning up to the implications of a keynote Tim O’Reilly gave only three short months ago.

More than a bit of disclosure: I am an O’Reilly author (three times, including Book: A Publishing Manifesto, a research paper on book piracy and an overview of the use of XML in book publishing). I’ve spoken nearly 20 times at TOC events in New York, Frankfurt, Bologna, Chicago, Austin and Charleston. Last year, I was invited to attend and participated in a NewsFOO event that took place in Phoenix. I consider Joe Wikert a friend and Kat Meyer a close friend. Neither had any awareness or involvement in the creation of this post. I’ve written favorably about O’Reilly and TOC in the past, and I may write favorably about O’Reilly again in the future… but not today.

Monica Bussolati, whose firm offers services to help improve both content strategy and effectiveness in content marketing, recently posted a piece about association editorial processes. In it, she argues that they should look a lot like content marketing, with:

• Active promotion of content assets
• Publisher engagement, responding to comments and questions
• A balance between content creation and social media activity
• A willingness to crowdsource and embed, and
• Social media tools used to broaden the mix of experts and resources

In her post, Bussolati includes a useful table offering a dozen ways in which the advent and growth of social media have changed content development. Her "then" and "now" comparisons try to make the shift clear using a set of real-world editorial examples.

Over the last several years, "publishing" and "content marketing" have blended, perhaps most visibly in the business-to-business and association publishing markets. Evident for a while, this trend poses challenges to the traditional model used to create, maintain and disseminate content.

The separation of "church" and "state" is an early example. Reframing a publisher's perspective from "product" to "service" is another. Both are hurdles to consider and overcome if we want to truly serve communities.

If you read the New York Times Book Review or subscribe to Publishers Weekly, you probably already know that author James Patterson recently took out ads in both publications, calling for a government rescue of publishing, bookselling and libraries. If you didn't know about it, I'm sorry to break the news.

People say all sorts of things about what ails publishing, and I could probably make full-time work out of responding to each of them. Fortunately, there are people who write faster and more completely than I do. For a full reaction to Patterson's plan, you should read Konrath on Patterson and August Wainwright on well, Patterson.

Truthfully, I admire James Patterson for taking action, even if he hasn't quite figured out what actions he wants us to take. As he told Salon, "I haven’t thought about it but I’m sure there are things that can be done." He's right; there are things that can be done. As Konrath and Wainwright explain, traditional publishers have been slow to do some of those things.

The thing that intrigued me most about Patterson's appeal has its roots in the argument I made in "The opportunity in abundance". Publishing faces a superthreat that affects all of us: people not reading. Unfortunately, no one part of the supply chain can fix that problem on its own.

Worse, the needs of various supply-chain participants are not fully aligned. In the case of libraries, publishers have often treated them as adversaries. As Konrath points out, publishers on their own could do quite a bit to "save" libraries, if the relationships were reframed.

I agree that we do need to "do something", but it needs to be part of a more mindful, broader effort to grow reading. Patterson has the right idea, and he has put some of his own resources toward efforts to grow literacy among school-age children. Those actions are notable.

But there's a difference between "doing something" to solve the underlying problem and "doing something" to preserve the current business model. One is critical; the other is impossible ... even with a bailout.

Poking around on Medium, I came across a post written by Josh Miller, now busy building Branch. Dating from last August, it examined "The liquidity of ideas".

Miller makes three really useful points:

• Online, space is a commodity
• Every great Internet thing is a marketplace, affording liquidity
• Right now, ideas are fundamentally illiquid

At the end of his post, Miller positions services like Medium ("collections") and Branch ("branches") as options to "empower new audiences and the exchange of ideas amongst them." If he came back to his post, I imagine that Miller might now include "subcompact publishing", the thinking behind Craig Mod's October 2012 Books in Browsers talk.

The approach that Branch embodies is simple, cross-platform and ultimately agnostic about format or medium. That might offer hope to those who see Amazon acquiring Goodreads as a loss.

For the last several days, I've been trying to write a post about Aereo, the somewhat controversial service that offers consumers a limited, low-cost alternative to cable TV. Aereo captures and re-sells broadcast signals in a way that the courts have (so far) ruled to be legal, rejecting challenges from the major television networks.

To thwart Aereo's ability to capture and sell their signals, various broadcast networks have evaluated giving up their licenses and becoming cable networks. After a recent court ruling, Fox publicly said it would do so if the courts upheld the ruling.

Ad-supported television networks are already common on cable. ESPN, Bravo, Lifetime, Comedy Central and others are examples. Many are owned by the same companies that also hold broadcast licenses. As examples: NBC Universal owns Bravo, while ESPN and Lifetime are jointly held by the Walt Disney Company and Hearst (though with different ownership interests in each). Viacom, once the parent of CBS, owns Comedy Central.

How does Aereo, with operations pretty much in New York City right now, threaten a $60 billion broadcast television model? By offering choice.

Both broadcast and cable providers could offer a variation on the choice Aereo gives consumers. They could create packages that unbundle certain content, sell them across various pricing tiers and truly test demand for the obscure channels that live in the netherworlds of your basic cable package (Veria Living, anyone?)

Here’s why this story is so hard to write: it’s always the same. Media incumbents use their positions to raise prices and limit choice. Start-ups employ new approaches, often enabled by an innovative technology, to disrupt the market and serve limited constituencies with more cost-effective options. Incumbents cry foul, litigate and disparage.

Rinse. Repeat.

This fight is not about preserving the broadcast model. Of the 115 million households in the United States, something like 11 million – less than 10% - get their television using broadcast alone. Everyone else either uses some form of cable or satellite television, or they have “cut the cord” (a market thought to be approaching 5 million households).

The fight is not even a full-throated defense of retransmission fees, the money cable systems give broadcast networks to offer their programming. True, it’s a $3 billion market, but that’s just 5% of the total revenue broadcasters receive each year, largely from advertisers.

At its heart, the incumbents are fighting to limit choice and preserve revenues. “Of course they are,” you might say. “It’s only natural.”

To which I say, natural, and myopic.

Not even four years ago, book publishers defended windowing – restricting the availability of eBooks until their proper “time” – as a critical part of the hardcover business model. When that false scarcity didn’t hold up, the larger publishers turned to agency to preserve sales of hardcovers by raising the price of eBooks (which are a license, not a sale) to something north of $12 on new releases.

I know the popular story is different: agency was a last, best defense against the growing power of Amazon; that it preserved or extended choice; and that it bought time for physical bookstores. To the extent that those benefits accrued, they were fortunate but not primary.

So how did agency play out for pricing? A look at the data available from Bookstats tells a story.

In 2011, the first full year after publishers implemented agency pricing, hardcover revenues increased 1.6%, to $7.35 billion. Good news? Not so fast.

Unit sales for hardcover books fell 7.9%, a drop of more than 50 million copies. Yes, we preserved the unit price for hardcover books: it was up 10.4% in 2011. But we didn’t convert lost print sales into digital books. In all likelihood, we lost the sales.

In 2011, the publisher revenue for an average eBook dropped nearly 34%, to $5.47. Some of that is the mix, with strong growth in the sales of trade eBooks overwhelming digital sales in other markets.

But efforts to sell higher-priced digital versions of front-list titles saw only limited success. To the extent that people bought more digital books, they purchased lower-price titles. Unit sales of eBooks tripled in 2011, but the growth didn't come from selling bucketloads of titles priced at $12.

Defending business models can blind us to opportunities that would grow the market overall. Unit sales for digital formats tripled in one year. There’s potential in that, much as there is in listening to the story that Aereo wants to tell.

A couple of weeks ago, I reflected a bit on the implications of a merger between two associations: American Business Media (ABM) and the Software and Information Industry Association. The long-term viability of the more format-driven ABM seemed in question, as did the notion that traditional definitions of market segments will persist.

Shortly after, Crain Communications' BtoB Media Business blog featured a profile of Penton Media. In it, writer Marie Griffin explains "Why Penton has started thinking of itself as a software company".

The company has introduced a number of content-related products that customers can integrate into their own ways of doing business - in the vernacular, as "part of workflow". The article describes an approach that allows subscribers to make Penton's database content available within a client platform.

At the same time, Penton is approaching its development efforts with the idea that it will "Write once, read many", at least where it makes sense for their markets. This is an area where publishers can gain some advantage through scale. Leveraging a development effort for a larger market can provide significant benefits in smaller segments that might otherwise not have their needs supported.

Again, these are data points, not necessarily inflection-point moments. That said, we're seeing a variety of data points that call into question traditional models of publishing. Waiting for the inflection point is probably not the best strategy. Then again, not waiting is pretty hard, too.

The last couple of weeks have been turbulent ones for the folks living in my hometown of Boston. The recent bombings both scared and motivated a city that could easily fit inside any of New York's five boroughs (something that most New Yorkers will tell you, though not last week, to their credit).

Before the bombings, I had come across a tweet that pointed to what is thought to be the earliest aerial photograph still available - a picture of Boston taken from a balloon in 1860. Anyone familiar with the city would recognize the steeple of the Old South Church, the curve of Tremont Street and the mix of warehouses that would later be rehabilitated as part of the Faneuil Hall remodeling project.

Boston has changed a lot since then, but its roots (and streets) remain fundamentally unchanged. That history and a sometimes helpful, sometimes flawed sense of identity gave many Bostonians an ability to weather last week's events.

While I still love my hometown, I also think the recovered photo informs a different dialogue, one that is starting to take place around things like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). In miniature, my story is this: U.S. copyright exists to serve a public good, the value in becoming a better-informed and higher-functioning member of U.S. society.

I've read accounts that question the DPLA, fearing it will disrupt the publishing business model. The concern is reasonable, but it has to be evaluated in total. There's not much sense in encouraging the development of creative works if digital versions of those works can be shared only after 90 years or more. The world moves faster than that - much faster.

It's great that a photo from 1860 can be shared widely on the web, particularly at a time when its value may have risen somewhat unexpectedly. Images from the 1800s, of course, are (for the most part) not subject to copyright. The question we should trying to answer, though, is "What do we need to do to make all of us strong?" A shared sense of history, place and purpose can only help.

Last week, Aaron Miller contributed a Medium essay, "How to change the future of publishing now, even though it's too late". He provides a good summary of the acquisitions Amazon has made (Shelfari, mobiPocket, Stanza, CreateSpace, Audible and most recently GoodReads) in the e-reading space, then asks, "Can’t anyone see what’s going on?"

With Travis Alber, Miller co-authored a chapter published in Book: A Futurist's Manifesto. For his post on Medium, he describe four ways that publishers can respond:

1. Care about community
2. Care about what happens to a book after it is sold
3. Understand that the context of content and authors is as important as they are
4. Understand that a seven-figure advance for BJ Novak’s book might be a good idea, but so might a $2M investment in a tech startup that helps them with #1, #2, and #3 above.

These are points a number of people have made before. However, coming from someone who has started and tried to manage publisher-facing businesses, Miller's advice resonates.

I think it will take an internal advocate - in Pablo Arrieta's words, a "bureau hacker" - to spur publishers to invest outside of what they do now. Defying the title of his post, Miller says it is not too late to change course. I hope he is right.

Variety reported this week that Netflix had passed HBO in total U.S. subscriptions in the first quarter of 2013. According to the trade publication, Netflix now has 29.17 million U.S. customers, up two million from the end of 2012. HBO is said to have a bit less than 29 million subscribers in the U.S., through it maintains a substantial lead outside the United States.

Generally, I'm not a fan of inflection point coverage. Tablets don't change everything overnight; the number of eBooks sold can exceed hardcover sales without forever changing publishing.

But, a service growing at 7% a quarter may signal an interest in unbundling some of the more costly, less flexible program offerings that characterize HBO and other cable networks. Digital technologies lower the minimum level of aggregation required to deliver content.

As that happens, new and different forms of content can be sold cost-effectively. That was part of the thinking behind yesterday's post, "Disaggregating supply". Inflection point or not, we're on solid ground if we start preparing for a more flexible future.

[Earlier today, I delivered a keynote presentation to open the second day of Klopotek's 10th annual Publishers Forum, held once again in Berlin. What follows are my prepared remarks for the talk, titled "Disaggregating supply".]

Last year, I had a chance to join this meeting and share my thoughts about the value of putting “context first”. In that presentation, I explained how what I described as the “container model of publishing” limits how we think about creating, maintaining and disseminating content.

If you heard my remarks, you know how strongly I feel about changing publishing workflows. We need to migrate from thinking about products to instead planning for and offering services and solutions. To get there, four principles apply:

• Our content must become open, accessible and interoperable.  Adherence to standards will not be an option;
• Because we compete on context, we’ll need to focus more clearly on using it to promote discovery;
• Because we’re competing with providers that already use low- and no-cost tools, trying to beat them on the cost of content is a losing proposition.  We need to develop opportunities that encourage broader use of our content; and
• We will distinguish ourselves if we can provide readers with tools that draw upon context to help them manage abundance.

Now, those principles were developed as I thought about book content. But, it’s a badly kept secret that I am not just a book guy.

For almost the first half of my time in publishing, I worked on ad-driven weekly magazines, particularly TIME magazine. I still consult with a variety of periodical publishers, and I while I blog more about book publishing, I write quite a bit about magazines, as well.

You might be listening and thinking, “He works with magazine publishers?” I hear that reaction more often than you think. Although there is more overlap in Europe than in the United States, I’ve found that book publishers often think that magazines are fundamentally a different business, much as magazine publishers feel that book publishing has only limited relevance to them.

Certainly there are differences between book and magazine publishing, and we could dwell on them. But when I was in business school (a while ago, but bear with me), one of my teachers gave us a piece of advice that sticks with me to this day: it’s easy to spot the differences in things; it’s much harder to see the similarities.

His point is an important one. As members of the book publishing community, we tend to see our situations as unique, distinct from the structure and trends of other content-driven businesses. But there are more similarities than differences, and understanding trends in those things that are similar can help us plan and prepare for changes down the road.

I see at least two useful similarities: Both periodical and book publishers provide content in mostly standard, provider-determined containers; and we both sell those containers to readers, increasingly in digital form.

So what got me thinking about “disaggregating supply” is a similarity that you might first think of as a difference: trends in the provision of advertising content. From a publisher perspective, there is a world of difference between editorial and advertising content. But I don’t want you to use a publisher perspective.

Let’s think like readers. From that perspective, advertising and editorial content is all part of a single container, or stream, or search. It is accessed, sometimes bought and consumed for reader-determined purposes. In many cases, advertising content provides equal or greater value than traditional editorial content. Think about fashion magazines, for example, or many business-to-business periodicals.

Yes, there are business-model differences. With advertising, the reader is monetized, and a publisher is rewarded for having gathered an audience. But that reality is changing even as I talk with you today.

A story from last October helps explain why.

You’ll have seen reports of how a huge storm, Hurricane Sandy, caused flooding and widespread power outages in the eastern United States, particularly in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Gawker Media was knocked offline for almost a week, instead publishing a version of its blogs on Tumblr, which is a fast-growing multimedia web platform. That brief alliance led some Gawker fans to hope that the company would use Tumblr’s platform on a permanent basis.

Tumblr does offer a pretty good set of cross-media authoring tools. These tools have further lowered barriers to entry for anyone interested in publishing content on the web. One reporter even called it “the ultimate CMS”.

But I think that wishing Gawker (or any other branded presence) will set up shop on Tumblr reveals a fervent hope for a return to gatekeeper media. Here, the advocates are mainly folks who favor ad-supported media, which has a hard time figuring out how to monetize audiences that aren’t built and sold by the millions.

That is to say, it has a hard time trying to monetize the web.

Two generations ago, the United States had just three television networks, a well-known set of national magazines and no Internet. The situation here in Germany was even more limited. Monetizing media involved mass markets and predictable patterns for purchase and messaging.

Each time traffic for a given web presence – a platform – grows to a size that rivals what networks and national magazines once offered, we hear a call to standardize the content and figure out the ad model.

I understand this. It’s much easier to deal with an overarching platform – CBS Television, TIME magazine, the Saturday Evening Post – than it is to figure out how to market at a small scale. But the web isn’t a community of millions; it’s millions of communities, even inside a platform like Tumblr.

It’s hard to keep track of millions of communities, unless you start with the idea that you’re not going to bundle them. That’s part of the power of a company like Google.

No one buys “Google”; they buy access to ad hoc communities defined by the searches people perform, the e-mail they send, and other contextually relevant activities.  For its part, Google invested in understanding what users are doing so that it can effectively serve them in the moment.

Now, I think, there is an ultimate CMS: the internet. It’s just messy. It was built that way. Trying to use the web in ways that emulate gatekeeper media is a mistake.

Rather, advertisers and media buying services are taking a page from Google and Facebook and getting out of the aggregation business. Some marketers have started to improve their ability to capture and automatically act on information that matches customer requirements with their products and services.

The more that you can match requirements with solutions in a way that feels lightweight, open and network savvy, the greater the chance that the communities you want to reach will opt in.

What is happening to advertising is also happening to editorial content. You see this most clearly with periodical publishing. Readers search for and read articles, sometimes just headlines. Sales of both physical and digital collections – containers like newspapers and magazines – persist, but demand is generally weak and the average prices paid for these formats have been under pressure throughout the last decade.

This is what got me thinking that periodical publishers could compete more effectively if they stopped trying to aggregate demand and started figuring out ways to disaggregate supply. You see companies that already operate this way – Bloomberg LLP and Thomson-Reuters are examples.

Disaggregating supply requires a new approach to structuring content. To help make this happen, a number of firms that support contextually sophisticated content management strategies have come on the scene in the last several years. You’ll have a chance to hear a good version of just such a story when Daniel Mayer of TEMIS presents here later today.

The short story is this:

Unstructured content is stupid and old-fashioned. It’s costly, complex and does not generate a competitive advantage.

This notion of disaggregating supply is a useful metaphor in book publishing, as well. In 2011, I wrote a presentation, “The opportunity in abundance”, that outlined how the prevailing book industry supply chain is under significant pressure. Increasingly, book publishing is a business built upon the cumulative sales of low-demand titles. Bestsellers remain, but the long tail gets longer by the day.

Whether it is used to sell and buy physical or digital versions of published content, the Internet is not a digital manifestation of the old supply chain. It functions as a multi-sided market, a platform that enables direct interaction between at least two distinct types of affiliated customers.

Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright, the business school professors who helped define multi-sided markets, said this about content on the web:

Another important example of an interlocking multi-sided platform is the Internet itself, which can be viewed as a platform that primarily enables users (content seekers) and content providers to directly interact. The platform … collectively provide[s] end-to-end connectivity across the world wide web.

Think about those ideas for a moment. For decades, perhaps centuries, the primary platform for publishers and their supply-chain intermediaries relied on the ability to exclude. Now, we’re starting to see the dominance of a platform that includes everything and excludes nothing.

In return, we get access to global communities and the ability to meet latent desires. But we are competing with everyone else to reach and serve these communities.

Book-based communities are not new, and across certain digital realms they have been served reasonably well for a decade. An early example is Safari Books Online, the joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson, which provides subscription access to digital versions of book content published by a number of companies, including but not limited to O’Reilly, Pearson and Microsoft.

The service generally focuses on technology-related content, a useful distinction in defining its community. It sells access, but it does not sell or provide components of any given work. This is not a bug; it is a feature that helps publishers understand and support the service. You can view but you can’t download parts of a book, a limitation that makes publishers more comfortable with Safari.

We’ve seen other book publishers that have succeeded in creating and sustaining community ties. These include Canadian romance publisher Harlequin Inc., which sells both physical and digital books directly to consumers, and science fiction publisher Baen Books, whose commitment to making its books interoperable across reading devices has earned it a loyal following among science fiction readers.

But these models still provide the book, the whole book and pretty much nothing but the book. They are flexible, as are online subscription services like 24 Symbols, already operating in Spain, and Oyster, announced but not operating in the United States.

I am a fan of the “pay-as-you-read” model embodied by ValoBox, whose principals, Anna Lewis and Oli Brooks, speak here this afternoon. But through no fault of their own, they are limited to provided what publishers are willing and capable of sharing. We need to improve what they are able to offer.

While we’ve begun to learn how to form and serve online communities, we continue to be bound by the form of the book as our container of choice. As a result, we’re trying to catch up with an audience whose needs may be already moving away from us.

Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague who ran a publishing business that includes newsletters, magazines, research and an evolving database that is sold on a subscription basis. The database includes much of the content that appears in other formats as well as original research and data relevant to the businesses they serve.

Subscriptions are sold to institutions. There is a good deal of high-value content in the database. Early efforts to convince companies to buy an institutional license focused on the price relative to the combined value of the published products whose content it would include. For the most part, my colleague’s business was unsuccessful in selling these institutional licenses.

That is, they were unsuccessful until they started offering high-quality charts, graphs and analyses that users could download and use as “white label” content in slide presentations given to their customers. Almost immediately, demand for site licenses began to rise; they remain strong today.

The charts had always been part of the database; the only change in their offer was an effort to unbundle content – to disaggregate supply. The publishers’ clients found great value in being able to borrow from the archive and present, easily and with great quality, the analyses already done by their publisher-partner. In a competitive marketplace, the visibility of these disaggregated charts and graphs amplified both awareness and willingness to buy the publisher’s data service.

Earlier, I touched upon trends affecting advertising as well as periodical content. Of course, there are other examples of disaggregating supply. Of those, the sale of recorded music may provide the most relevant and uncomfortable example for book publishers.

Many things are said about the music business, including conjecture about the impact of piracy on its overall health. This morning, I’d like to focus on two things that are generally undisputed: music publishers benefited from selling full collections of songs – that is, albums; and a significant share of music consumers wanted to be able to buy individual songs of their choosing. For quite some time, they were unable to do so.

It’s not a stretch to say that, in the music business, the “album” is their book. In fact, when the technology used to create vinyl records could store only a short amount of recorded music on a single side, studios took to bundling multiple pieces of vinyl in sleeves with a cover. This book-like object gave birth to the very notion of an album.

Technology improved to the point at which a single piece of vinyl could hold five to ten songs on a side, but the notion of an album as the discrete unit stayed with us even after digital technology took hold in the later 1980s. For the better part of a decade, overall music revenues grew, but so too did consumer expectations that they should be able to buy components – songs – as well as albums.

While this came to a head with the launch of Napster, an early file-sharing service, the trend dates back a generation. For decades, consumers tried to improve their ability to buy and share songs. Anyone who grew up with music in the 1970s and 1980s has likely created or received a mix tape of individual songs. If you haven’t done either, I guarantee you danced to one.

Physical distribution gave suppliers the opportunity to limit what songs would be published as singles. Digital technologies removed that aspect of the gatekeeper role. When music labels tried to maintain the album as the core component, consumers – and soon after, Apple – took matters into their own hands.

I understand the reluctance of music publishers to trade sales of songs for revenues from albums. Song revenues are lower, at least at the outset. But refusing to meet a latent or emerging requirement is likely to result in a more severe falloff in revenues. At least part of what happened to music publishers in the last decade is tied to their reluctance to disaggregate supply.

Now, book publishers approach an inflection point of their own. Defense of format makes us reluctant to unbundle content. Even something as basic as “cut and paste” functionality is disabled or severely restricted across many commercial works. Publishers restrict use with the idea that this kind of thing somehow cuts down on piracy and other illicit activities. I’d argue it ends up having the opposite effect.

Last year, I talked about various types of content that might be more readily disrupted by new business models and non-traditional competitors. These genres or categories included reference, travel and tourism, education and testing, cooking, certain religious works, particularly Biblical content, and some business writing.

In the last year, disruption across most of these categories has accelerated. After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica closed down its print edition. Google bought a restaurant guide, Zagat, and then acquired rights to travel content from Frommers, formerly a Wiley imprint.

Last year saw major universities offer several highly successful “MOOCs” – massively open online courses – to individuals well outside their registered study body. In all cases, the best-performing students included a cross-section of people who had not attended the bricks-and-mortar university.

Digital-first Biblical content is available now from firms like Logos, which offers readers the opportunity to study anywhere, on any device, while also providing tools to aid the development of sermons, improve and inform academic study and interact with other members of the Logos community.

A simple example of Logos’ academic functionality: the software lets you search various Bible translations by a part of a clause, so that different interpretations can be examined, understood and perhaps refined. The service is available on a subscription basis for US $57 to US $134 a month. Try doing that work using printed texts and you’ll quickly see the value of a subscription.

When I present these ideas and examples, publishers sometimes push back around their applicability to works of fiction. I agree with the sense that fiction itself is less prone to disruption from non-traditional sources, but I think that’s missing the opportunity. Good works of fiction are typically supported by a rich backdrop of historical research, settings, backstory development and character profiles.

This is context – metadata of the highest order – and it distinguishes those works for which it exists. Imagine the boost for online visibility and discovery for those titles for which this context is made visible. And imagine the increase in awareness and sales for those titles whose authors and publishers are willing to share at least some of this data with their fan base, even their fan-fiction base.

There’s a pretty good example of that kind of thinking. It’s called Pottermore.

So, lots of changes, some faster than others, not distributed equally. It’s tempting to wait until the market shows itself, but that’s a high-risk strategy. We need to prepare for the networked present in at least three ways:

Standards. Beyond product-level identifiers, we'll need ways to provide for a much more robust and extensive use internal tagging. RDF, ISNI and ISTC provide some examples, but we need greater clarity to guarantee access and interoperability. As we think about selling components, we’ll need to significantly revise the way that we acquire, maintain and account for rights. Lessons learned from services like Safari Books Online and Valobox will help here, but it’s more than that. We need to rethink how we handle content and rights, or someone outside the business will do it for us.

Structure. If we’re serious about creating, managing and delivering components that meet market-determined requirements, we are going to have to develop, partner or adapt to systems and structures that make content acquisition and monetization possible at levels more granular than most publishers have ever considered. Many good start-ups are eager to work with and even receive funding from publishers, should publishers find it in their hearts to do so.

Sense. We’re talking about organizing and serving communities of readers. Success no longer emanates from a series of well-planned, top-down efforts. Publishers will need to develop a market understanding that helps them prepare for and address at least some consumer needs that are not yet articulated.

These initiatives demand broad-scale change, but not universally. Authors and customers are not the ones at risk. Rather, publishers and in some cases technology vendors face the greatest threat, as authors and consumers develop their own coping strategies around slower-moving content providers.

Investing in discovery standards, content structure and the maintenance of a market-facing (rather than a product-centered) sensibility are hedges toward long-term sustainability. The four principles outlined at the start of my remarks today can provide a useful and important filter for those investments.

Toward the end of last year, a colleague and friend, John Maxwell, joined a panel discussion on the future of academic publishing in the digital age. There, John suggested that “we needn’t take boundedness and completeness as a prescription for what serious media ought to be. Our challenge is to look beyond that.”

This brings us back to the idea of a container. "Context first" proposed that we not use containers as the primary source of information, instead considering them as vehicles to transmit what Hugh McGuire calls an "internally complete representation." But here, "internally complete" is not the same as "complete".

I think we're inevitably moving toward what I'd call a "pre-book world": a living representation of the development, refinement and extension of a particular work. At various points, an object - a book or an eBook, as examples - may be rendered, but as a subset of the greater representation.

That trend is easier to see in scholarly or academic publishing, where digital has been the norm for a decade or more. But I think it will grow to include many forms of publishing. As it does, we’ll need to think more about components, solutions and ultimately the potential inherent in disaggregating supply.

Last Wednesday, paidContent hosted a one-day conference dedicated to the robust developments surrounding, well ... paid content. The New York event was sponsored jointly by GigaOm, which picked up paidContent in February 2012 when it bought ContentNext from U.K.-based Guardian News & Media Limited.

The conference agenda was fast-paced, with most panels and discussions running only 20 to 30 minutes. It was also ambitious, combining the range of O'Reilly Media's (longer) Tools of Change conference with the business model focus generally reserved for events like DeSilva & Philips' annual media banking event.

The first half of the morning largely covered the "new" in "new media". Topics included:

• Rise of the digital new media entity
• Where the money is going (according to guest Ken Lerer, at any rate)
• Impact of personalization and algorithms on the attention economy; and
• The Guardian and open journalism

Maybe it was the dense nature of these opening sessions, but the second half of the morning dragged by comparison. An interview with Tumblr founder David Karp shed little light on "where the company fits in the media landscape", and a somewhat manufactured debate failed to answer whether "apps or the web are the future of mobile content". The best answer seemed to be a rousing "it depends".

After lunch, Felix Salmon of Reuters moderated a session on "the future of native advertising: blurring ads and content". The panel, which included representatives from Forbes Media and Buzzfeed, needed more than the allotted half hour to get at some of the implications of sponsored content.

Mid-afternoon, Laura Owen moderated a panel focused on the book industry. Although the panel included three highly regarded speakers (Rachel Chou from Open Road, Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and Evan Ratliff from Atavist), a notable portion of the audience left as their session began. Those who ducked out for coffee missed the best-prepared and perhaps the most honest panel of the conference.

Even though books are truly "paid content", the mid-afternoon exodus may be another sign that the category isn't considered very cutting edge. That's more than just a PR problem, even if you'd rather be HarperCollins than Time Inc. these days.

That said, the audience returned in force to hear "lessons from the blogging elite", a panel that included best-selling author Tim Ferriss, Maria Popova from Brain Pickings (a keynote at this year's TOC in New York), Andrew Ross Sorkin of both CNBC and the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan, now out on his own with The Dish. Their best answers also seemed to be a chorus of "it depends", as each approaches blogging with different interests and expectations.

The last interview of the day saw Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia make news with his comments about a recent claim that Fox would go "off the air" if his company continued to win court battles as a legitimate service. The 20 minutes allocated to his session was just too short for a service that could upend broadcast television business models. I'll try to come back with a post focused on Aereo alone.

The day ended with a set of five startup presentations from RebelMouse, Spreecast, Circa, Prismatic and Branch. In some ways the showcase was a metaphor for the business of paid content: speed and uncertainty while most of us hope for a collective breath.

Recently Garrett Kiely, director of the University of Chicago Press, recently tweeted a link to an interesting chart of U.S. publishing employment. Dating back to 1990, the information is compiled monthly and maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The chart shows that publishing employment peaked in 2001 (at about 1.04 million) and has been on the decline pretty much ever since. The most recent estimate (March 2013) puts total employment in the U.S. publishing industry at 730,000, a drop of 30% over 12 years.

While that information is sobering, I tweeted back to Garrett that things might not be as bad as all that. Necessarily, the government data defines jobs as they have been done in the past. As industries evolve, the indicators lag, and jobs that are a new form of publishing - blogging, for example - are not captured.

The data in the chart explicitly excludes Internet employment. While many jobs related to the Internet are not publishing, a significant number likely are. The form and location of the work is changing, but we would likely recognize at least some of the uncounted jobs as publishing.

While the last decade may not have been as dark a time for publishing, the chart does tell me it is a difficult time for publishers. This is an argument I've made before. There's a difference.

A week ago Sunday, Scott Turow published "The slow death of the American author" as an op-ed contribution to the New York Times. Life is too short to write yet another post refuting Turow's views of the publishing world, so I'll point you to a response Mike Masnick wrote for Techdirt. It covers the waterfront beautifully.

Coincidentally, three days earlier, the Times had run an interview with the comedian Louis C.K. O'Reilly Media's Kat Meyer sent me a link. If you're not familiar with Louis C.K., you should read the interview. If you are familiar with Louis C.K., you should read the interview. Go .. read the interview.

In thinking about Louis C.K. and Scott Turow, Kat and I were struck by how much changing your frame of mind opens up a world of possibilities. Unhappy with the terms he would have gotten if he'd tried to release a comedy DVD through traditional channels, Louis C.K. made and sold his own video. Dissatisfied with the way that companies like Ticketmaster handle sales at various venues, he staged a national tour that skipped venues that had commitments to the ticket vendors.

Asked about his "overnight" success, he pushes back until the interviewer (Dave Itzkoff) agrees "At this point you've put in the time". Louis C.K. responds:

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Facing an environment in which the world is changing and the deal isn't what it used to be, he decided to try something different. Louis C.K. has his opinions about the business, but he isn't looking to have the rules bent to suit his view of the world.

The comedian could have done what he did and failed - that happens. But Louis C.K. didn't argue to put everything back the way it once was. On that front, it's "Scott Turow vs. The World".

Over the weekend, author Joe Konrath posted his views of what constitutes "fair use" of his work. Konrath thinks it makes sense to let people build on his work, while making one fundamental distinction: 

If you do want to use my work to make money for yourself, I think it is fair to include me somehow, by negotiating for the rights to do so. But if you want to use my work for anything else, enjoy yourself.

I learned of Konrath's post on Teleread, where Juli Monroe wrote a good summary. Though Monroe described Konrath's stance as "surprising", I think the author has held his point of view for quite some time, something I added in a comment to her work.

Konrath was responding to a tweet from the U.K.-based Publishers Association. During a digital conference panel about copyright, the PA feed posted a picture of the panel and claimed "Copyright is fundamental to creative industries, those who believe it is not relevant are mistaken".

In response, Konrath makes an essential point: industries don't own copyrights; those who create a work do. Creators may assign certain rights to others, but the goal of copyright is not to preserve industries. It is to encourage the creation of new works, while also providing for eventual public access those works.

This is a distinction that associations and rights registry organizations too often gloss over or simply omit. It's reasonable for industries to band together to preserve their interests. The law, though, should balance public and private interests, not work to protect the industries built upon the work of others.

Last month I wrote about an assessment of LinkedIn that Josh Sternberg had posted on Digiday. Sternberg argued that LinkedIn was "a sleeping giant of publishing", well-suited to compete on five dimensions relevant to business-to-business publishing.

I don't know if LinkedIn was following Sternberg's post, but last Friday the platform announced that it had agreed to buy Pulse, a service that "aggregates news from different industries and presents it to viewers in a tilelike, graphical interface." Pulse also provides corporate clients like the Wall Street Journal with a white-label content dissemination solution.

For the most part, any given acquisition is a data point, not a trend. That said, access to services like Pulse makes LinkedIn more likely to provide significant competition in the B2B space.

It's worth noting that the transaction took place the same week that ABM and SIIA announced plans to merge the two associations. Competition from the likes of LinkedIn can only increase the extent to which traditional business publishers need ready access to a broader set of tools.

Last week, American Business Media (ABM), the association representing business-to-business publishers, announced plans to merge with the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). The merger is subject to approval of ABM's members at an annual meeting scheduled to take place later this month in Amelia Island, Florida.

Writing for Crain Communications' BtoB Media Business, John Obrect reports that about 20 of ABM's 220 members are also members of SIIA, so the merger expands horizons for both organizations. Clark Pettit, ABM's president & CEO, offered his view of the merger:

Our members are rapidly evolving and expanding their businesses with new capabilities, business models and platforms – and that requires access to new thought leadership, research and networking. The combination of SIIA and ABM creates the breadth and scale required to powerfully represent, promote and defend the entire business information and media industry. It creates the nexus that brings together all relevant business models and technologies and forms a platform for future strategic alliances.

It's hard for associations to vote themselves out of existence, and the companies convening in Florida could conceivably overrule the ABM's board. But the growing use of digital platforms to create, maintain and disseminate content is going to force a large number of trade associations to evaluate their own business models.

This is a point I made in presenting "the opportunity in abundance": that the publishing business needs a wider view and more effective R&D spending than its trade associations provide. That view was not widely accepted, and our associations continue to work as more or less independent entities. Time and financial viability will tell whether business as usual is the right course.

Last Friday I wrote a post about ways that booksellers, notably Barnes & Noble, might reduce the impact of showrooming, in which customers visit stores but ultimately purchase a product elsewhere.

After the post went up, Peter Turner tweeted me a link to a Statista “Chart of the Day” that had been published a day earlier. According to Statista, 29% of book consumers purchased a book online after visiting a bricks-and-mortar retail outlet.

That’s middle of the pack among the sectors reported by Statista:

• Consumer electronics – 63%
• Apparel, clothing & accessories – 43%
• Books – 29%
• Appliances – 22%
• Toys – 22%
• Jewelry and watches – 16%
• “Other” – 10%

While not specific to the book category, Statista reported that smartphone users were fairly likely to check product reviews and compare prices while in the store. The presence of that activity supports the idea of offering in-store kiosks that might capture at least some of the showroom shopper’s purchase activity.

Interestingly, Statista found that 48% of buyers “felt better about a purchase” after scanning for product information, while another 14% said they made a purchase they had not planned to make. The idea of configuring bricks-and-mortar bookstores to support such inquiries might yield some welcome benefits.

From time to time I write, directly or tangentially, about the views offered by Scott Turow, now in his third year as president of the Authors Guild.

My first foray, written in 2010, was an open letter about his views on book piracy. I found them somewhat under-informed, and I offered my thoughts on how he could balance his fears of piracy with a call for more comprehensive research.

Mr. Turow never responded. I didn’t think he would, but it was nice to have hope for a while. Today, the Authors Guild views piracy the same way it did in 2010: it is a scourge, and it must be stopped.

These days, there’s no shortage of bogey men in publishing. A couple of weeks ago, Amazon bought Goodreads, prompting Turow to decry the loss of yet another author-friendly platform.

At the time of the purchase, Jason Boog of Galleycat reported that the Authors Guild saw the purchase as “a truly devastating act of vertical integration”. Mr. Turow added:

Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads is a textbook example of how modern Internet monopolies can be built … The key is to eliminate or absorb competitors before they pose a serious threat. With its 16 million subscribers, Goodreads could easily have become a competing on-line bookseller, or played a role in directing buyers to a site other than Amazon. Instead, Amazon has scuttled that potential and also squelched what was fast becoming the go-to venue for on-line reviews, attracting far more attention than Amazon for those seeking independent assessment and discussion of books. As those in advertising have long known, the key to driving sales is controlling information.

I have concerns with the purchase, but (as I explained last week) I am less worried about what Amazon might do than what publishers have not done.

There’s more than a little irony in a wildly successful author flaming Amazon, something that author J.A. Konrath picked up on in a comment on Boog’s post:

Grand Central’s acquisition of Scott Turow's latest novel is a textbook example of how modern publishing monopolies can be built… The key is to absorb writers before they can write for another publisher. With his millions of fans, Turow could have easily sold his novel to a competing publisher, or even published himself and made a better royalty percentage. Instead, Grand Central has scuttled that potential and also squelched the chance for other publishers to make money from Turow. As those in publishing have long known, the key to driving sales is controlling authors. This is a truly devastating act of vertical integration.

As I said in response, I wish I’d written it myself. Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads may be a threat to publishers, but it is not a threat to publishing. The Authors Guild, including Mr. Turow, should recognize the difference.

At the end of March, I read a New York Times op-ed piece, “Machines of laughter and forgetting”, written by Evgeny Morozov. I struggled with it at the time, though I was not immediately sure why.

The author has a book out, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. His Times essay argues that “technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for ‘thinking’ needs to happen only once, at the design stage”. Morozov would prefer technologies that keep bugging us:

While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an “aesthetic of friction” that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought — nay, contemplation — slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?

There is value in trying to build consumer awareness of issues with social and environmental implications. Morozov’s issues include appliances that consume more power than they need to, or web sites that obscure the extent to which they acquire and store personally identifiable information.

But his solutions (power cords that contort themselves to remind their owners that they are in use; browsers that send persistent reminders of things like how many web sites you visited yesterday) don’t necessarily improve decision making. “Devices as troublemakers” may try to remind consumers of an undesirable externality, but the “thinking”, as Morozov calls it, still happens at the design stage. He may like the thinking behind troublemaking technologies a bit more than I might, but it’s still part of design.

I’ve written before that improving workflows of any type relies on our ability to change processes (how work gets done), technology (the tools we use to do the work) and the roles that people play. We need to make changes in a way that balances the relative contributions of each. Optimizing one – making the tools do all the heavy lifting , in this case – will not work, as it presumes that the role of both the people and process components shift only when technology forces it.

Consider a simple example. If you’ve purchased an appliance in the United States in the last two decades, you know that energy-consumption stickers are both visible and standard-issue additions. I wholly get the idea that an inefficient refrigerator costs me more money and ultimately contributes to global warming, but… I also care how big it is, whether it can hold enough food for my family, whether it is more reliable than an alternate model and how long it will last before I need to replace it.

No decision is made in a vacuum. To shift the way a system works, the feedback mechanisms can’t be limited to annoying technological features. Believing that invasive technologies will address our collective failings is just as naïve as expecting that more benign technologies will cure everything that ails us.

If there’s a folly to “technological solutionism”, it’s in thinking that we can build any set of values into the technologies we use and they will carry the day. That won’t happen. We also have to talk about what we’re trying to accomplish and whose help we’re going to need to change things for the better.

An additional note: Around the time that Morozov's essay appeared in the New York Times, he also published "The meme hustler", a 16,000-word assessment of Tim O'Reilly's body of work. While Morozov's writing exposes some flaws in how "big" ideas develop, he declined an offer to speak directly with O'Reilly, a decision he documents at the end of the piece. Morozov and O'Reilly may never see eye to eye, but I think walking away from a conversation weakens Morozov's work. He may see me as part of the "meme-making machine", but I think we'd all benefit from a fuller presentation of the story.

Richard Nash has contributed a substantial (8,000-word) essay, “What is the business of literature”, to the spring edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Published recently, his essay has prompted a number of links, comments and tweets.

Much of the commentary picks up on the content of the essay’s subhead, “As technology disrupts the business model of traditional publishers, the industry must imagine new ways of capturing the value of a book”. While Nash does address both the history and the potential for technology to shape our business, I think his ambitions are much greater.

Consider this excerpt from the essay’s penultimate paragraph:

Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts. That swirl and gurgle does happen to have a home for print fetishism, as it has a home for digital fetishism. This is what literature has always been.

Nash extends this argument as he concludes:

By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.

This essay is less a defense of technology and more an argument to once again define the purpose of publishing. Nash covers fertile ground, weaving together themes that he has been developing for years while working at Soft Skull Press, Cursor and now Small Demons.

His work is not easily reduced to a short blog post or a succinct tweet. Nash and I approach publishing from different angles, but we agree without reservation about the question we should be asking: “What is the purpose of publishing?” In an era of things like increasing wealth disparity, we could use a radical agent of change.

A brief note: The links provided in the two excerpts are mine; they did not appear in the original text.

In writing “The opportunity in abundance”, I characterized “people not reading” as the publishing manifestation of a “super-threat”, an overarching challenge that the industry could collectively work to address.

Certain aspects of “abundance”, notably a call to combine association funding in pursuit of a larger goal, prompted some early discussion but fundamentally no change. While not a surprise, the lack of movement remains a disappointment.

Two weeks ago, Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives covered if:Book, held in Milan. At the event, David Walter of Nielsen BookScan provided an overview of 2012 book sales around the world. In miniature:

• United Kingdom down 3.4%
• Italy down 7.7%
• South Africa down 8.8%
• United States down 9.3%
• Spain down 10.3%
• South Korea down 20%

On its own, this data doesn’t prove that reading is on the decline. In the United States, for example, eBooks are bought at prices that are lower than all formats other than mass-market paperbacks. You’d have to sell at least twice as many eBooks to match the top-line revenue of a hardcover format, so reading may be level or increasing even as revenues fall.

Also, Nielsen’s data provides estimates of retail sales in existing channels. As consumption patterns shift, it’s possible that book purchases are migrating away from those channels. We already know that ISBN use among self-published authors is hit-or-miss; estimates for those missed sales are rare and likely error-prone.

The decline might also be a temporary blip in markets where digital sales are strong but e-gifting options are limited. Fix that problem, as Enthrill and Livrada are working to do, and we might see stronger sales of gift books of all types.

But …

Suppose the falloff in sales really does indicate a decline in demand for books. Nawotka asks: “Could it be something as straightforward as a lack of focus on fostering literacy and a love of books and reading? Or are there larger social and economic changes afoot?”

Truthfully, no one really knows. That’s a problem, especially when purchase and consumption patterns are shifting quickly. Our best studies are inadequate, in that they summarize self-reported data, extrapolate from existing channels and miss the “dark matter” of non-traditional content creation and sales.

Nawotka gives the publishing industry credit for its efforts to “innovate and advance into the digital age”, but I am less certain. If we were really interested in the digital age, wouldn’t we want to know more than Amazon or Kobo does about how books are read, shared, evaluated and even abandoned? Our “best efforts” are still treating the book as an object, while literacy is clearly the product of an ecosystem.

A bit of disclosure: I am one of a small number of industry advisors working with Enthrill on its efforts to bring a point-of-sale eBook card to retail environments. Enthrill and its management had no role in the creation of this post.

Reports of a business dispute between retailer Barnes & Noble (BN) and publisher Simon & Schuster have been circulating for a few weeks now. BN is said to be looking to increase the revenue it receives from publishers for "showrooming" books; Simon & Schuster feels the proposed terms are too onerous.

Negotiations take place in private, so the dispute isn't perfectly understood. The retailer does seem to be asking for additional consideration for giving books prominent display in its stores. I wonder if that's the best or only tactic to employ here.

In its January 2013 issue, DM News featured an article, "Use showrooming to your advantage", by Dianna Dilworth. While we tend to focus on the impact of Amazon on bricks-and-mortar booksellers, showrooming is in fact a widespread retail challenge.

Dilworth captures Michael LeBeau, founder and CEO of Weld Media, advising retailers to "replicate what consumers are doing on their own in the store." Dilworth explains:

For example, consumers shopping for a stereo may go online to read reviews, then look at their social networks, and then go to search engines to compare prices. He recommends that retailers do this for consumers and put tablets in stores that feature this information.

“What if a retailer aggregated all of that information on behalf of consumers?” LeBeau asks. “Now I don't have to do that research on my own, which makes it easier for me.” If retailers take on this strategy, they also should optimize their product and pricing mix so showrooming consumers will make the purchase while in their store.

Although there may be examples, I've yet to see a physical bookstore that made it easy to look up information about the professional and popular assessment of a book, something Amazon does reasonably well. Certainly there are plenty of tablets in any store trying to sell you a Nook, but they're not integrated with the (book) browsing experience.

There are ways that BN could make price comparisons a feature, not a bug. Rather than use corporate resources to keep up with Amazon (or others) on price, BN could introduce an in-store search function with an "instant coupon". Doing so could give BN the ability to keep the price-sensitive customer without discounting the entire store.

Something similar could be built for inventory. Let customers tell you (easily) "I searched for this book and had to leave without it." Collect enough of those alerts and your store managers and book buyers become smarter, too.

This isn't to say that BN doesn't need better terms, or that publishers shouldn't be thinking of ways to sustain a retail presence. Terms alone, though, won't stop showrooming, and they are unlikely to stem the tide for very long. We have to adapt to the ways that people shop.

In its last issue of 2012, Columbia Journalism Review ran a profile of The Atavist and Byliner, two pioneers in what it described as "the e-singles market". While author Michael Meyer provides a good overview of the two companies, he breaks some interesting ground writing about the role of e-singles as part of an comprehensive marketing effort.

Toward the end of the piece, Meyer interviews Molly Barton, global digital director at Penguin, about using shorter content to improve the sales of traditional-length books:

Molly Barton, Penguin’s global digital director, also sees an opportunity for short content to boost the sales of full-length books. “We’ve seen over and over with digital publishing generally that having multiple titles out in the market is helpful,” she says. It turns out that e-singles can be a kind of gateway drug to full-length titles, as well as a way to keep the attention of an author’s fan base between longer works. Barton predicts that for Penguin, at least, “short content will become more tightly coupled with the overall publishing program for an author,” playing an increasing role in how their work is marketed.

While The Atavist and Byliner are looking at options to grow revenues from various sources, Barton's comments suggest that there may be an opportunity to offer free shorter-form content as a teaser to drive longer-form sales. The marketing power of sample chapters is already thought to be significant; it will be interesting to see if short formats become the new black.

Writing about Goodreads and Amazon on Monday, I observed that "There are five companies currently fighting to own our digital lives":  Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

This idea is adapted from a single-page infographic that Joe Kloc described in the November 2012 issue of Wired:

To best each other, the five companies also fight proxy wars over everything from GPS maps to book distribution, leaving a trail of defunct startups in their wake. In 2011, for instance, Google acquired 79 companies, only to shut down most of them and put their talent to work on other projects.

We've entered a time when strategic investments in new businesses are the competitive equivalent of table stakes. If publishers want to preserve their ability to play, buying into promising ideas and sustaining them over time need to become core activities.

Otherwise, venture-capital firms with a love of high returns (and no romance when it comes to traditional media) will continue to turn over good ideas to the highest bidder. When that's likely to be one of The Silicon Five, publishing (and publishers) would benefit to have some skin in the game.

Yesterday, I picked up on an observation made by James McQuivey and Nate Hoffelder: publishers lack the mindset and skills required to disrupt their own business model. That's a tough thing to change, but a window just might be opening.

In February, Crain's New York Business ran a profile of the venture-capital (VC) firms offering so-called "Series A" funding: "the first, all-important, validating round of institutional money start-ups vie for." In her article, Judith Messina explains that New York City "has a well-publicized Series A crunch", with as many as 1,000 start-ups likely to fold for lack of capital.

VCs provide more than capital, typically mentoring management teams along the way. These commitments make accomplished VCs reluctant to take on too many companies at once, even when capital is abundant.

That means there are probably some good prospects out there that VCs will not fund. Enter the traditional publisher.

I'm not suggesting that publishers suddenly start throwing $2 million at everyone with an idea. But it wouldn't hurt to have an open door and some substantial conversations, ones that try to place the new idea in the market, not your current business model.

In publishing, most entrepreneurs have to beg for access to something as simple as content. Look at how hard Kobo has had to work to sign publishers just to sell their titles, and they're the retailer that isn't fighting with publishers about terms.

This would be a good year to change that. A modicum of funding, an open attitude and a willingness to share what you know might keep the more promising of those new ventures on the publishing horizon. It's too late to support Goodreads, but you can still get in on ReadSocial.

A bit of disclosure: Travis Alber and Aaron MIller, who founded BookGlutton and ReadSocial, contributed a chapter about the projects and their experiences to Book: A Futurist's Manifesto. I'm using ReadSocial as an example of a good idea that could fly with some support, but neither Travis nor Aaron was involved in the creation of this post.

So, Amazon bought Goodreads last week. You probably know that already. After the announcement, there was an immediate, mostly negative reaction, followed by some pushback from folks who asked variations on "What did you think was going to happen?"

One of the better "What's the big deal?" responses came from Dan Blank, who works with authors to improve the visibility of their work. Via Twitter, he shared his day-later assessment of the social-media-fueled reaction: "A small number of people paying very high rent freaked out about a multi-billion $ co buying a multi-million $ co."

So, I'm not a Goodreads fanatic, and I am not reflexively an Amazon basher. But (with a tip of the hat to Dan), I do think the acquisition matters, a lot.

There are two reasons. The first is one I've touched upon before: digital choke points. There are five companies currently fighting to own our digital lives. They are well-known: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Increasingly, access to content, reviews and distribution is in the hands of this small number of firms. They don't play nice with one another, and they are prone to be lobbied. Look at the number of takedown requests that Google is fielding each month. There's no legal process in place there. It just happens.

I'm not immediately leaping from "could happen" to "will happen", but there are enough examples (Amazon deleting what it sees as an unauthorized account; the 1984 clawback) to make you think twice before deciding all is well in online bookselling. Think about how hard Smashwords had to work to restore its access to Paypal when the banking vendor took exception to what it decided was objectionable content.

The other reason is less visible, but it is aptly offered by James McQuivey and Nate Hoffelder: "There's a reason that nobody in publishing bought Goodreads". With strong allegiance to a trade publishing model, publishers didn't understand or value Goodreads and its commitment to readers.

McQuivey points out that any publisher could have bought Goodreads on the cheap while it was growing, but none did. Hoffelder uses Bookish, a living example of what should have been a reader-facing publisher initiative, to make the point that any publisher that bought Goodreads likely would have managed it to an early demise.

It's hard work starting a business whose underlying premise disrupts the one that made you successful. Building a new business model takes planning and patience. From the outset, Indigo segregated Kobo, ultimately selling the business when its capital requirements outstripped Indigo's ability to sustain the business.

Much has been made of Goodreads and its Amazon-sponsored exit strategy. The folks who founded and grew Goodreads took a risk, and they have been rewarded.

As McQuivey notes, publishers had a chance to be part of that. For a mix of reasons, they chose to pursue different paths.

They may have felt that their own initiatives could help forestall disruption, but I think that's not the case. As Amazon expands, traditional publishers may soon be considering their own exit strategies.

Last Friday, I posted a response to a Soapbox column written for Publishers Weekly by book buyer Mike Joachim, who offered five “rules” to help self-published authors. When it came to self-published titles, I thought that independent and regional booksellers could do better than adopt the model already in force for traditional imprints.

More recently, Publishers Weekly featured a Soapbox contribution from marketing expert Kirk Kazanjian, whose latest book focuses on “driving loyalty”. In the piece, he calls on the owners of bricks-and-mortar bookstores to take four steps that would help them cultivate loyalty and compete against Amazon’s price advantages:

1. Create a welcoming experience
2. Hire right (book enthusiasts!)
3. Embrace technology
4. Practice two-way marketing

Some of what Kazanjian suggests seems a bit limited. His idea of a “welcoming experience” involves saying hello and getting to know frequent customers on a first-name basis. No argument there, but a welcoming environment can also include things like self-evident navigation, a clear path to the register, a place to sit and read (or meet readers), as well as my “local author” idea from last week.

In a similar vein, “embracing technology” should include more than point-of-purchase recommendations. A comment on last week’s post, added by Kobo’s Ami Greko, explains how independent booksellers can partner with her firm to offer digital formats to customers who prefer that option.

While these suggestions fill in Kazanjian’s guidelines, they really don’t take away from one of his core points: “Customers do business with you because they want to, not because you’re the cheapest place around.” That’s the value of loyalty.

A bit more than a year ago, O’Reilly Media hosted an “executive roundtable” just ahead of its 2012 Tools of Change (TOC) conference in New York. For an audience of publishers and industry partners, Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, described the data-driven approach he took to writing and marketing his book.

While the roundtable presentation and the subsequent dialogue were not recorded, you can watch Ries give a shorter version of his remarks as a TOC keynote. After he finished his presentation at the roundtable, members of the audience posed a number of questions challenging Ries’s approach. One question described his use of market-driven data as “dangerous”, something that potentially would encourage authors to write to the lowest common denominator.

Ries did a credible job defending his approach; he’s all-in on the ideas contained in his book. By the end of the session, though, I kind of felt as if a core set of publishing veterans had sequestered his ideas as things that were interesting but not really relevant to the business.

That roundtable experience came to mind recently, when I started re-reading “The vine nerds”. A Wired story written by Jeffrey M. O’Brien, the article profiles Thibault Scholasch and Sebastien Payen, two Frenchmen who founded Fruition Sciences.

The company monitors the amount of water in the vines whose grapes will be used to make wine. A small but apparently growing number of vineyard owners have hired Fruition Sciences to help them improve the quality of the grapes they produce. Along the way, many vineyards have been able to significantly reduce the amount of irrigation water they consume.

Helpfully, O’Brien spends a good deal of time explaining the science of raising grapes. What reminded me of that roundtable with Eric Ries, though, was the reaction of some successful vineyard owners. Brad Grimes of Abreu Vineyard offers his thoughts:

For us, farming is about gut feeling, common sense, and the relationship we have with our properties. We don’t utilize any of those services, and we stay away from technology. What Fruition has done has been pretty radical. Maybe it’s archaic and old-school, but I just have a problem with having so much data. There’s a scientific part to their business that I just can’t align myself with.

In a similar (and somewhat more pointed) reaction, Jayson Woodbridge of the Hundred Acre vineyard told O’Brien:

I farm in the old-fashioned way, and I win the races. If they’re going to tell me that giving the plants water before it gets hot is wrong, they can [deleted because this is a family blog]. When you’re in a vineyard and it’s 120 degrees, all the leaves are turning upside down. They shut down.

There’s no doubt that vineyards like Abreu and Hundred Acre are successful now, but their owners may also be playing the roles that the skeptical audience did with Eric Ries last year. Disruptive innovation can start small, offering a more efficient solution (reduce or eliminate water consumption) with at least momentarily lower quality.

What happens next is reflected in history: the leading disk-drive manufacturers and steel mills were replaced as the old paradigm limited their visions. It’s fair to say that disruption is now finding its way through ad-supported media companies. I don’t know if Eric Ries is right (though he makes a good case), but it’s more than fair to ask any publisher “What would you need to do differently if his idea is valid?”

Last month, Michael Cairns delivered a keynote address at the annual conference of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS). If you're not familiar with NFAIS, it is a "global, non-profit membership organization serving all those who create, aggregate, organize, and otherwise provide ease of access to and effective navigation and use of authoritative, credible information."

They host dozens of meetings each year, most dedicated to a specific topic in the field. I've presented at some of their events, which consistently draw informed and engaged audiences.

Cairns runs Information Media Partners, a consulting firm that helps publishers sort through issues related to content management, product development and mergers and acquisitions. Our practices cross paths on occasion, typically over lunch, where I always come away better informed than I started.

The NFAIS presentation, "The end of the middleman: Predicting the future of education publishing", is posted on Personanondata, Cairns' well-known blog. He includes both the slides and his speaker's notes, giving a great deal of access to the substance of his talk.

Cairns makes a number of important points about the future of higher education, including:

• Most innovation in publishing is happening at the edges of the industry
• Across all segments, the value chain is compacting, allowing direct interaction with consumers
• Excluding Pearson, education publishers are just starting to transition from content providers to service providers
• Technology, particularly the internet, is driving changes that will improve the relevance of higher education
• Only through assessment and adaptive learning will we bridge the gap between higher education and industry
• Platform providers may soon be the only efficient way for publishers to reach students

[The language here is pretty much a direct lift from parts of Cairns' prepared remarks.]

Cairns concludes that:

It will only be a matter of time before pan-university content assets – library licensed content, faculty and university produced materials and archived and professionally published content, etc.  - are brought together.  I expect the platform model will facilitate this change.

He goes on to describe a world that will look remarkably different from the current, container-driven model:

Examples in professional publishing indicate that what we begin to see in platforms is not so much a repository of ‘ready-made’ solutions like books, journal articles, collections and the like but more a biosphere akin to an operating system supporting the end-user in everything from content creation and hosting to user and community engagement and, in the case of education – life-long learning.  There is an exciting future to come in educational publishing and we are only just on the cusp of it.

Cairns brings a wealth of experience to his observations. He also adds more than a bit of self-deprecating humor. If you have even a passing interest in what might happen to institutions of higher education and the publishers who supply them with content, his entire presentation is worth reviewing.

Last fall, Cory Doctorow was invited to present at the Library of Congress (LOC) as part of an event held there in October. The LOC recently posted a video of Doctorow's talk, and he links to it on his primary site, boing boing.

If you are interested in copyright, eBooks, DRM, piracy or the role of libraries in an age of digital reading, make time to watch the entire video. Even if you've heard Doctorow speak on these topics (perhaps at the recent Tools of Change conference in New York), the video is a worthwhile investment.

The entire video runs about an hour; Cory's prepared remarks make up a bit more than half of that time. Personally, I found his engagement with the audience as useful as his structured comments, but not everyone has a full hour to spare. If you have to choose, go with the prepared remarks.

Last fall, Voyager Japan reached an agreement with O'Reilly Media to publish a translated version of Book: A Futurist's Manifesto in Japan. Work began almost immediately, and the full book was released just last month.

Introducing the Japanese version, Voyager Japan president Masaaki Hagino wrote (and translated here for our benefit):

I read through the book once. I felt mixed emotions because the book was packed with the kind of stories we were suppose to tell. The authors write well too. I felt as we got left behind. Then I read the book again, this time a little more carefully. I noticed that many concepts in book are developed through a series of experiments and failure. These authors tried just like we did, were defeated, and then tried to do it all over again. I took a hard look at myself. The book reminded me that we learn from defeat and failure. This is how people have been trying to create a new digital publishing paradigm. The lively voices of authors and the momentum of their concepts prove it.

Hagino-san describes something that Hugh McGuire and I probably felt more than we planned when soliciting contributions, but it's very true of the book as a whole. Many of the chapters tell stories of conception, trial, limited success and ultimately reinvention. The honesty of those voices is something I came to take in stride, and it's good to be reminded of how valuable that honesty can be.

To support the launch, Voyager Japan has prepared at least one print piece that you are unlikely to see in the United States (image courtesy of Ron Martinez). There is also a video that features pictures of our 29 contributors and a video clip with Craig Mod. Before you click through, fair warning: Japanese skills recommended.

Edited March 29 to add: When titling this post, I had in mind a 1940s film. A few days after writing it, I came across the Walt Whitman poem, "Untold Want", that contained the original line:

The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

Given Hagino-san's assessment of the message underpinning our book, I thought it would be worth adding here.

Last month, Publishers Weekly featured a Soapbox column written by Mike Joachim, a book buyer for The Paper Store, a regional chain based in New England. In it, Joachim offers five "rules" to help self-published authors get access to The Paper Store's retail shelves.

Unfortunately, Joachim's rules sound all too familiar:

1. Price the book right
2. Find a "real" distributor (Ingram, for example)
3. Hire an editor
4. Hire a cover designer
5. Don't contact the buyer more than three times

In other words: please do everything that traditional book publishers do, because that's the model that works for us. As Joachim concludes:

... nothing can replace the publishing professionals who have spent their careers learning how to select, edit, create and market solid products that people want to buy. As this self-publishing trend continues, the entrepreneurs involved need to pay attention and try their best to match the market.

Last summer, I posted some thoughts about efforts by a Palo Alto independent bookseller, Kepler's Books, to reinvent itself. The group that convened for a weekend workshop came up with eight "foundational principles" for a new Kepler's. Among those principles:

• Be dedicated to community outreach
• Serve as a gathering place for creative events and social events
• Support life-long learning and literary education

Oh, and one other principle of interest: "Provide a carefully curated selection of books".

I don't think Mike Joachim is going to look my way when it comes to best practices in book buying, but here's my two cents. Local authors with self-published works will almost never get picked up by a chain. Those bigger retailers impose all the same rules that The Paper Store does, and they won't return any of the calls. 

Regional and independent bookstores have an opportunity to turn a bug - dealing with the annoying, unprofessional self-published author - into a feature. Hold workshops. Create dedicated spaces for locally produced work. If you want to spring for an in-store POD machine, you might even help create some of those works.

And invite the public to join in the conversation. Sure, there will be clunkers. And yes, it will take resources. But it will also reward community and create a base of support that no national chain (including the one in Seattle) can readily mimic.

Honestly, I love independent bookstores. I recently went to Posman's and bought books just so that I could thank the sales staff for their owners' anti-DRM lawsuit. That's why I struggle with Joachim's stance on self-published authors. Turn your back on your community, and you're burning your own house down.

Last month Publishers Weekly covered "Indie rock's lessons for publishers: Musicians who self-publish books find the two forms strikingly similar". Written by Alex Palmer, a freelance journalist who lives in Brooklyn, the article uses the experience of a musician, Todd Colberg, to draw some parallels between independent musicians and self-published authors.

Colberg told Palmer that he had to overcome "two main sticking points: finding the time to do the final writing and editing, and letting people know that the book exists." His band had broken up in 2006, long before Colberg began working on Self Booked, a profile of his eight years with The Spinns. So he turned to Kickstarter, the band's (aging) e-mail list and YouTube to get the word out.

While the parallels between indie musicians and self-published authors are loosely drawn, Palmer offers four primary lessons:

• Barriers to entry have fallen for both musicians and authors
• 'Creating' and 'managing' are hard to balance
• Discovery is a persistent challenge
• Depth of connection with a vibrant community can make the difference

Toward the end of the article, Palmer captures a hopeful exchange with Scott Collins, also a musician and published author. Riffing on the recent resurgence of vinyl as a medium, Collins observes:

I think it’s because it’s kind of a ritual— pulling something off the wall, putting it into a machine and playing the thing; there’s a process. I think for reading too—a lot of this is going to come back to that ritual, to people doing things because it’s an investment.

In creating a parallel with vinyl, Collins also offers a bit of pining for the physical connection. That's something that e-reading has yet to create. Then again, try to take an e-ink or tablet device away from a heavy reader and you'll see the power of a new-era ritual.

In its March issue, Wired featured an interview between Jeff Howe and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. At one point, Howe asked Christensen, "If you had to list some industries right now that are either in a state of disruptive crisis or will be soon, what would they be?" Christensen answers:

Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question.

This is neither new nor uplifting. Christensen made similar points last year, in a conversation with Nieman's Joshua Benton. Christensen's views are pretty stark, but I think his assessment of ad-supported media is entirely accurate.

Howe could have continued dissecting "disruption" as a topic, but he went on to ask about another of Christensen's passions: measuring one's life. Christensen says in part:

Many people think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management; that's dealmaking. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.

Christensen then talks about what he calls "the Doctrine of New Finance". The concept is part of The Capitalist's Dilemma, a book he is working on now. Struck by the visible paradox of strong corporate balance sheets next to persistent national unemployment, Christensen observes:

We’ve encouraged managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make more money with fewer resources. But what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently the world is awash in capital but the innovations we need to advance aren’t there.

It's no secret that I like to write about disruption, and Christensen certainly leads the way on that topic. May he have equal or greater success changing the way we talk about management and corporate responsibility.

My first 12 years in publishing were spent working on three of Time Inc.’s weekly magazines: Time, People and Entertainment Weekly. Many of us who worked at Time Inc. in those days still hold the memory of the company in a special place.

Last month shook those memories a bit. In the span of four weeks, TimeWarner eliminated about 500 jobs within Time Inc., explored a partial sale to Meredith Corporation and then announced a plan to spin off the magazine subsidiary later this year. I imagine that Laura Lang, the company’s second consecutive outside CEO, could file for a whiplash disability.

As it happens, she told the parent company that she wasn’t interested in staying on. Despite their best efforts, the next CEO will inherit a company fundamentally unchanged under Lang or her predecessor, Jack Griffin. Time Inc. actively resists change, and therein lies the problem.

To save the company, Time Inc.’s next CEO needs to do six things that have been more or less off the table for generations. These aren’t easy, and some are controversial. But there’s little hope for a Time Inc. that passes on these ideas:

• Lose the Vatican. Since Henry Luce, the company has made its editor in chief the nominal defender of editorial integrity. Over time, the separation of “church” and “state” became almost synonymous with Time Inc. That era was always overblown, as any history of Luce’s meddling has shown, and it effectively ended more than 20 years ago. It’s time to stop paying for a vestigial organ.

• Stop grouping magazines. If I wanted to write the world’s longest blog post, I’d recount the various ways that Time Inc. has grouped, regrouped and re-regrouped magazines over the last 20 years. The company may think Time and Sports Illustrated (SI) are “news and information”, but no one else does. As media properties, Fortune and Money are no more alike than an orange and an apple. Treating them that way muddles your thinking about the people you should care about: your audience. Save the overhead and let the magazines run their own operations.

• Scale back corporate. I worked in a corporate department, so this one strikes close to home. A corporate department has to prove its value. Magazines should be freed up to negotiate with suppliers on their own. Paper and printing are commodities, and believe me, the postal service really doesn't care who you send to lobby it these days. They have much bigger problems to solve. Even the environmental initiatives should be scrapped. That's why we have the MPA; let them carry the freight for the industry.

• Write off the legacy systems. In 2012, Time Inc. earned $463 million on revenues of $3.436 billion, a 13.5% margin. That’s weak, one of the reasons Meredith was said to be offering only $1.7 billion for all of the titles other than Time, SI, Fortune and maybe Money. Worse, in 2012 Time Inc.’s depreciation and amortization totaled $127 million. A fair share of that depreciation covers editorial, consumer marketing and operations systems built for a print magazine model. Beyond depreciation, the systems also cost a lot to run. The new CEO should scrap the lot and change processes to take advantage of cheaper, current tools that support cost-effective cross-platform content distribution and sales.

• Raise consumer prices. The cheapest offers for many Time Inc. titles are way too low. I can buy a year’s subscription to Time for $20. Short of a return to the golden age of advertising, there’s no way the print version of the magazine survives at $20. Just ask Newsweek. Yes, you’ll lose subscribers as you raise prices, and yes, it will have an impact on advertising revenues. Make the change now, while it is still under your control, before advertising is gone completely.

• Stop using the B-word. As Jeff Jarvis has argued, “Magazines have pretty much blown it now because they’ve insisted on the mass market and being brands, not community companies.” People are looking for reasons to become and remain connected to the companies they choose to spend time with. The precise strategy varies by title and content focus, but if you want to build loyalty, try investing in the things a community values.

Other things fall out of these ideas. Independent publishers will learn to partner more, both inside and outside of Time Inc. A focus on community brings Time Inc. back to the best parts of its Briton Hadden – Henry Luce roots.

And folks who don’t have to manage up all the time may enjoy an opportunity to look sideways, sharing ideas with their colleagues. After all, Time Inc. remains the only consumer magazine publisher with four national weeklies. There’s something to be learned there.

The same week that Meredith was said to offering $1.7 billion to buy most of Time Inc., Comcast bought the 49% of NBC Universal that it did not already own in a deal that valued NBC at $34 billion. There’s no denying that print is challenged, but print is not dead. Just print alone.

Last November, Clive Thompson wrote "The rules of panic", a one-page opinion piece that appeared in Wired. In it, he builds on an argument made by Intel's director of interaction and experience research, Genevieve Bell, that some technologies are certain to provoke moral panics.

Bell asserts that panic-worthy technologies:

• Change our relationship to time;
• Change our relationship to space; and
• Change our relationship to each other.

A shift on one or two of these dimensions is not enough; unsettling technologies wind up shifting our interactions on all three fronts.

Interestingly, Thompson names social book reading as one of the technologies that will create a sense of panic in the populace. There aren't too many people pushing the boundaries of social reading - Bob Stein and Travis Alber come to mind - and the reaction to date has been less than embracing. Maybe Genevieve Bell offers a credible sense of why we resist.