A few weeks ago Kevin Drum, political blogger for the U.S.-based magazine Mother Jones, took a break from his usual beat to write "A Brief Whine About E-Books, Digital Publishing, and International Nonsense". In it, he laments an inability to buy an update to a series of books written by Charlie Stross. They have been released in the United Kingdom (starting in April), but the U.S. publisher (Tor) has yet to publish the books.

Drum quotes Stross, who explains, "The Merchant Princes re-issue won't be sold in the USA until Tor US decide to publish it. This will not happen in 2013 (because their 2013 schedule is full)."

Because Drum wants to read the digital versions of these books, territory matters. A digital book put up for sale in the U.K. cannot be sold in the United States, even though it is plainly available in digital form. This anachronistic practice leads Stross to counsel a bit of rebellion:

And (ahem) you might want to investigate the usual work-arounds. As these books are DRM-free, all you'll need to do is set up a sock-puppet AMZN account that is tied to an address in some other country and fed by a supply of amazon.co.uk gift coupons bought via ebay, or something like that.

You know when the author is suggesting piracy, things are more than a bit screwy.

I don't know what makes Tor's 2013 schedule "full"; perhaps it's a desire to manage year-over-year revenue fluctuations. I don't think its limited approach to territorial rights will last much longer, though.

in a post tied to "Territorial Rights in the Digital Age", a report I wrote for Livres Canada Books in 2012, I argued:

Windowing the release of eBooks and negotiating rights by country used to be considered reasonable practices. Today, they feel like tactics that increase the likelihood that we’ll encourage the behavior we seek to avoid.

Drum softens his argument with a disclaimer: "I know this is trivial. First world problems and all that." He's kind, but in practice the problem is global. Availability trumps piracy, and ubiquity provides readers with options they might otherwise have never considered. That's as true in Russia as it is in the United States.

One of my favorite features in a print publication can be found in Harper's, which starts each issue with a single page Index. It's a collection of several dozen insights, each distilled to a single number or fraction. Often enough, two or three consecutive entries in the list relate to one another, but interpreting the Index as a whole is left in the hands of Harper's readers.

The collective amibiguity of most of theses Indexes once struck me as a blessing: I can draw my own conclusions. Over time, though, I've come to see its ambiguity and obscurity as something of a curse. I consume the facts, but I don't do anything with them.

My Harper's experience came to mind as I read Aneya Fernando's Mediabistro piece, "Why listicles are here to stay" (posted without irony on the web site's 10,000 Words blog). While it may reflect my age, generally I have not been a fan of list-driven journalism. It has seemed a bit easy, a presentation designed to support accessibility and sharing at the expense of depth and understanding.

Lately, my views of listicles have been shifting. The act of sharing does not guarantee understanding, especially when the act itself can be literally the click of a button. But it does start at least some readers down a path of engagement, something that Jack Shepherd, Buzzfeed's editorial director, told Fernando:

At their best, lists are just scaffolding for stories: The list format grabs the attention because it’s an easy way for people to process information and for readers to know what they’re getting, but that’s not even close to half the battle. A great list that people share everywhere has to be an experience.

Typically, that experience mixes text with pictures, frequently GIFs, that help tell the story in more than one way. It doesn't work for everyone, but it does work for some people. That's a point I have made in other settings: we can create multiple iterations of a single story, offering content that readers value in formats that work best for them.

It's not fair for me to endorse agility and then shortchange lists that have effectively met the needs of a particular audience. As Shepherd maintained, “Lists have been around since the Ten Commandments. It’s a very natural way for people to organize information."

Taking his example a step further, the existence of the Ten Commandments did not stop people from writing the Bible. It didn't block philosophical consideration of natural law or prevent the development of frameworks that govern our behavior in activities both envisioned and unimagined when the Commandments were first written.

Much as the growth of digital does not mean that print is dead, the growth of list-driven stories need not replace long-form journalism. A list written to inform, excite or motivate a reader can spur interest that leads people to both short- and longer-form articles on a topic.

In fact, lists that point to primary sources can serve readers by facilitating discovery in ways that Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, would likely support. Yes, in many cases lists are the foundation for "just sharing", but I can live with that. We never dinged print because its adherants were "just reading". Sharing can be a sign, and a start.

Last month, Creative Commons (CC) announced its fourth iteration of the licenses that govern distribution of digital content on the web. According to Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic, the updated licenses address a number of issues, notably:

• A less draconian way of dealing with inadvertant violations of CC licenses
• More explicit ways of recognizing database rights, which are not uniform around the world

Although CC licenses have been available since 2001, they are not universally understood. On the positive side of the ledger, services like Flickr have made widespread use of CC licenses, providing web users with access to over a quarter billion images. The conditions of use are clearly spelled out and travel with the photos themselves.

Conversely, plenty of organizations continue to grapple with what Creative Commons is and can offer. In a column for Associations Now, written around the same time that the new licenses were announced, Ernie Smith argued that associations have a vested interesting in both using and creating content under CC licenses:

I’d like to propose a good way to balance social shareability with creator rights: Creative Commons. The nonprofit initiative founded by Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has been around for more than a decade, and it’s a pretty vibrant part of the internet, thanks in part to Flickr’s decision to allow photographers to license their content under a Creative Commons license. (Wikimedia Commons is another space that offers such free-to-use content.)

If you need photos for your content, this is a good place to start—especially if you’re struggling to budget for the increasing need for images online. But don’t just take from the Commons: Give back. Associations create a lot of content—around their events, their industry initiatives, and their industry’s people. This would seem like a great opportunity to be part of the solution, rather than the problem. If you’re taking photos of your event, for example, put a Creative Commons license on the work that allows free commercial or noncommercial usage. It gives the idea room to spread without giving up your copyright on the photo. You don’t have to put all of your content out there with the license, but it might be beneficial to put out some, especially things that have broader public appeal.

In a way, it might seem strange to think that organizations are still looking for digital copyright solutions more than a decade after CC debuted. For better or worse, use and attribution continue to befuddle even those among us who work in publishing for a living. Even with the rules written, we can struggle to develop an architecure for collaboration.

In 2010, Hugh McGuire pointed me to a post by Frank Chimero in which he tried to answer the question "What is the future of print design?" In part, Chimero laid out an argument that much of what we design in print doesn’t “deserve an artifact”.

That notion stuck with me, finding its way into "Context first" as well as a set of observations in 2012, including "A living representation", the post that led me to "Disaggregating supply".

Chimero has been on sabbatical this fall, and he took some time to examine "What screens want". It culminated in a presentation last month at Build 2013, a festival for web designers that took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A version of the presentation can be found on his web site.

Because it is taken from a talk at a conference, Chimero's post is long, but it is well worth the time it requires. In my reading, I found four interwoven themes:

• Designing for screens makes us "children of filmmaking", in which designers must manage time, movement and change in "making light dance"
• It is in the nature of screens to want things to move and to change
• "Movement, change and animation are a functional method for design"; designers must become adept at "crafting the interstitials"
• With respect to the web, "we've taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention."

I may come back to each of these themes, but for today I'd like to focus on the third: the functional method for design.

In his post, Chimero defines flux as the "capacity for change". He goes on to note instances of low, high and medium flux:

• Low: e.g, sorting data in Excel
• High: immersive experiences, often great in physical spaces, but not on the web
• Medium: assistive and descriptive animation; responsive content

With respect to screens, the use case for "medium" flux most interests Chimero. In his view, it is more than just how things look. Design must consider behaviors that respond to interaction as well as the adjustments made between fixed states (this is what he meant by "crafting the interstitials").

Chimero laments the absence of a shared language to describe the behaviors and adjustments used when designing for screens. In response, he makes a case for thinking broadly:

We need to work as a community to develop a language of transformation so we can talk to one another. And we probably need to steal these words from places like animation, theater, puppetry, dance, and choreography.

Absent from this assessment, which informs my more recent thinking about "architectures of collaboration", are any signs of allegiance to format. That doesn't surprise me about Chimero; he argued almost four years ago that some things must first earn the "privilege to be objects".

Here, he offers a more-than-useful reminder that our inspiration comes from acts of creation and storytelling in media that are not solely or even necessarily print. This is the risk in continuing to benchmark publishing against its established models. We miss the opportunity to become wholly transformative.

Earlier this fall, IAC sold its interest in Newsweek to International Business Times Media (IBTM), a "digital global news publication". After acquiring Newsweek, the new owners hired Jim Impoco to edit the magazine. The move prompted swift commentary from acerbic industry observer Michael Wolff, who used his column in the Guardian to call Newsweek "the poster child of magazine journalism failure".

If you're not already familiar with the title's recent history, here's a recap:

• In 2010, the Washington Post sold the publication to Sidney Harman, best known for his pioneering work in audio systems. The magazine was said to be losing $1 million a week at the time of sale.
• Shortly after, Harman merged Newsweek with IAC's Daily Beast, and Tina Brown was named editor of both.
• In April 2011, Harman passed away; his wife began managing the Harman interest.
• The losses continued, and in July 2012, the Harman family decided to stop putting in more money, in effect reducing their share of the joint venture.
• In the fall of 2012, IAC bought the remaining Harman share, then decided to stop the print edition.
• This fall, IAC sold the brand to IBTM

Earlier this month, Impoco announced that Newsweek planned to revive its print edition in the United States. Wolff's Guardian piece preceded that decision, but it's not hard to imagine how he would react to this latest turn.

At its core, Wolff's argument is not a new one: having lost its digital and print presence, Newsweek is the publishing equivalent of a startup. Starting a weekly publication costs money, probably (Wolff said certainly) more money than the folks at IBTM are willing to put into the venture. As such, there's no good ending to this story.

I've worked on a magazine launch (Entertainment Weekly, in 1990), and I can confirm that starting a weekly magazine costs money. The title lost something close to $50 million in its first year, a number that may have approached a cumulative $200 million before the magazine turned a profit several years later. No one in publishing today is likely to invest that kind of money in a print product.

In his critique, though, Wolff glosses over an often-missed fact: it's not quite a relaunch. The magazine's print edition was closed in the United States. International editions lived on, with content created by a modest group of journalists who have not stopped even as the brand was kicked hard in the U.S.

A print relaunch in the United States could work, if Impoco is able to deliver a magazine that subscribers are willing to pay for. Here's what he told the New York Times:

It’s going to be a more subscription-based model, closer to what The Economist is compared to what Time magazine is. We see it as a premium product, a boutique product.

This is an idea that stood The Economist in good stead as it has grown in the U.S. market. It's also an idea I offered to Time Inc. as it tries to find its way in the world: "Magazines should be profitable based on circulation alone."

According to Impoco, Newsweek would like to get 100,000 subscribers to buy a subscription in 2014. That's 1/15th the circulation Newsweek had before it closed, although the average price then was below $20.

Is there a market for a weekly magazine priced above $100? The Economist and People have proven yes. The question becomes what Newsweek can do to make its magazine appealing to an audience willing to pay for good journalism. I'm glad to see them try to answer that question.

The growth of native advertising has been led by digital platforms like Buzzfeed and Gawker, and their early success has prompted more traditional media organizations like the Washington Post and Hearst Digital to form internal units to develop sopnsored content. In October, Michael Sebastian profiled each of these companies for Advertising Age.

I've already weighed in on the risks inherent in a perceived failure to clearly separate an editorial from a sponsored message. Sebastian's article offers some operational insights on the move to sponsored content:

• All four companies have hired staff dedicated to the development of native advertising
• All pay their staff as employees; only Gawker offers a bonus based on the performance of native advertising
• Backgrounds tend to vary, although traditional media firms seem more likely to emphasize journalism and editorial experience
• Buzzfeed (40 staff) and Gawker (15) lead the way; Hearst (5) and the Post (building a team) follow

For some additional background, you might want to check out a two-part profile of Buzzfeed that my Quantum Media colleage Ava Seave wrote for Forbes.com:

• Buzzfeed's director of creative: 'Authentic content earns the right to go viral'
• Buzzfeed's native ads: Working toward a fail-safe performance

Both posts draw upon Seave's interview with Melissa Rosenthal, who oversees the staff responsible for creating sponsored content that appears on Buzzfeed.

Writing yesterday about an ongoing debate about the efficacy of paywalls, I considered an argument advanced by Mathew Ingram of GigaOm:

... [P]ersonal relationships are what drive an increasing amount of media-related consumption and activity now — not products, but people. This trend has been fueled by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but it wasn’t created by them. It’s an innate human desire, and (as I’ve argued before) the best pay models take advantage of that desire and build paywalls that are based on readers’ relationships with specific writers.

I responded in part by noting that "[w]hile I'm not convinced that the world is moving to "paywalls that are based on readers’ relationships with specific writers", it clearly is happening already at the margin. Where it ends up is a guess."

Today, I got to re-reading "Three ways to beat the tragedy of the digital commons", a post written by IBM's Ethan McCarty for B-to-B Online. In it, McCarty argues that unfettered access to social media can lead to a tragedy of the commons, in effect an overuse of the shared environment to the detriment of all.

In my first reading, McCarty's argument seemed a misuse of "the commons". Unlike sheep grazing on a common or fish in a sea, social media does not represent a resource that is depleted with use. Revisiting McCarty's work, though, I saw an application that I hadn't envisioned before responding to Ingram's claim that readers follow writers.

McCarty describes the steps that IBM took to manage its social media presence, presented here largely verbatim:

1. Collaborating around a single social-media strategy
2. Building an active, engaged membership that respects the values and philosophy of the organization
3. Creating a curatorial team that determines who has access and when

You might imagine my initial reaction: an established brand responds to social media by implementing a command-and-control plan for engagement. Good luck with that, right?

But McCarty goes on to specifically consider the risks inherent in restricting access:

Because "failure to offer employees full access to social media seriously threatens an organization's competitiveness," it's important that we temper our use of restricting access. At IBM, we published Social Computing Guidelines in early 2006, encouraging IBMers to participate. We intuited (and later learned first hand) that, as my colleague, Susan Emerick puts it in The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, “Brands need to respect the employee's desire to develop their own reputation…the greatest impact occurs when both the brand and the employee understand and integrate each other's strategies.”

While this latter argument sounds more like "finding win-win options" than preventing a tragedy of the commons, the point made by McCarty and Emerick is directly applicable to media entities (and not just established ones). If people really are inclined to follow writers - Andrew Sullivan, Nate Silverberg, Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher provide examples - their employers need to acknowledge and respect that inclination.

The same employers also have a chance to show how individual writers are better served remaining part of a collective - newspapers and magazines, in particular. Ultimately, writers whose work draws an audience will have to be recognized and rewarded in different ways.

The primary challenge, perhaps embodied in Nate Silverberg's departure from the New York Times, may lie in management convincing the organization that win-win scenarios are possible. After a decade of staff cuts in newspapers and magazines, many promising writers may see their own ventures as more stable and attractive.

I'm beginning to think that paywalls are the new piracy, fostering debates in which all sides hold strong opinions backed by precious little data. I don't blame folks for having precious little data - it's early yet - but we could probably dial back on the judgement calls.

One recent example: the announced launch of "The Information", a subscription web site that looks to charge its users $399 a year to access content researched, written and curated by a dedicated staff of about five journalists. Depending on where you stand, this idea is bound to succeed, difficult to pull off or bound to fail. These assessments came in the first day of the new venture. Pick the one you like.

The dividing line between unthinking paywall and business-model innovation can be a bit murky. Covering the New York Times' anticipated paywall strategy, Digiday's Josh Sternberg last October wrote that the Wall Street Journal's base subscription ($260 a year) made them paywall "hardliners". At the same time, he praised People magazine for offers that ranged from $112 to $200 a year.

But here's the thing about those hardliners at the Wall Street Journal: they are offering access for about $1 an issue. The People "paywall" charges $2 to $3.80 an issue, depending on the option you pick. Good work if you can get it, but what makes People innovative and the Journal a bunch of hardliners? Maybe there's a psychic price point around $200, but if so, we can always try changing the way that price is expressed.

Admittedly, it's hard to get people to pay for content. At least, it's hard to get people to pay full boat, though the reasons are not always clear. A generation raised on low subscription prices for ad-supported media may well have been taught (by publishers) to devalue content overall.

Writing for GigaOm, Mathew Ingram himself bumps into a variation of this challenge in "Why the New York Times needs to think less about products and more about relationships", a post he wrote about evolving paywall strategies at the paper.

The Times is developing "micro-paywalls around specific topic areas or content verticals such as food, real estate and opinion." Ingram supports the move but not the thinking behind it:

This is all well and good, but one thing made me stop short: namely, the fact that the paper refuses to call what it is doing a “membership” program, but insists on talking about it as a “premium product” offering instead. This is a mistake.

Why is it a mistake? Because personal relationships are what drive an increasing amount of media-related consumption and activity now — not products, but people. This trend has been fueled by social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but it wasn’t created by them. It’s an innate human desire, and (as I’ve argued before) the best pay models take advantage of that desire and build paywalls that are based on readers’ relationships with specific writers.

In effect, Ingram is arguing that the Times should "disaggregate supply", unbundling newspaper content and letting readers choose the relationships they want to pay for. The Times, fearful that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, is moving slowly on the idea that it should unbundle itself.

Membership-driven associations face a similar challenge. Historically, the association value proposition comes from a collective funding of the commons. We all contribute something, and we gain access to a core offering. In some cases, the core offering provides benefits - lobbying, as an example - of value to only a subset of membership.

Few associations are comfortable unbundling the membership offer, much as most cable providers are slow to offer a la carte channel access. Ingram is right to point out that dragging your heels on a market demand for disaggregated content leaves your traditional business vulnerable.

While I'm not convinced that the world is moving to "paywalls that are based on readers’ relationships with specific writers", it clearly is happening already at the margin. Where it ends up is a guess.

In his Digiday post, Sternberg wrote that "The paywall is growing up because it has no choice. Publishing is a hustle these days, and those willing to try and fail will end up ahead." I think that's where we need to be these days ... experimenting. Dismissing ideas just out of the gate will certainly lead publishers to miss some good opportunities. At this point, we just need to craft the experiments.

Simon Dumenco writes "The Media Guy", a weekly column for Advertising Age that I find to be among the more useful assessments of the media business. He typically delivers his views with a sense of humor that makes even a well-worn path worth walking.

For the past decade, Advertising Age has published a list of the top ten "hottest" magazines, announcing the results at the American Magazine Conference, the annual meeting of the Magazine Publishers of America (now MPA - The Association of Magazine Media). When the most recent list was released in October, Dumenco simultaneously published "Magazines are dead, or why there's no such thing as a (mere) magazine company anymore."

For reference, the Ad Age "A-List" for 2013 included:

1. Bon Appetit
2. Esquire
3. Vice
4. InStyle
5. Elle
6. Women's Health
7. New York
8. Eating Well
9. W
10. Men's Fitness

Both Ad Age and Dumenco celebrate the triumph of legacy print brands on this list. Introducing the list, the Ad Age staff wrote:

And to those who doubt magazine-centric media companies as relevant vehicles circa 2013, take note: Many of the titles on our list are doing phenomenally well with the dead-tree divisions of the operations—in several cases, achieving historic, fattest-ever issues thanks to support from marketers who recognize the enduring value of print.

In his column, Dumenco approaches the topic from a somewhat different angle:

What's perhaps most remarkable is not so much the phoenix-from-the-ashes-of-2008/2009 narrative—because lots of business sectors have also bounced back from those dark days—but how enduring many of our A-List magazines are. We tend to forget how ephemeral a lot of pure-play digital brands end up being, while overlooking the dynastic strength of iconic glossy brands.

In one sense, I agree with Ad Age and Dumenco's arguments. It's foolish to argue that print is dead. It would be more accurate to say that print alone no longer makes much sense.

Here, even that argument is framed with an untested qualifier: we're talking about ad-supported print media. I mean, it's a given that Advertising Age would be most interested in ad-supported media. But the selection process depends on a number of criteria (growth in ad pages, for example) that are not necessarily a sign of a media entity's health.

Toward the end of his column, Dumenco compared the vitality of the 2013 list to the demise of Friendster and Myspace. I think those are the wrong benchmarks. As it happens, the premise inherent in his title ("there's no such thing as a (mere) magazine company") could be extended to other media, as well.

We live in an age when Flipboard "magazines" are created from the work of books by Margaret Atwood and George R.R. Martin. Newspapers have learned to tells stories like Snowfall, the multimedia package that had industry observers debating its utility and sustainability.

Journalistic enterprises like Epic have been launched to source and fund stories that ultimately may drive the development of movie scripts. Some movie companies employ tactics that sound more like Moneyball than the studio model.

This makes it harder to say just what a "hot" media property looks like these days. Consider how Ad Age describes Vice, which appeared third on its Top-10 list:

The print edition continues to thrive, with ad pages up and expansion to 24 international editions meaning global distribution of 1.1 million copies. But Vice's video content has earned more than 1.1 billion views today across Vice.com and other distribution channels, including the Vice channel on YouTube. That rapidly growing digital-meets-video-meets-cable content business is what fueled revenue reportedly north of $175 million last year, and prompted a $70 million August investment by 21st Century Fox that valued Vice Media at more than $1 billion.

It's a story-driven brand, and yes, it does get ad support. But Vice is inherently digital, increasingly global and entirely comfortable with video.

To me, the surprise isn't that Esquire or Elle or New York magazine continues to make the list after all these years. The surprise is that we think the list is a proxy for success. Just last week, New York announced that it would cut its print frequency from 42 to 26 issues a year. If success in ad-supported print media means you have to reduce your frequency, we may want to refine our definitions of success.

Around this time last year, I started writing about using the web to offer "a living representation" of a particular content object - a book, for example. In part I said:

I think we're inexorably moving to 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.

In the time since, I've incorporated this idea into a handful of other posts, notably the presentation-length version of "Disaggregating supply" last April. The depth of a web-first publishing model can be seen in projects like "The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs", a twelve-volume set produced by James Bridle to capture all changes made between December 2004 and November 2009 to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War.

A smaller example of the web's dimensionality is made visible by Paul Ford in his Medium post, "Hedgefox Buys Metayacht". In it, Ford offers his take on Jeff Bezos acquiring The Washington Post. It's worth your time to read, but I want to focus on something Ford does to amplify his points.

If you are familiar with Medium, you know that it offers readers the ability to comment on a subset of a published text - a paragraph, for example, or even a word. The interface is simple and intuitive, and the individual comments are seen only when a reader chooses to make them visible.

Without dismissing the value of comments from readers, what intrigued me about Ford's post is his use of the annotation feature to offer comments from the writer. Ford is not just responding to comments; he is amplifying his own work.

Take a look at the comment attached to a word ("insane") in the paragraph that begins "Why would such a man want to own the Washington Post?" Scroll down a bit and view his two additional comments on the paragraph that starts "As we were screechingly informed".

There are other notes, other insights into how Ford thinks about his subject and even his own work. Ford's comments create a level of intimacy that is hard to obtain in an unadorned post. Moreover, the notes aren't a single moment. They could have been created at inception, upon proofing, after hearing some feedback or months later, in a reconsideration of the work.

I don't want to come across as breathless, but as I wrote last month, annotation is probably the new black. As Medium evolves its platform, one of its redeeming features may be the opportunity it affords authors to deepen their conversations with readers.

Hubspot, the inbound marketing platform that helps its clients host and offer targeted content, recently revamped and relaunched its blog as Inbound Hub. After it went live, Kat Meyer sent me a link to coverage on Openview Labs, written by Jonathan Crowe.

Crowe interviews Jay Acunzo, senior manager of content at Hubspot, who explained why the company felt a need to change its approach:

We’re really up against the known edge of what content can do to drive business right now — nobody knows what this stuff looks like at great scale. When I joined HubSpot to head up content, I saw how our scale — the volume, variety of post topics, different goals and formats, and a big network of contributors — was starting to break that standard single-column business blog. It’s totally new territory compared to a company struggling to publish weekly without going dark.

To address that content "glut", Inbound Hub was reorganized "to create more topic-specific and reader-friendly subscriber options". Moving away from a single-column presentation also meant that site navigation had to be rethought, so that it would balance simplicity and depth.

When it came to breaking down content to offer those topic-specific options, Acunzo described the reorganization as "a way to place more control back into the hands of our audience, since they can subscribe specifically to what they enjoy most. If sales-related content is irrelevant to you, then you don’t need to subscribe to it. You as the consumer hold the control — as it always should be."

Happily, this perspective explicitly considers choice, a core component of "Disaggregating supply". It also fits nicely with yesterday's post about the role of content strategists:

But content strategy is more than the activity formerly known as ... something else. It is organized around customers, not formats or functions. The messaging is a component of corporate strategy.

This is an area in which traditional publishers need to evolve, and quickly. Platforms like Hubspot increasingly provide marketers with an opportunity to serve the media functions once owned by periodical and even book publishers.

The lines between editorial and marketing content are already blurred, as marketers work to answer questions and solve problems for both current and prospective customers. If publishing incumbents can't establish a customer-facing legitimacy, marketers may become their new and even primary distribution channel.

Because I spend most of my time thinking about how content is created, managed and distributed, I'm a pushover for articles on content strategy. Fast Company recently featured one by Rusty Weston, a "content strategist, editor, and writer" based in San Francisco.

The post, "5 must-know things about content strategists", makes these core points:

1. Content strategy is not new; it was just called "something else"
2. Search engine optimization (SEO) alone won't carry the day
3. Lofty goals should be paired with lofty resources
4. Good content strategy depends on good content workflows
5. In a new role, content strategists must regularly explain what they do

The list as a whole is useful, but you can probably divine from these points that "Advice for content strategists" might have been a better title for the piece. "5 must-know things" probably helps with SEO, though.

Still, claiming that content strategy "was just called something else" troubled me. In Weston's view:

Before the title content strategist was popularized, we were involved with the precursor to “content:” News, advertising, marketing or something in between. I was an online editor and consultant for the better part of a decade. But the majority of us came from marketing departments or advertising agencies, and some of us were copywriters.

Certainly, many people who are now called "content strategists" came from functions that touched upon content. In that sense, their prior skills and experience are being put to use in a larger setting.

But content strategy is more than the activity formerly known as ... something else. It is organized around customers, not formats or functions. The messaging is a component of corporate strategy.

A content strategist who continues to think of the role as an extension of news, advertising or marketing misses the cross-functional cooperation required to organize around customers. Publishers who treat content strategy as a way to push messages to consumers will probably continue to rely on established formats, missing the two-way communication available across multiple platforms.

Content strategy is new, and making it work requires a shift in perspective, from functions to purpose and from formats to consumers. On its own, that's a lofty goal.

After the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) evaluated a screening program put in place by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote "TSA's got 94 signs to ID terrorists. but they're unproven by science". On two fronts, ouch.

The first is the science. Anderson explains how the GAO audiited this program, which reportedly costs $200 million a year:

For the report, GAO auditors looked at the outside scientific literature, speaking to behavioral researchers and examining meta-analyses of 400 separate academic studies on unmasking liars. That literature suggests that "the ability of human observers to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral cues or indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance (54 percent)." That result holds whether or not the observer is a member of law enforcement.

The second is the absurdity of trying to spot terrorists using 94 leading indicators:

[The TSA program] relies on a network of 3,000 behavior detection officers (BDOs) deployed at 176 airports around the country. BDOs observe passengers waiting to cross security checkpoints into the "sterile" section of an airport. They are trained to observe 94 different signs of stress, fear, and deception, with the goal of calculating a "point total" for an observed individual in less than 30 seconds. The 94 signs remain a secret, but we do know that anyone displaying enough of them is referred for a patdown and secondary screening, during which officers will engage in "casual conversation" to determine whether the traveler poses a potential threat.

There's not much value in jumping all over the TSA; they have plenty of critics (and I will have to fly again sooner or later). But 94 signs? Forget 30 seconds; you couldn't evaluate that many signs in 30 minutes.

Naturally I think there's a lesson for publishing here: what Peter Collingridge has described as "the surprising power of little data". Rather than spend years building comprehensive systems to cover every possibility, pick a small set of things you'd like to test and pilot them. Collect (some) data along the way, evaluate what you find and refine where needed.

A good example of this approach can be found in SourceBooks. The company's CEO, Dominique Raccah, has been recognized twice this fall as a publishing innovator and an inspiration among digital pioneers. Although the awards are new, they follow years of smaller-scale innovation in areas like poetry and education.

More recently, SourceBooks has teamed up with Wattpad to sign and market young-adult titles. In making the announcement, Raccah said, "This partnership is all about helping connect talented authors with readers.” I don't think Sourcebooks or Wattpad will need 94 ways to measure when that happens.

In September, Wired ran an except from Clive Thompson's new book, Smarter Than You Think. Thompson writes regularly for the print publication; I find his column one of the magazine's better features.

The excerpt, "Your casual acquaintances on Twitter are better than your close friends on Facebook", is somewhat mistitled, as the part that Wired ran deals almost exclusively with Facebook. Thompson's piece is still worth reading, as he argues that "weak ties" - remote friends on Facebook, and I imagine almost everyone you might follow on Twitter - are a richer source of discovery and opportunity:

Socially, we tend to be close friends with people who mirror us demographically, culturally, intellectually, politically, and professionally. This makes it easy to bond — but it also means that we drink from the same informational pool. Any jobs my close friends have heard about, I’ve heard about, too.

Thompson lays out the theory pretty well in his post and at greater length in his book. His work got me thinking again about format-specific services like Goodreads, which does a good job sharing perspectives and recommendations among friends.

This isn't a critique of Goodreads, as its approach serves an audience of book devotees that publishers are already reaching. An over-reliance on services like Goodreads, though, effectively means that we are primarily pursuing existing customers.

That's a slow-growing and disruption-prone universe. Reaching back to "Context first", I've noted:

[W]e treat readers as if their needs can be defined by containers.  But in a digital world, search takes place before physical sampling, much more often than the reverse.  Readers may at times look for a specific product, but more often they search for an answer, a solution, a spark that turns into an interest and perhaps a purchase.

The key to success is not becoming more efficient at reaching the customers we have, but growing the number of customers we can reach. As long as "the defining metaphor is a book", we're pursuing those with whom we already have the strongest ties, likely forsaking the promise and potential of those consumers with whom we have only the weakest connections.

For the last several weeks, I have been building on a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Last week, I looked at what Bjarnason calls a “more symmetrical relationship between reading and writing”. In this final post in the series, I am considering his argument for a “greater variety of models for how we extract value from writing”.

In his originating post, Bjarnason's examples ranged "from gift-giving (pay-what-you-want) to subscription to dynamic pricing (like automatically increasing or decreasing prices the more people buy to create either scarcity or abundance, depending on what you want)." Although these models aren't firmly established in publishing, there are some emerging examples to show that they can work.

Storybundle, for example, invites readers to "support awesome indie authors by paying however much you think their work is worth". Readers who pay more than $10 are eligible to download bonus titles. The bundles are genre-specific (video games and romance at the moment), and titles are sold without the use of DRM, making them readable across multiple devices.

Although funded startups are getting the lion's share of press attention, subscription models already exist in publishing. A post I wrote last week talked about Safari Books Online, Coursesmart and Valobox as different ways to bundle and access content. These services don't require you to acquire the whole book. You access what you need.

Dynamic pricing also exists, although it is implemented mostly by online retailers. If there is an example of a publisher using dynamic pricing on its direct sales, I am not yet aware of it.

In publishing Book: A Futurist's Manifesto, a title I co-edited with Hugh McGuire, O'Reilly Media elected to release the book sequentially. Readers who bought the first section at a low price received the second and third sections at no additional charge. We wanted to encourage people to buy the book early, comment on it and build a conversation around the content of the entire book. The pricing scheme helped us do that.

Each of these examples outlines what can work, not necessarily what will work. Different types of books likely will benefit from different models (the technology focus for Safari Books is an example). But demand for different, flexible, customized pricing models is likely to grow. Meeting that demand is another way to "make eBooks worth it".

Last month, David Bauer posted "An unfinished list of ventures in journalism you should be watching (and why)", an extended consideration of "what", "why" and "where" to find 38 new-media efforts. As the title suggests, Bauer is treating the post as a work in progress. Readers have already suggested another 17 companies to add to his list.

There's a lot to like about Bauer's unfinished list. He looks globally, featuring companies operating in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. He also goes well beyond the usual suspects, featuring startups in data journalism (Ampp3d, Journalism++) and local interest (Narratively) as well as hard paywalls (Mediapart) and "news as a process" (OnOn.at).

Bauer's perspective is potentially useful (and sobering) for publishers (and consultants) who are looking for "the" answer: 

Given the speed of technological change and the complexity of what is now the media landscape, it’s unlikely we’ll ever find a model that will work for more than a few years for more than a few publishers. The hype around native advertising or metered paywalls is primarily a manifestation of the hope for silver bullets. There will have to be lots of experiments.

In a generous move, Bauer posted his entire list on Github and invited comments, edits and enhancements. Take a look and see if there are any companies you think he should add. The first 55 (including reader suggestions to date) are a good start, and I am sure there are more worthy experiments to watch.

In August, I wrote a post that encouraged publishers looking to test new approaches to "start with an audience, focus deeply on its needs and keep the established entity at bay". One of the examples I used was Refinery29, a retailer that had grown its own content-driven online presence.

Writing about Refinery29, I observed that a "first-time visitor could easily mistake the web presence for a lifestyle media site." Apparently, investors think so too.

Last month, the retailer announced that it had secured $20 million in additional financing to expand its content focus. An article by Erin Griffith of PandoDaily (now just Pando) notes that this is just one of several content-related deals:

The decision to double down on content is a sign of the times. Refinery29′s fundraise follows an even bigger raise from its fellow NYC media startup, Vox Media. The parent of The Verge and SB Nation closed on $36 million of a $40 million round, bringing its total funds raised to an eye-popping $80 million. BuzzFeed has turned profitable after raising $46.3 million. Business Insider raised $18.6 million. Vice Media is worth $1.4 billion.

Agreed, Refinery29 is a vertical and Buzzfeed is not journalism. But there is funding for content-related ventures. Established publishers should be thinking about "doubling down" on content plays of their own. I should, too.

Edited on November 27 to add: On Twitter, Peter Collingridge fairly noted that "Buzzfeed does some good journalism". I clarified on Twitter that "the aside isn't an indictment; more a call to think about journalism as a still unfilled niche". I struggle with the list-driven approach that dominates Buzzfeed, but its success is evident.

Last month, the American Magazine Conference convened a panel to address the question, "How should editorial guidelines influence the development of native advertising?" As covered by Advertising Age, the answer was "not at all". I think that's a mistaken perspective.

First, a bit of background: In this case, the "editorial guidelines" are a set of recommended practices, developed the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), that began as a way to distinguish the presentation of advertiser-sponsored print content from editorial. The basic rules involved visual clues: fonts should differ from those used for editorial; layouts should not mimic editorial formats; and pages should be prominently labeled something like "special advertising section".

In the past, publications that did not follow the guidelines have been sanctioned, a scarlet letter that probably had relatively little commercial impact. Advertisers, sales people and some magazines have periodically tested the limits of ASME guidelines, and sometimes ASME pushed back.

As publishing has moved from print to digital distribution, ASME has updated its guidelines. Still, the ability to embed related links, sponsored links, paid content and now native advertising has left some editors wondering if there are any limits to what a publisher will do for an advertiser.

I've argued that the best solution, perhaps the only solution, is to do what's right by the reader. If you don't meet the needs and expectations of your readers, you don't have much of an audience to offer anyone else.

That sensibility was far from evident at the AMC panel, whose participants offered these perspectives (verbatim):

• The industry worries too much about labeling. For 100 years we've conditioned people to ignore advertising. Native advertising changes that with the right content and intentions.
• It's important for us that [native advertising] looks like a content site.
• We won't be using the term native advertising in five years. There will no need to identify it. It will all blend.
• A very small group of people* shouldn't over-police native advertising.

As much as publishers and ad agencies want to resist an organization like ASME, the association at least represents an effort to police publishing on behalf of consumers. A perceived failure to clearly separate an editorial from a sponsored message generally gets the attention of a somewhat larger group of people at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

This isn't an idle observation. The FTC has already investigated bloggers who accepted payment, whether in cash or in kind, for special mentions of products and services. The practice was widespread enough to warrant govenment intervention. It resulted in the promulgation of a set of guidelines that mandated disclosure and transparency. It also made clear the penalties for failing to follow the rules.

Now, native advertising gains the spotlight. The FTC "will host a one-day workshop on Wednesday, December 4, 2013 to examine the blending of advertisements with news, entertainment, and other editorial content in digital media". Attendees are expected to include "publishing and advertising industry representatives, consumer advocates, academics, and self-regulatory organizations".

In a tweet made during the AMC panel, Forbes publisher Mike Federle was quoted as saying that it won't be ASME or the FTC telling publishers what to do with native advertising; the direction will come from consumers. If publishers don't serve readers' needs, the complaints will certainly come from consumers, but I think the FTC has shown that it is more than willing to set direction. Just look at the blogger guidelines.

*This means "ASME".

A bit of disclosure: I worked with Mike Federle when he was an ad salesperson at Time Inc.

In The Guardian last month, David Byrne published "The internet will suck all creative content out of the world", a critique of music-streaming services like Spotify. In it, Byrne argues that the popularity of streaming "spells disaster for today's artists across the creative industries".

Byrne is an accomplished musician, blogger and author. His 2012 book, How Music Works, provides a sweeping overview of the ways that music shapes our lives, making his Guardian lament one worth considering.

Much of Byrne's concern is focused on Spotify, a music-streaming service that is available in the United States in one of three ways:

• For free on desktop or laptop devicees, paid for by ads
• Ad free for U.S. $4.99 a month on desktop or laptop devices
• Ad free for U.S. $9.99 a month, on any device with the added ability to download music and listen offline

A fair share of Bryne's attention goes to the third option, a kind of "race to the bottom" that provides unlimited access to songs for a fixed price.

Although Byrne has taken steps to keep the music he does control off Spotify, he argues less strongly that other artists do so. He does wish for better terms - major record labels appear to pay about 15% of the roughly 70% of the revenue they get from streaming services, a rate that adds up to very little for many artists.

When I read posts like this one, I can usually find a point of entry to reframe the debate, but not this time. If anything, Byrne reminded me something I wrote for "The opportunity in abundance":

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

It seems clear that streaming services are popular among consumers. It also seems clear that these services need to create a win-win scenario for the artists who make the music they stream. Byrne rightly points out that the work done to date - in effect, adapting terms that were in place in the established model - provides little incentive for those creating the work.

Like Byrne, I don't have an answer, but I think the record labels (major and independent, alike) have a vested interest in convening the players to find a solution. It strikes me that labels, not artists, are at the greatest risk. Historically, they control catalogues of music, a set of rights that will persist for a certain amount of time.

That gives them a superior position today, but any artist could reasonably ask if they'd rather go directly to Spotify and get 70% of the revenue, or work through a label and take half of that or less. If labels don't act soon to demonstrate their value in support of an industry, they may encourage artists to make deals that eliminate labels entirely. That's a lesson that can be applied broadly.

I am continuing to build on a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Last week, I looked at what Bjarnason calls a “more peer-like, less hierarchical, relationship between the reader and writer". In this post, I'd like to consider his argument for “a more symmetrical relationship between reading and writing.”

In his originating post, Bjarnason adds that “reading, annotations, quotes and more should feed directly into writing systems.” The systems side of the equation was covered in last Friday’s post, which called for a more focused move “toward annotated, threaded mesh of book content”.

The human part of things is proving a bit more difficult. When it comes to writing, editing and publishing content, we are still developing an “architecture of collaboration” around what it means to create among peers.

Some of the language we use to describe writing reinforces the notion that creation is an individual act. Images persist of writers toiling away for years in small, cluttered garrets. We think of writers (and editors) with solo, sometimes silent “eureka” moments, critical points at which great ideas are born.

And then there’s reality.

Before we are writers, we are all readers. Our early writings emulate, crib, maybe even copy the work of others. We stand, by design and often enough without attribution, on the shoulders of giants. (This thought cribbed from Richard Nash, who would probably say he'd borrowed parts of it from others.)

November 19 marked the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, a speech given by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln at the site of one of the Civil War’s most deadly battles. The speech, just ten sentences long, is considered a pre-eminent example of English-language prose.

Lincoln wrote it, and several drafts persist to this day. There is no record of the speech, other than a transcription of the remarks made by someone attending. Even this version is somewhat disputed.

What is not disputed: Lincoln borrowed from or was inspired by others in creating some of the speech’s most memorable phrases. The precise sources are debated, with scholars and observers citing Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the King James Bible as well as the works of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, U.S. senator Daniel Webster and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Marshal.

Lincoln deserves credit for the language he used, but were he among us today, he would not claim that it was his alone. He knew how to do what we all do: reach back to older texts to find a way to shed light on our own times. We borrow and amend to make the known relevant to a new world, one that grew out of the older ones.

This practice isn’t new; it is as old as storytelling itself. In a commercial age, we’ve moved to a structure of ownership and copyrights. Those agreements have their place, but interpreting them as protecting an individual’s work has dampened opportunity for interaction and innovation. Developing a new architecture, one of collaboration, won’t replace copyright, but it is sure to broaden it.

Henry Blodget, a disgraced securities analyst who delivers presentations, blogs about washroom attendants and runs a gossipy web site generally focused on business, recently tried to make a point about Google being “bigger than both the magazine and newspaper industries”.

Before we look under the hood, I’ll make my core point. It doesn’t matter how big Google is. The newspaper and magazine markets are just small and growing too slowly. The biggest problem with legacy print media is its size, not its digital competition.

Back to the chart: The revenues Blodget used for Google include everything – advertising, affiliate sales, product sales, interest income. Although there is scant explanation for the 2012 number (the slide claims “Google, NAA, PIB” as sources), it appears to be Google’s total revenue for 2012 ($46.039 billion) multiplied by the share of revenues derived from the U.S. market (46%):

$46.039 billion x 0.46 = $21.178 billion

A cursory check of Google’s 10-K for 2012 (available online, for free) shows that the company breaks out advertising revenues for its own and its partner sites. Why not use one of these numbers to show Google’s advertising might? Well, one reason is that it would change the narrative.

Advertising revenue from Google websites in 2012 was $31.221 billion. Borrowing the 46% share from the total revenue calculation, you can do the math:

$31.221 billion x 0.46 = $14.362 billion

By comparison, the newspaper number that Blodget picked up from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) for advertising revenue in 2012 appears to be $18.931 billion, which represents total advertising revenue for “daily & Sunday newspaper print”. It excludes digital advertising ($3.37 billion) and a category called “niche publications, direct marketing & non-daily publication advertising” ($2.9 billion). Include those and newspaper ad revenues came to $25.316 billion in 2012.

Bizarrely, Blodget then uses Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) revenue data to claim that the U.S. magazine industry earned $19.475 billion in advertising revenue in 2012. Here are three things you want to know about that number:

1. It is false. PIB revenues are calculated at the open rate. After discounting and agency fees, publishers may see about 30% of that revenue.
2. Everyone knows that it is false.
3. It represents only consumer magazines, and a cross-section of them, at that.

Google didn’t pass consumer magazines’ ad revenue in 2012. It did that in 2007 or 2008. If Blodget was looking then, he didn’t include it in this presentation.

[As a side note: Even though the number is available, Blodget excluded ad revenues ($1.599 billion) for Sunday magazines. Again, let’s decide on the story and customize the numbers to fit.]

Very few people will sit down and examine Blodget’s claims. His site promotes the chart (reporter Jim Edwards calls Google’s rise “staggering”) without question. We’ll probably hear renewed calls for the government to “so something” about Google (and Amazon, while they are at it).

The search for factoids, these magical inflection points, blinds us to the things we should be doing as publishers. Blodget could have used his moment to say that magazine ad revenues, significant as they are to the publishers who earn them, are trivial in total. As the digital world continues to shift from branded to programmatic advertising, those revenues will become something akin to a footnote.

Magazine publishers should be figuring out how to live in a post-advertising universe. Newspaper publishers should be asking themselves why their digital advertising revenues are increasing by single digits (3.7% in 2012) when the rest of the online world grows at a multiple of that figure. And readers of Business Insider should be weaning themselves off untested factoids.

Earlier this month, Arthur Attwell posted "Tough truths about selling to publishers". The post includes the content (text and slides) of a presentation he gave at "the inaugural Footnote Summit, South Africa's new digital-publishing summit."

Attwell is no stranger to publishing or its many events. His work experience includes time spent with Oxford and Pearson, while his distributed print-book startup, Paperight, was chosen from a short list of startups and recognized as the best in show at last February's Tools of Change meeting in New York.

For several years, Attwell has been trying to partner with publishers on new ideas. The road has not been easy, and he packaged his experiences into five "tough truths":

1. People love you. Their organizations don't.
2. The right person is rarely the right person.
3. Most people don't speak XML.
4. Anchored numbers (internal hurdles) are sticky.
5. Risk and regret loom large.

Yesterday, Porter Anderson dedicated part of Ether for Authors, his regular contribution to Publishing Perspectives, to ask "Is there an 'architecture of collaboration' for startups?" The phrase is borrowed, fairly, from an observation I'd made last month after attending the fourth iteration of Books in Browsers.

In this most recent Ether for Authors, Anderson considers the dynamic that persistently unfolds between traditional publishers and the startup community that hopes to partner with them. Most of these startups want to offer publishers new ways to distribute and sell content. Anderson observes:

Major corporate structures—and the traditions of doing business that create their scaffolding— make fruitful collaboration with small, lean, tightly targeted startups very challenging.

The topic draws its share of time and attention, particularly when a company like Small Demons announces it cannot continue without additional, as yet unrealized funding. In a post motivated in part by Small Demons' plight, I suggested a course of action for publishers:

I counsel publishers to place their bets broadly, investing in limited ways with startups. At the least, make it easy for companies with a range of new ideas to do business with you. If publishers really feel they are in a dogfight with Amazon and Apple, it would be nice to have some tech-savvy allies in their camp.

That said, the window for partnerships may be closing, but for a different set of reasons. Bowker recently announced that in 2012 it issued more than 391,000 ISBNs for self-published titles, an increase over 59% over 2011. Something like 40% of those ISBNs identify eBook formats.

Those numbers represent just the titles published with identifiers. The self-published total is probably much higher, as books distributed within a platform like Kindle or Nook Press can be sold without an ISBN (though Laura Dawson can give you a course on why that's not always a good idea).

In and of itself, growth in the self-publishing market does not signifiy the end of traditional publishing. Multiple models can and do co-exist. But a new set of less rigid options is already operating in the publishing space.

When a platform like Smashwords (which distributes more than 100,000 self-published titles) signs a deal with Oyster, the emerging book subscription service, we can laugh about the apparent quality of some of the Smashwords books. Ear to the ground, though, we might listen as authors and entrepreneurs ask, "Do startups really need publishers?"

Earlier this month, Techcrunch featured “Startups Pitching A “Netflix For E-Books” May Have A Tough Sell”, a post by Sarah Perez. In her piece, Perez offered some thoughts on why a rental market for books seems less likely to develop, even as a rental market for movies takes hold.

In making her case, Perez focuses largely on the trade publishing market, the kinds of books you’d find at Barnes & Noble or your local independent bookseller. In that space, I agree that the companies trying to make eBook rentals a reality in the United States face an uphill battle, but I think Perez misses the core reason:

It's really hard to buy a trade eBook today.

For general-interest eBooks, there is very little space between “buying” and “renting”. For the most part, eBooks are licensed: they are limited to a single platform, can be shared only in circumscribed ways and cannot be resold.

The eBooks you rent … are limited to a single platform, cannot be shared and were never yours to resell. There's just a sliver of daylight separating "buying" and "renting" in the eBook space.

By comparison, you can actually buy movies, making the purchase/rental calculation a real one. The price of a single high-definition movie is generally higher than the price for monthly streaming, but you can lend and resell the physical disk. Typically, you can also watch purchased movies on more than one platform.

In markets like the United States, publishers have been happy to rely on platform-specific eBook sales (happy, that is, until the platforms started to test or determine the price of eBooks). Until recently, the same publishers have been reluctant to sell eBooks to libraries, and the current relationship between publishers and libraries is not what anyone would call cozy.

Looking at this landscape, you could conclude that publishers kind of like digital books as they are: hamstrung, of little downstream value and mostly available through closed platforms. That's a point that industry observer bowerbird made after I recently argued that "publishers need to stop letting lock-in trump functionality".

A focus on trade publishing in the United States can also blind us. In her TechCrunch profile, Perez missed three other, useful trends:

• The eBook market is increasingly global
• There are already useful vertical services
• There are already pay-as-you-read options

While these trends are not the primary challenge to eBook subscription services, they aren’t trivial, either. Global is important: A company like 24 Symbols, based in Spain, might not get the buzz that Oyster has received, but it was up and running before Oyster went looking for capital.

A canny global subscription model might also work in markets where the average reader can’t afford to pay list price for books. In 2011, a study of media piracy in emerging economies found that high price relative to average income was a leading indicator of the instance of piracy. A targeted subscription model could provide publishers with an opportunity to open up new markets while lowering the risk of downstream piracy.

Perez also missed the important vertical services that have already developed around specific content niches, including technology (Safari Books Online) and higher education (Coursesmart). These and other services provide users with the ability to consume less than a whole book or to review content from a wider cross-section of titles than any one user might buy.

“Sampling” is an idea also explored by ValoBox, a U.K.-based “pay-as-you-read” service. Publishers can set a price for a unit of reading – a chapter, for example, or a section on a given topic – and Valobox acts as a toll keeper. Readers never pay more than they would for a full work, but they pay only for what they read.

None of these examples is necessarily “the” solution for subscription-like services for books. For all we know, none may persist. But there’s a significant risk in evaluating any business model against only what we know.

There are many different types of publishing, with markets for digital content spread around the world. Subscription models could provide publishers with options to be global, niche and customized, all at once.

In a recent essay, "Real pages are all about flow", Aaron Miller makes a good case for rethinking one of book publishing's core metaphors:

Pagination is the process of fitting an author’s work into predefined, separate areas to be bound together. It’s the process of artificially creating pages. Why artificially? Because it exists only as a solution to the problems of putting ink on paper and shipping it around to stores, not as a real concept that authors think about. Real pages, it seems, would better fit what authors really meant for them.

Although Miller doesn't specifically invoke Hugh McGuire, the "pagination" argument is consistent with "Why the book and the internet will merge", an essay that McGuire contributed to Book: A Futurist's Manifesto. In that piece, McGuire argued:

Ebooks are, in fact, a lot more like websites than like print books. Or rather: they are almost exactly like websites. Ebooks are built in HTML, which is the programming language (or mark-up language, if you prefer) used to make websites. There really isn’t that much difference between the stuff we use to build, say, an article about Britney Spears in the Huffington Post, and an EPUB of Don Quixote.

For his part, Miller approaches the possibilities from the point of view of an author:

I’m not suggesting that pages will disappear from our experience. But pagination, as an artifact of centuries of non-scrollable books, will become glaringly anachronistic. Again, the distinction between pagination and pages is that pagination breaks up content in ways the industry demands, while pages break up content in exactly the way the author intends. As pagination gradually disappears from the overall experience of reading books, pages will be valued even more. And each one will be expected to contain exactly what the author wanted there: nothing more, and nothing less.

Hopefully, I'm making the case here that McGuire and Miller, approaching the topic from different points of view, reach similar conclusions.

Both McGuire and Miller published their work on platforms that allowed commenting. "Why the book and the internet will merge" was first published on the PressBooks platform that McGuire helped develop, while Miller posted "Real pages are all about flow" on Medium.

Reaching back to something I wrote as long ago as last Friday: these platforms are examples of efforts to create a "more peer-like, less hierarchical, relationship between the reader and writer". Just park your view about pages at the door.

A bit of disclosure: With Travis Alber, Aaron Miller contributed a chapter to Book: A Futurist's Manifesto, a title I co-edited with Hugh McGuire. I am a persistent fan of PressBooks and the capabilities it brings to publishers of all sizes and most shapes. Neither Miller nor McGuire had any involvement in the creation or knowledge of the content of this post before it was published.

I am continuing to build on a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Last week, I looked at what Bjarnason calls “democratised tools of publishing". In this post, I'd like to consider his argument for a “more peer-like, less hierarchical, relationship between the reader and writer".

In a number of ways, the change Bjarnason wants to see is already happening around us. For several years, Bob Stein has been developing SocialBook, a peer-based commenting system. Platforms like Medium have launched with intuitive, web-based commenting as a core feature.

More recently, the Open Knowledge Foundation developed Annotator, “an open-source JavaScript library and tool that can be added to any webpage to make it annotatable.” The Annotator web site goes on to explain:

Annotations can have comments, tags, users and more. Moreover, the Annotator is designed for easy extensibility so it’s a cinch to add a new feature or behaviour.

In September, Peter Brantley, director of scholarly communication at Hypothes.is, gave a presentation at the Publishing Business Conference that included a partial list of the companies and projects that are using the Annotator API. Early adopters include Hypothes.is, Annotorious and the Max Planck Institute, as well as projects at Harvard University (Open Video Annotation) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (its Annotation Studio).

These early efforts are exploring and extending what Brantley called the “key characteristics of open annotation”. Among these characteristics (presented here pretty much verbatim):

• Specificity via direct reference
• Additional detail/content by authors
• A ‘mesh’ that links across publishers, authors, works and media
• Threaded conversation
• Interoperability across services
• Social features (e.g., following, groups)

So, with all of this good work underway, why is Baldur Bjarnason still pining for a “more peer-like, less hierarchical, relationship between the reader and writer"?

Remember that this series started with his post, “Make eBooks worth it”. Although the eBook standard is based in part on HTML, it is not yet “of the web”. To the extent that annotation – conversation, really  - occurs within the current eBook ecosystem, it is largely controlled by the platforms that sell and host the content.

Generally, publishers accept these limitations. Steeped in a format – print – that offers few opportunities for review, comment and conversation, publishers tend to see annotation as an aberration, a special use case that need not be widely supported.

But book, periodical and user-generated content spurs conversation every moment of every day. Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads points to the commercial value of efforts to capture some of those conversations. Authors like Hugh Howey illustrate how self-published authors can capitalize on a substantial opportunity, learning from and responding to the reaction and direction of their fan bases.

Admittedly, it can be easier to continue to rely on locked, digital containers. Testing the value of making content accessible and annotatable on the web requires skill sets not yet native to traditional publishing.

Standing still is not a great option, though. Content formats that emulate what we’ve had in the past represent a static, if not declining market.

It’s more than possible that an “interoperable, threaded ‘mesh’ that links across publishers, authors, works and media” could open up new markets and new levels of engagement for readers around the globe. It’s worth testing, and not in a small way. Some things must be believed to be seen.

A bit of disclosure: Peter Brantley is a colleague and a friend. He afforded me a spot on the agenda of each of the first three iterations of "Books in Browsers", the annual meeting that he created and now plans jointly with Kat Meyer and the Frankfurt Book Fair. His support and willingness to take a risk on a new idea was instrumental in the development of "Context first" in 2010.

A debate broke out last month over the future of periodicals on tablets. Although the participants focused on magazines, the implications apply to book and newspaper publishers, as well.

True to internet form, this debate followed a predictable path:

1. An industry pundit, observer or funder explains "why tablet magazines are a failure"
2. The CEO of a company that makes magazine apps says they are "here to stay"
3. An informed insider provides a handful of examples that "aren't failures"

And… let the comments begin.

If you read through just these three pieces, you'll find overlap. In declaring tablets a dead end for magazine content, Jon Lund argued that apps are a high-cost solution to a small-market problem. Greg Hano, the CEO of Mag+, the software company that specializes in apps, says that growth is still possible and it's too early to write off this new medium.

For his part, Sam Kirkland, writing for Poynter.org, acknowledges the cost challenge but encourages experimentation. He concludes:

But that doesn’t mean publications should stop experimenting with apps completely — at least not until the Web becomes so robust that apps lose their advantages in bundling, design, and interactivity and this debate becomes moot.

Okay, it's not quite the makings of a flame war. It's just a debate about the wrong topic. When it comes to content creation, management and dissemination, we should be figuring out how to grow, not how to "not die".

Take Game Informer magazine, an example from Lund's motivating post. The magazine has the largest number (nearly 3 million) and highest share (38%) of "digital replica" paid circulation of any magazine profiled in Lund's piece.

Lund treats Game Informer as the exception, noting that GameStop includes a digital subscription to the magazine for anyone who buys its loyalty card ($14.99 at retail). The implication is clear: the circulation is bought through a partner.

But here's the thing about Game Informer that the commenters missed: it is by far the single largest magazine on the list.

Forget about tablets, apps, physical or digital formats: every issue, nearly 8 million people receive a copy of Game Informer. That's 2.6 million more subscribers than Reader's Digest. That's more than twice the number of copies sold by People magazine.

A generation ago, there was no Game Informer. Today, its circulation makes it the largest magazine circulated in the United States, delivered to an audience that most publishers think won't read.

Implicit in the "high cost, small market" assessment are two corrosive beliefs: people will only pay what they have paid in the past (if not less); and the market is static, or shrinking. Those untested assumptions lead us to look at a new platform - in this case tablets - as fundamentally an extension of what we've done in the past.

If they could shake this bias, Lund, Hano and Kirkland would likely find common ground in a focus on the unmet content needs of audiences. Some of that need can be met in print, and some of it will be better addressed using the platforms we have and the ones that have yet to be invented.

Here are the questions I'd like to have everyone ask first: What can we do to grow the market for content consumption? And, what can we do to grow the market for reading? That's where experiments matter.

Earlier this year, Eric Hellman, President of New Jersey-based Gluejar, argued that "The eBook copyright page is broken". In a piece published by the New York Law School Law Review, Hellman laid out a case for reconsidering the role of the copyright "page" in digital works, observing "that almost nothing has been done to make them functional in the digital environment."

In the Law Review piece, Hellman starts by outlining seven ways in which a simple declaration of copyright fails to function effectively for digital content. He then illustrates how new copyright agreements, such as those offered under Creative Commons, further complicate matters. Though he doesn't directly invoke Mark Bide, Hellman provides effective examples of an argument advanced by Bide: the absence of clear data on rights turns intellectual property assets into liabilities.

Hellman argues the ambiguity means that "today’s copyright page fails as a license declaration":

The low-tech way to address this failure is to engage an intermediary that can attest to the proper conveyance of a license. The intermediary maintains a registry of CC license conveyance and is available to provide evidence of the conveyance should a CC-enabled use be challenged. The author’s company, Gluejar, Inc., performs this service.

A high-tech approach is also possible. Digital signing technology is now common and easy to implement. The EPUB3 standard for ebooks includes a specification for a “signature file” for use in this sort of application. The rights holder can sign the licensed content together with the license and a public key, enabling anyone to verify securely, without reference to a content registry, that the content has been CC-licensed by the rights holding entity.

Continuing ambiguity is potentially a significant challenge for copyright owners and content consumers, alike. Uncertainty generally shrinks markets and reduces innovation, two trends publishing should actively avoid.

Yesterday I wrote:

Admittedly, we don't yet have an ecosystem that could rightly be called "a pre-book world", much as we can't yet buy programs outside of established bundles. I think both are coming, and when they do, we'll be looking for an architecture of collaboration that will allow us all to tap into a web-facilitated sea of stories.

What copyright means and how to adequately express that meaning represent important parts of an "architecture of collaboration". Hellman is right to clearly illustrate how our current use of the copyright "page" is broken.

A bit of disclosure: I know Eric Hellman and on a few occasions we've talked about his work (and mine). I recommend his blog, "Go To Hellman", which includes an early-October update with his perspective several months after the original piece was published.

According to Reuters, the Canadian government is expected to "soon require cable and satellite television providers to make it easier for customers to buy only the channels they want rather than pay for bundles". Reuters also noted:

Some Canadian cable and satellite television providers have already begun to offer so-called "a la carte" pricing, a trend some analysts think could begin to take hold in the much larger U.S. market.

In the United States, unbundling has been resisted by cable providers, whose reluctance has prompted efforts by legislators like U.S. Senator John McCain to require a new approach. As technology has evolved to support choice, consumers are increasingly asking, "Why do I have to pay for what I don't want?"

Making things easier for consumers is a source of competitive advantage. That's the fundamental premise of "lean consumption", a topic I've come back to repeatedly while considering options for new approaches to publishing and media.

Customers want more say in unbundling, rebundling and consuming content of all types. As I noted in "Disaggregating supply", my own nod toward the appeal of unbundled content:

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.

Admittedly, we don't yet have an ecosystem that could rightly be called "a pre-book world", much as we can't yet buy programs outside of established bundles. I think both are coming, and when they do, we'll be looking for an architecture of collaboration that will allow us all to tap into a web-facilitated sea of stories.

Although I write pretty much exclusively about publishing, I try to read more broadly. A change of pace is often helpful in focusing my thinking about publishing topics, and much of what happens in the world ultimately affects or is reflected in published works.

One example is a post, “How citizen diplomacy can help communities innovate”, that Andy Cutler wrote earlier this year. In it, Cutler describes incipient efforts to link Providence, Rhode Island and Copenhagen, Denmark as two smaller, sister cities.

Cutler makes a case for thinking of smaller cities as useful vehicles for this kind of change:

Smaller cities understand and work within the confines of their size each and every day. Size matters, and smaller cities have the power to enlist professional (and personal) networks in order to bolster ideation and ultimately create meaningful change quicker than their larger counterparts.

The Providence-Copenhagen initiative has several goals (adapted here from Cutler’s post):

1. Find new ways to engage student populations
2. Create new forms of arts and cultural exchanges
3. Foster student and professional exchanges
4. Leverage existing events and conferences
5. Enhance the quality of interaction of cities by opening new channels of understanding and information sharing
6. Explore new economic development opportunities

Without saddling a new effort with too many competing priorities, I might expand the fifth point a bit.

“Opening new channels of understanding and information sharing” would benefit from an explicit consideration of Esther Dyson’s “quantified community” movement. Building journalistic enterprises into trusted sources of local information is an idea that could improve both news organizations and the communities they serve.

I am continuing to build on a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Last week, I looked at what Bjarnason calls "the ability to enable new modes of learning and skills development". In this post, I'd like to consider his argument for "democratised tools of publishing".

In his original post Bjarnason added, "It’s still too difficult to create good looking ebooks and distribute them widely." This reality has been shaped in part by design, and in part by neglect.

Let's start with the designed component. In the early land grab for eBook market share, Amazon and then Barnes & Noble used proprietary DRM schemes to make sure that the books in the Kindle or Nook ecosystems could be read only where they had been purchased. With iBooks, Apple has followed suit. For these larger digital platforms, interoperability isn't a feature; it's a bug.

Multiple platforms, with multiple formats, negate the value of standards. Sure, publishers can supply a single format to Amazon, B&N, Apple and others. But there's no guarantee that the end result will offer the design and features included in the source file. And, there's an absolute guarantee that an eBook bought on one platform will not be read on any other platform, unless your hacking skills are much better than your reading comprehension.

As for neglect, I look at publishers and their suppliers. In the early- and mid-2000s, there was a moment in time when the industry could have readily coalesced around the implementation of a single format. Because eBook sales at the time were measured in tenths of a percent of total book sales, publishers were largely absent and those discussions went nowhere.

The result: the books we are able to read, and the functionality those books can provide, depend entirely on what platform owners care about. Sure, there's an EPUB3 standard, and it should support app-like behavior for published content. But making that actually happen across competing formats is enough to "make kittens cry" (with a nod to Hugh McGuire, whose efforts to display PressBooks content across these various platforms have seen many kittens cry).

It's simply unacceptable to have formats and functionality vary by platform. Imagine how television, movie and video producers would react if every television manufacturer had different standards for what would work on their displays. That would be chaos, and among consumers, it would create uncertainty, shrinking the market.

This is why we have video standards like Blu-Ray. Sure, there are DMCA tie-ins that make me wary of Blu-Ray, but at least I know that anything sold to me in that format will work on any of the screens in my home.

This isn't a technical problem. It's an industry problem. Until publishers and their suppliers are willing to put their provider power on the table and argue for a uniform standard, Bjarnason's "democratised tools" will remain at the mercy of platform owners for whom lock-in trumps functionality.

Yesterday, news came that Small Demons, a startup focused on “the people, places and things from books, and everywhere they can take you”, had begun telling its publishing partners that, without additional financing, it was planning to close down later this month.

According to The Bookseller, where the story apparently broke, efforts to sell the company to an unnamed technology firm had fallen short. I read about the expected closure on Publishers Lunch, a subscription site covering the book publishing industry.

In the Publishers Lunch coverage [registration is required; only a part of the coverage is available without a subscription], Michael Cader introduced the news by invoking a theme that has appeared with some regularity on the site:

In perhaps another sign of the disconnect between conference veneration of the new and shiny and the daunting challenges of building a scalable business around new uses of other people's content, California-based Small Demons has indicated to publishers in a letter cited by the Bookseller that it will cease operations on November 25 unless a buyer emerges.

Cader goes on to point to a featured track at the upcoming Digital Book World conference, describing it as “a realistic look at where and how established publishing players and start-ups can and should come together.”

Promoting the conference is natural here; Cader has partnered with Mike Shatzkin to put on a range of events, including Digital Book World (in conjunction with F+W Media). It was the use of “conference veneration of the new and shiny”, coupled with the later, contrasting use of “realistic”, that got me thinking.

Small Demons and its founder, Valla Vakili, have been featured at a number of publishing events. It’s kind of the thing people do, in part, to market their ideas. Things are changing quickly in publishing, and there is no shortage of companies and ideas that could grace a stage at virtually any publishing meeting.

Still, I don’t think of Small Demons as “new and shiny”. Vakili came to the idea with a deep background in and a love of storytelling. His company offers publishers a way to expand “which stories gets told, as well as who writes – and publishes – them.”

That last phrase is borrowed from the final lines of “Context first”, which I wrote in 2010. They fit here by design: when Vakili was first trying to introduce his idea to publishers, he read my “Books in Browsers” talk and asked to come see me in New York. We saw eye-to-eye on how context plays a critical role in discovery and use of content.

I’ve written before (as recently as the moment when Amazon acquired Goodreads) that “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.”

At the same time, trying to bring a new idea to an established set of businesses is not easy. I counsel publishers to place their bets broadly, investing in limited ways with startups. At the least, make it easy for companies with a range of new ideas to do business with you. If publishers really feel they are in a dogfight with Amazon and Apple, it would be nice to have some tech-savvy allies in their camp.

Keep in mind: we want to bet broadly because we don’t know who’s going to win. By “we”, I mean “all of us”. I think highly of work done by Nicholas Negroponte and Kevin Kelly, but even they missed some boats. When it comes to figuring out which ideas will persist, we can make educated guesses, but we should also admit that a lot of our education no longer applies.

As it happened, Digital Book World did include Small Demons as part of a January 2012 session on new business models for trade publishers. Over the course of an hour, attendees heard from:

• The Atavist, talking about Periodic Technology, described by Publishers Lunch at the time as a “robust custom content management system”
• Cookstr, which “has developed a rich taxonomy and tagging system that can be applied in many other verticals”
• Subtext, “among the hottest of the new social reading platforms”
• Small Demons, showing how various users can “drive digital discovery” (a persistent theme across several conference programs)
• Audible.com’s ACX (the Audiobook Creation Exchange)
• Bookriff, showing "how readers can build their own curated collections from published works and their own content”
• Vook, demonstrating “a product that enables creation of and multimedia eBooks”

So, almost two years later, where are these inaugural members of “Publishers Launchpad, a curated forum to highlight companies with new propositions for the trade publishing value chain”? [this link is a reposting by Audible.com of text taken from a post that appeared on Publishers Launch]

• Well, Atavist rebranded Periodic Technology; it is now called Creatavist. The software remains in beta, with eight “featured clients”. Half are not-for-profit entities. None is a trade publisher.
• Cookstr persists, but its “context-first” approach has not taken root among established publishers (believe me).
• Subtext pivoted; it now offers an app “that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts”.
• Small Demons is hoping for a November intervention.
• Bookriff lost its CEO in 2011 and shut down soon after, eventually taking an established Canadian publisher, Douglas & McIntyre, with it.
• As best I can tell, Vook is plugging along, with a focus on periodicals as much or more than books.

Then there’s Audible.com. ACX probably seemed cool in 2012, but the notion of crowdsourced audiobooks and collaborative creation was pioneered by Hugh McGuire in 2005, with the launch of LibriVox. Publishers may feel more comfortable with Audible.com, which of course is owned by their favorite large online retailer.

So, two failures, a pivot, a product still in beta and three survivors, only one of whom seems very connected to the book business (and that one cribbed its offer from a start-up). That feels fairly representative of the kind of results we might expect from a mix of companies offering new approaches and ideas.

Ultimately, that’s the point: no one has a monopoly on “where and how established publisher players and start-ups can and should come together.” Ideas evolve. Things catch on, or they don’t. But a process that tries to pick winners (and by exclusion, losers) at the outset is doomed to fail. A collection of things we see as “realistic” begs the question: realistic for whom?

More than a bit of disclosure: I met Valla Vakili in early 2011. I’ve talked with him a number of times, occasionally offered advice and perspective (not as part of a consulting engagement), introduced him to colleagues and friends and once reviewed a presentation. I edited a contribution from him for Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. Although it is not the point of this post, I like the idea behind Small Demons, whether it finds a lifeline this month or not.

I've done a limited project for Publishers Marketplace, owner of Publishers Lunch, working on a new-business idea. At my suggestion, the assignment was contingent on the the business coming to fruition; the plan ultimately didn't come to pass and I was not paid for the time I spent working on the project.

And: I co-edited Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto with Hugh McGuire. I talk with Hugh even more than I have talked with Valla Vakili. I wish that everyone in publishing did. We’d be better for it.

Earlier this year, Time Warner revealed a plan to spin off its magazine unit. At the time, the announcement prompted me to offer "six ideas to save Time Inc.":

• Lose the Vatican (the office of the editor in chief)
• Stop grouping magazines
• Scale back corporate
• Write off legacy systems
• Raise consumer prices
• Stop using the b-word (brand)

Since I wrote that post, Time Inc. hired a new CEO (Joe Ripp). As one of his first moves, he decided to "lose the Vatican", dismissing editor-in-chief Martha Nelson and shifting reporting lines from her office to the publishers of the company's magazines.

The decision generated a good deal of commentary. At MediaPost, Bob Garfield wrote "An open letter to Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp" that suggested the company is trading editorial prestige, trust and good names for "quick cash":

A Time Inc. spokesperson tried to persuade Ad Age that the company’s vaunted editorial independence is not in jeopardy: "Our editors will have full responsibility for their own content. Nothing there changes." Translation: everything changes. Editors, by virtue of their new bosses, will be obliged to show new revenue, which is a path to perdition.

Writing about "The fall of the wall?" for the New York Times, Joe Nocera was a bit less dire, but still concluded that "[t]he more likely outcome, though, is that the much-vaunted Church-State divide at Time Inc. is dead." All hail the glorious dead, right?

Well, not exactly. At Ad Age, Michael Sebastian describes how editorial oversight has a bit of a grubby past:

Martha Nelson, who is leaving her post as Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief as part of the restructuring, previously oversaw the editorial functions of the company's 21 magazines. That could mean rewriting an article or even ripping up a cover at the last minute, a former Time Inc. editor said. That's not something Mr. Pearlstine will do.

Sebastian could also have invoked the magazines that were not overseen by past editors-in-chief: titles acquired in the U.K., for example, have long operated under separate rules. Time Inc. manages something close to 160 titles; fewer than two dozen reported to the editor-in-chief.

Michael Wolff, acerbic to a fault, cares less about church and state and more about failed business models. Writing for The Guardian, Wolff offers a clear and discouraging view of the company:

Now, to further refine the problem, it is not just that the editorial side is reporting to business, but that the business side largely consists of failed salesman. Certainly, if you are a salesman who is still selling magazine pages (however you have tried to rebrand yourself as a cross platform man), you've lost your career way.

While Wolff's tone is not one I would emulate, he puts his finger on an untested assumption about the future of Time Inc. All of these changes presume that the company needs to become more ad-driven. I'd argue that the opposite is true.

My fifth idea, "raise consumer prices", provides a clearer path for Time Inc. to survive and grow:

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.

Time Inc. separated church and state to protect the interests of the reader. Then and now, that was the most important thing to do. Unfortunately, editors at a lot of its magazines may have come to see "independence" as separate and apart from "serving the reader".

Editors whose publications aren't profitable based on circulation alone should be horrified, but not because it leaves them vulnerable to advertising pressures. They should recognize that the people who are supposed to benefit from all of that reporting and writing and editing don't value it enough to cover marginal costs.

That's the problem to work on. Speaking just for me, I wouldn't mind having a boss who was concerned about that, too.

Via Ron Miller of Ness Software Engineering Services, I came across a chart that claimed "IOS remains the favored platform for enterprise apps". According to a study of 804 companies, 80% favor the iPhone and the iPad, while only 71% favor an Android phone and 59% expect to be developing an app for an Android tablet.

I find these assessments a bit frustrating. First, the question asked ("Is your company very interested in building apps for the following platforms?") is open to interpretation: "very" is relative, while "interested" could mean anything from "committed" to "commissioned a study".

Second, respondents were asked to name any platform of interest. A nine-point difference between the iPhone and an Android phone could reflect a preference, but the response rate for each platforms was above 70%, suggesting widespread interest in both. As well, anyone who tracks the share of new sales going to a given platform can attest how quickly things can shift in the mobile space.

Finally, comparing Apple, whose iOS base is concentrated on its newest release, and Android, an open standard with many marketplace iterations in play, can be deceptive. IT executives may favor the iOS platform because it is more manageable, not necessarily because overall demand is greater. 

To me, the more interesting comparison is within Apple. The company began by producing desktop and laptop devices. It still sells them, but its market share outside of core verticals like publishing has never been significant.

The interesting question to ask (and answer) is "How did a company with less than 10% of the computer market gain such a large share of the mobile device market?" Apple reinvented itself by creating categories built around untapped consumer need. That's the lesson for publishers.

When it comes to content, digital media has changed both our sense of scale and the nature of aggregation. The shift has happened relatively rapidly, challenging established models as it gives rise to new ones.

It's a pretty turbulent time, and it is probably natural to want to find the next model before our time with the current ones winds down. That quest for certainty shows up in Karthika Muthukumaraswamy's Huffington Post piece, "A la carte journalism: Where people (and reporters) set the agenda", in which she writes:

Setting aside the question of whether celebrities should be exploiting the masses for their pet projects, crowdfunding appears to be the way to go for most media projects.

That same quest appears in Emily Bell's recent post, "US journalism makes break with market forces", that appeared in The Guardian. Bell argues:

In a few years the non-profit news sector has gone from being seen as a temporary embarrassment for US news to a cornerstone, with dozens of organisations adopting a funding model reliant on diverse revenues. ProPublica, the Pulitzer-winning investigative unit, has had considerable impact, ditto the Texas Tribune. A Knight Foundation report on non-profit news last week saw fragility in the sustainability of the non-profit model but noted its growing significance.

While I think that crowdfunding and not-for-profit journalism have a place, it strikes me as both narrow and potentially distracting to put them on top of the pedestal just now. Getting people to pay for content has been difficult for a while. Abandoning that effort too soon begs the question about why people are not willing to pay for quality content.

I think we live in a world of smaller scale - not "communities of millions, but millions of communities" - and different approaches to aggregation. We're no longer bound by the physical format, and we can organize by author, topic or community. We can also play with formats to address the needs of different topics and the communities that are interested in them. I'd like to further test these opportunities in a range of for-profit settings.

I am continuing to build on a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Last week, I looked at what Bjarnason calls a "wealth of new tools for reading and writing that are impossible in print." In this post, I'd like to consider what Bjarnason describes as "the ability to enable new modes of learning and skills development".

In his original post, Bjarnason added "just adding interactive quizzes is a massive bankruptcy of imagination". This is an important reminder for publishers whose experience is shaped in two dimensions.

I've consulted with a number of publishers whose physical products are layered with a range of different types of content. Information, assessments, supplemental lessons and clarifying questions are all confined to a two-dimensional page or spread.

Often enough, the publishers I work with have struggled to translate the richness of a print product into a digital environment. It's impossible to present high-density (300 dpi) content in a 72 dpi digital environment, but the advent of higher-resolution displays shouldn't be taken as an opportunity to replicate what we've long had in print.

The reason is simple: print products are layered and complicated largely because they are limited to two dimensions. A digital version of a reading workbook (for example) doesn't have to offer assessment questions or supplemental exercises on the same plane as core text. There are other ways to conceive and present that content.

Moreover, assessments can evolve to take context into account. A faster reader might be served a more challenging set of questions. A student who scored well on a given assessment might be referred to more challenging reading assignments for future classes. Students who struggle with an assignment could be grouped and regrouped according to need.

All of these ideas (and the many more that are percolating around us) demand a reconsideration of the book as product. The measures of success are no longer a function of making the best physical product available. Reimagining the book as a service, at least in areas where learning and skills development are at stake, is an important next step for publishers to take.

At Books in Browsers last week, John Maxwell and Haig Armen delivered a brief talk about "The craft of the book in the age of the web". In it, they explored what might become of the book as its form merges with that of the web. I found their talk to be a useful reminder, not an elegy, as they asked and tried to answer some basic questions:'

Have we lost sight of the craft tradition of the book in the age of the web? If so, what happens to that wealth of knowledge and wisdom? Or is that tradition migrating to new contexts—in which case, what is lost and what is gained in translation?

As it happened, I'd already been reading a separate paper, also written by Maxwell and Armen, on "Index cards and the handcraft of creative thinking". Their work, first presented at an academic meeting in June, explores a bit of the history and implications of card-based writing and reading. They see three modes of use for these cards:

• As textual documents, read in linear or other manners
• As indexes, a representation of another object
• As a visual cue and a vehicle for engagement and manipulation

Toward the last point, Maxwell and Armen invoke "a laboratory for teaching object-oriented thinking", a paper published in 1989. At the time its authors noted:

[W]e were surprised at the value of physically moving the cards around. When learners pick up an object they seem to more readily identify with it, and are prepared to deal with the remainder of the design from its perspective. It is the value of this physical interaction that has led us to resist a computerization of the cards.

By concidence, the value of manipulatives - of interacting with something physical as part of an act of creation - was a common theme at two very different meetings I attended on consective weekends earlier this month. At the first, a reunion of my business-school class, Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano argued that U.S. manufacturing was losing access to a range of technologies considered critical to sustained innovation. With a colleague, Pisano explained how a Kindle could not be made in the United States, because we no longer maintain the equipment and skill bases required for its core technologies.

A week later, I attended a parents' weekend at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The university president, John Maeda, and the school's provost, Rosanne Somerson, discussed a new book, The Art of Critical Making, written by RISD faculty and staff. The book explores the school's "culture of 'critical making', in which the hand and mind combine to envision and create essential objects, experiences and meanings."

The books describes an approach to "critical making" that is at once academic and intuitive to anyone interested in innovation (presented here verbatim):

• Frame critical questions through an iterative process
• Apply hands-on, embodied approaches to problems
• Enhance seeing through closer looking
• Meet uncertainty with flexibility
• Evaluate and articulate the significance of one's work
• Generate ethical responses to global needs

This is a list that both Maxwell and Armen would likely embrace. Less nostalgic for the past than most, they are also mindful that the present and future can benefit from a careful consideration of what made the past so darn good for so darn long.

Books in Browsers attendees were rewarded this year with a tee shirt that featured the conference logo surrounded by a bit of a manifesto: "One does not simply put a book into a browser." That gets to the point in a couple of ways.

Publishing books on the web remains a work in progress, and the form of the book will evolve with it. Borrowing from Pisano, Maeda and Somerson: if we're not hands-on, we're potentially critical steps removed from the tools and insights we need to continue to innovate. 

In the United Kingdom, the prime minister this week fired a warning shot across the bow of The Guardian, whose coverage of information disclosed by Edward Snowden has embarrassed the U.S. government and allegedly undermined a global war on terrorism. "Prior restraint" is allowed under U.K. law, and according to Reuters prime minister Cameron may well invoke it:

"If they (newspapers) don't demonstrate some social responsibility it will be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act," Cameron told parliament, saying Britain's Guardian newspaper had "gone on" to print damaging material after initially agreeing to destroy other sensitive data.

The timing of Cameron's remarks is interesting, coming just after the German chancellor learned that her cell phone may have been targeted by the NSA for unauthorized surveillance. For his part, President Obama told chancellor Merkele that he wasn't aware of what the NSA was up to. I guess you have to read The Guardian for that.

No one takes terrorism lightly, but the U.S. and U.K. governments have yet to provide any meaningful data on harm done by the Snowden leaks. In fact, the New York Times last month reported that the government's own leaks - the ones that are often deliberately channeled through "senior administration officials" and others - have had a more immediate negative effect on counter-terrorism efforts.

The Times coverage drew a fair number of complaints, but not for one of its core arguments: "Snowden has not given away the store in terms of harming national security or counterterrorism efforts." That honor falls to people within the government working to explain why the United States decided to close several embassies without any notice.

While the U.K. government tries to figure out what it will do with its noisier publications, the President and Congress may wish for a world in which the fourth estate is somewhat more pliable. That might be good for those in power, but it would be a shame for the governed, all of whom deserve an explanation of what is done in our name.

A contributor to a discussion list that I participate in recently pointed to a post, “Survivorship bias”, that David McRaney published last May on his blog, “You are not so smart: A celebration of self-delusion”. McRaney’s books include You Are Not So Smart and You Are Now Less Dumb, titles that are intended to help us “learn how you can use that knowledge to be more humble, better connected, and less dumb”.

The post is long (5,900 words), and McRaney summarizes its core argument at the outset:

The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful.

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

He offers several examples of survivorship bias, featuring one (efforts to protect planes from enemy fire during World War II) that clearly articulates the risks baked into studying only what persists.

The larger, lumbering bombers used during that war were prime targets for anti-aircraft fire. The odds against making it back from any given raid were not that good, and the odds of surviving a series of raids were even more daunting. In his post, McRaney invokes historian Kevin Wilson, who described these World War II airmen as “ghosts already”.

Flight-crew vulnerability gave a cohort of mathematicians more than enough reason to figure out how to bolster aircraft to withstand enemy fire. One of the mathematicians, Abraham Wald, realized that protecting the areas most heavily damaged on the planes that survived was exactly the wrong thing to do, as those were the parts of the plane that could sustain the assault and still work.

McRaney’s post is worth reading in full, particularly for those of us struggling to come up with new models in publishing. He argues effectively that understanding what works must consider ideas that ultimately did not work.

Book and periodical publishers work in an industry that has been pretty stable for a relatively long time. Perhaps as a consequence, we seldom make the time to figure out why something failed, except in terms that delineate shortcomings relative to the examples that prevailed.

Considering a change, we will almost always ask “Who else is doing this?”, applying lessons gained in hindsight. Failures are dismissed by citing the parts of the successful model we conclude they clearly lacked.

McRaney argues that truncated questions can blind us. I tend to agree. In an April post, “Disaggregating supply”, I briefly explored our tendency to dismiss outliers:

[W]hen I was in business school, 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.

There’s a tension, not always healthy, between our ability to question prevailing business models and our willingness to challenge the mental models surrounding what drives publishing success. We often rely on consultants (like me) to offer a perspective on what works, or what will work.

There’s value in seeking outside counsel, but publishers need to challenge consultants as much as they should challenge themselves. McRaney says it best: “The advice business is a monopoly run by survivors”.

In the past, I have been skeptical about demand for the "all you can read" subscription service offered by Next Issue Media. It debuted last year in the United States, where readers can access a cross-section of monthly titles for $9.99 a month and an additional set of weekly titles for $14.99 a month.

In Canada, Rogers Media recently announced that it had partnered with and invested in a Canadian version of Next Issue Media. The service went live in Canada on October 15, with access initially provided to Rogers' cable customers. A wider rollout is expected later this year.

The Canadian offer includes many of the titles available in the United States, along with Rogers' publications. The subscription price points are the same. As the Canadian version was announced, a senior executive at Next Issue Media made a somewhat pointed argument for the new service:

“We aren’t competing with other digital magazines,” Morgan Guenther, chief executive officer of Palo Alto-based Next Issue Media, said in an interview. “We are competing for a share of leisure time against Netflix, against Google, against Amazon. We are competing for the last $10 of wallet share that is out there.”

To date, demand for digital versions of Canadian titles has been limited. In his Globe and Mail report, Steve Ladurantaye observed:

Digital editions are likely to play a key role in any transformation, but they are yet to be widely adopted by Canadian readers. Maclean’s has the third-largest digital edition subscription rate with 5,600 subscribers compared to a print circulation of 313,007 (Canadian House and Home leads the industry with 11,000 followed by Readers Digest at 6,700).

As it announced the Canadian service, Rogers itself was said to be looking to save money on production and distribution expenses while pursuing workflow efficiencies.

Maybe Next Issue will offer enough of a catalyst to push digital penetration for a weekly like Maclean's past 2%. For its part, Rogers claims to have invested "eight figures" in the new venture. Still, talk of cost containment and "competing for the last $10 of wallet share" doesn't suggest that future of periodical publishing in Canada includes much of a growth scenario.

A bit of disclosure: I've consulted with Rogers Media, an assignment that was completed in 2009. All of the information contained in this post is derived from public sources.

I am continuing to build on a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Last week, I looked at "new modes of reading". In this post, I'd like to consider what Bjarnason calls a "wealth of new tools for reading and writing that are impossible in print."

Yesterday and today, I'm listening to a range of presentations offered at Books in Browsers, the San Francisco event created by Peter Brantley and jointly planned by Brantley and Kat Meyer. A range of speakers have touched upon the kinds of tools that might extend what we currently do in print. The presenters include:

• Jason Merkoski (BookGenie451) "Books (and readers) in browsers"
• Baldur Bjarnason (Unbound), "Interactivity is what you do"
• Adam Hyde (Booksprints), "The death of the reader"
• Anna von Veh (Say Books), "Beyond the text: Writing undercover on the web"
• Mandy Brown (Editorially), "Writing and editing in the browser"
• Kate Pullinger (Bath Spa University), "Landing gear: A writer, a novel, a publisher, an API"
• Kathi Fletcher (Shuttleworth Foundation), "Textbooks in browsers: An editor for creating, adapting and sharing"

Bjarnason and von Veh touched upon an aspect of content creation and feedback that is increasingly supported in non-print environments: collaboration. Their talks, coupled with ones given by Peter Armstrong (Leanpub) and James Bridle (Booktwo), led me to ask what we need to do as an industry to grow and support a collaborative infrastructure.

In a larger-group setting, that can be a hard question to ask and answer. It does seem clear that the tools are on their way, if they are not here already. But collaboration will also require new skills and processes, as well as different philosophical and legal environments.

Developing those skills, processes and environments is an investment, one that might be made if we can divine a payoff. My filter of the moment is simple: can collaborative approaches help grow the size of the pie for reading? If so, I think we'll find a way to make those approaches a reality.

Late last month, Poynter.org profiled a cross-section of nonprofit news organizations, noting that they "are proving to be healthy but slow to scale". Since the article appeared, I've been mulling over how I feel about the concept of nonprofit journalism.

I live in northern New Jersey, a state that has both significant wealth and a host of social challenges. One of these challenges, somewhat surprisingly, is hunger.

Throughout the United States a number of organizations have been formed to deal with malnutrition and hunger. In my area, the active organization is the Community FoodBank of New Jersey (CFBNJ), a nonprofit that I've supported financially since the late 1980s. In telling this part of the story, I'm not looking for applause; the donations have been modest, if persistent.

CFBNJ recently sent a mailing to suggest including the organization as the beneficiary of a major gift from my estate. This assumes I have an estate, of course, but on its face the request is pretty reasonable. I've been writing checks for more than two decades, so I'm clearly someone who supports the organization.

Lots of nonprofits, particularly educational institutions, try to cultivate these kinds of gifts. It's a good way to tap into longer-term funds. And that's actually what gave me pause.

The United States remains the richest country on earth, but we have not found a way to adequately provide for all of our citizens. This problem extends to health care as well as malnutrition. For more than 25 years, CFBNY has been working to meet the immediate needs of hungry children and adults, and the problem has not become smaller. To their telling, the need has grown over that time.

This is just wrong. It's not CFBNJ's fault; far from it. But in the last quarter century we have not solved an underlying problem, one that leaves a notable share of our population hungry and in need of food bank services.

There's no telling when I will no longer write among us, but in actuarial terms, I should be around for another 30 years or so. Convincing me to fund CFBNJ today is easy; the need is apparent. Asking me to commit to funding CFBNJ three decades from now is discouraging. It means we'll have spent half a century shoveling against the tide.

"People who are hungry" is an immediate need, but if it is the only problem we address, we'll always need food banks and charitable support to provide a safety net. That's not the world we want to live in.

This is the frame that came to mind when I revisited the Poynter piece. Rick Edmonds captures Steve Waldman talking about finding stable, long-term sources of funding for nonprofit reporting:

"The winners in the new economy,” like Google, Apple and AT&T, Waldman said, are making tens of millions in profit per quarter. “If they would put just a tiny part of that into this problem,” he said, serious journalism could thrive.

It's always tempting to make the "one percent" argument, but I find it discouraging (particularly coming from Waldman, who wrote the FCC report on "The information needs of communities"). The long-term problem isn't a shortfall in charitable funding. It's a shortfall in the number of people who value journalism enough to pay for it.

This set of mental models is corrosive: "Journalism is long-term. Journalism is expensive. For-profit companies won't invest. We need to fund this work as a charity." It is made worse when we leave off the critical word: "Forever."

I don't think "forever" is in the cards here. There's a reason that "nonprofit journalism doesn't scale". Scale - growth - requires capital. You get capital from profits, loans and investments. And you get profits, loans and investments in businesses that have shown they can produce and sell something people value.

I don't know what builds demand for journalism. I've posited a model, but it's just a model. I do know that if we can't figure it out, journalism itself will wither on the vine. We owe it to the next generation to revive demand, not just preserve supply.

To be clear, there are very legitimate roles nonprofits can play. Establishing and sharing best practices and building capacity through things like the use of shared code libraries are two examples. But creating nonprofit entities simply to investigate and report for us once again requires us confront "forever".

I'm in Las Vegas for a couple of days, attending a meeting that is supposed to teach consultants how to grow their consulting practices. I've never been to this particular meeting, and I didn't quite know what to expect.

In one breakout session, a senior member of the association that sponsors the event stood up and made the claim, to my ear somewhat aggressively, that consultants need to emulate their clients to land serious business. This included dressing as CEOs dress. His recommended solution: buy and wear Hermes ties. He went on to say that he had packed and worn a different Hermes tie for every day of the conference.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. "I wore a Hermes tie, and I got the job. Everyone should wear Hermes ties. It will help them grow their consulting practice."

On a notepad, I tried to figure out the Hermes-tie equivalent of the conference fee. However, I did not stand up and say, "Seriously? That's it?"

You can credit me with being polite, but I think the more likely reason is battle fatigue. I hear and read too much stuff that uses a small amount of data to draw a significant and unsupported conclusion.

One example came last month, when Bookseller editor Philip Jones went about "exploring in exaggerated terms one outcome of the current narrative around publishers seeing readers, rather than booksellers, as their customers" (his words, not mine). Jones fears that the death of bookstores will result, as publishers sell direct and pursue communities to the exclusion of the bookstore.

His arguments are effectively dismantled by Suw Charman-Anderson, whose Forbes post contends that  "[c]reating and maintaining a direct relationship with your readers, and treating them as the end customer, does not mean that you have to turn your back on distributors, wholesalers or retailers." That seems self-evident, so much so that I struggled to understand how Jones missed the point.

In a similar vein, "The abomination of eBooks: They price people out of reading" claims that publishers' pricing practices for libraries block uptake for digital versions of popular titles. This post led M.G. Siegler to write about "The end of the library", a riff whose centerpiece argument navel-gazes us to death:

It’s hard for me to even remember the last time I was in a library. I was definitely in one this past summer in Europe — on a historical tour. Before that, I think it was when I was in college. But even then, ten years ago, the internet was replacing the need to go to a library. And now, with e-books, I’m guessing the main reason to go to a library on a college campus is simply because it’s a quiet place to study.

Yes ... I haven't been to the library in a long time; they must not be very useful. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

All of these posts picked up at least one moderating comment, and maybe a cross-section of people read past the headline and into the comments section. But (like this post): what a waste. We could be working to improve the appeal of reading in a digital era. Instead, we're chasing arguments that steadfastly miss the systemic nature of cause and effect.

Until last summer, Reuters was known to be actively developing a consumer-facing news site, dubbed Next, that would draw upon reporting resources the company had already built to serve a business audience. The project was effectively shelved in July, after the project leader left Reuters to run for political office in Canada. It was formally scrapped last month.

After Reuters announced that it would shutter Next, Buzzfeed ran a lengthy piece pinning the blame on Chrystia Freeland, the project leader. In particular they noted that she was an outsider who had tried to build the consumer site without engaging the established staff within Reuters. Author Matthew Zeitlin also reports that Freeland exceeded budgets by significant amounts, in part by hiring outside contractors.

I don't have an inside view of Reuters, and if I did I probably couldn't invoke it, but Buzzfeed's reporting seemed to underplay a couple of important points. David Thompson, chairman of Thomson Reuters, favored Freeland for the Next job, but she still reported to the Reuters CEO.

Andrew Rashbass, the executive who ultimately killed the project, was appointed Reuters CEO in the middle of this year. Big development efforts sometimes flounder when leadership changes.

Too, some of what Buzzfeed reports as Freeland's folly came straight out of the disruption handbook, particularly the need to isolate the new venture from the dominant (established) business. The reality within Reuters was made clear by a former employee, who told Zeitlin:

[T]he direction the company now wants to go in is about giving power back to the profit centers and abandoning any innovation on the consumer side.

In all likelihood, Reuters and Freeland could have better managed the development effort. I'm sure mistakes were made; it's impossible to imagine a world in which a green-field startup inside a traditional media company doesn't step on a lot of toes.

By focusing on Freeland, we have a tidy solution: she made mistakes, was out of her depth and didn't cultivate the right alliances. But we still have a vexing problem, as we struggle to launch vibrant new businesses from a base of traditional structures, systems and processes that actively resist change.

Over the last few years, IDEAlliance has coordinated the work of a set of industry volunteers interested in developing "a new open source standard for packaging and exchanging digital content." For periodicals, this development effort emulates work done to develop and promulgate EPUB, the book-industry standard for interchangeable formats.

The IDEAlliance standard, dubbed OpenEFT, was introduced last month as an alternative to closed formats, particularly .Folio, an Adobe format. Peter Meirs, who played a role in developing OpenEFT, recently explained why the industry standard is important:

Woodwing opened its well-implemented OFIP format to the public, free of charge. It was a noble attempt to standardize interactive publications across the industry.

In the short term, many providers and publishers benefitted from the new “OFIP standard.” This license-free format allowed third-party software companies to build their own tablet solutions, providing more choice to buyers. While the demand for magazines on tablets was still in question, at least the process to produce them was moving forward.

This is where the story turns. Opening OFIP to the public was not the same thing as making it an open source format. Woodwing offered its specification on a license-free basis, but it was not a true open source format under the control of a vendor-independent standards organization. As quickly as it was given, OFIP could be taken away. And that’s exactly what happened.

In October 2011, Adobe and Woodwing announced an alliance that involved, among other things, a “retirement” of the OFIP format. This meant all the niche players who had built solutions around OFIP were no longer able to create products using that format. Instead of using OFIP, Adobe’s DPS solution used a new format called .Folio. Adobe’s terms of service clearly restricts the use of the .Folio format to drive third-party viewers.

We see this a good deal in publishing. Examples include Amazon and Barnes & Noble developing their own eBook formats, Apple shifting the terms of service in its app store and proprietary DRM schemes. Closed standards continue not because platforms have all the power (though they have accrued substantial advantage), but because publishers stop at the water's edge when it comes to understanding the nature and implications of open standards.

Every time a supply-chain partner implements a proprietary solution, it moves a step closer to creating and maintaining platform lock-in. Development efforts are disrupted, new entrants are blocked and the higher barriers to entry give cover to incumbents who innovate less.

On Friday, I echoed Baldur Bjarnason's call for "new modes of reading". Those won't come from a company like Adobe, which is intent on developing and maintaining "standards" that protect its position. The most significant challenge publishers face is the threat to reading. Diminishing our options for innovation only increases the likelihood that we'll fail to address that threat.

An additional note: Meirs posted his "An open plea for OpenEFT" on MediaShepherd, a new web site founded by Noelle Skodzinski and James Sturdivant, who came to the venture from NAPCO's publishing arm. It describes itself as "an innovative company that meets the needs of today’s publishing/media executives and the vendors that serve them." The site has been operating for about a month, not enough time to evaluate its offering. Under the heading of "new entrants", though, it's an information option.

Earlier this week, I was part of a book fair organized by the Harvard Club of New York. The club solicited participation from members who had published a book in the last few years, in the end choosing 37 authors and about 50 books for this inaugural event (a follow-on fair is planned for next spring).

The fair featured many types of books, mostly non-fiction but not entirely so. I went to talk about Book: A Futurist's Manifesto, the title I co-edited with Hugh McGuire, but my table included a book on the origins of business, money and markets as well as a title that presented a liberal's argument in favor of the United States Constitution's second amendment.

Before the fair started, I had a chance to talk with a cross-section of the authors, all of whom were surprised to learn that I actually work in publishing. Curiously, several asked me a variation on the same question: "The book is going away, isn't it?" I kept saying, "No, not really."

After the doors opened, I had a number of similar conversations with people who'd come to meet the authors and talk about our books. It surprised me that people who wrote and read books, the kind of people who take time on a weekday evening to come to a book fair, could be so pessimistic about the future of the book.

In each of these exchanges, I kept pressing to better understand what people meant when they talked about "books". Although authors and readers agreed that they loved the narrative, a structured argument - a story - they still saw the book as a container, a physical or digital object, a defined way to obtain and consume content. There's the problem, and the opportunity.

Last Friday, I wrote a summary of Baldur Bjarnason's call to "make eBooks worth it". Bjarnason doesn't see eBooks as just a set of EPUB files; he imagines an eBook ecosystem that can "support a diversity of content and interfaces". Indeed, the first element of his "digital manifesto" is "a diversity of new modes of reading".

On reflection, I can better understand why even the most passionate readers aren't thinking outside the box. We have a 500-year history with the book. It has served us well, and for a subset of use cases, it will continue to do so.

But there is more than one way to engage a reader. My recent post about Random House and its use of Flipboard to extend the narrative for two of its authors points out one option. So, too, does the notion of opening up the traditional newspaper to make it a locally oriented dataset, a resource as much as a provider of news.

It's hard to re-imagine our world, but it is overdue. Next Thursday and Friday, Peter Brantley and Kat Meyer will kick off the fourth installment of Books in Browsers, now billed as "a small summit for the new generation of internet publishing companies, focusing on developers and designers who are building and launching tools for online storytelling, expression, and art." Its sessions include:

• A book isn't a book isn't a book
• Artists books reborn
• Annotation, data and the living "e" book
• Interactivity is what you do (this, from Baldur Bjarnason)
• Mobile screens and artistic practices

And that's just part of the first day.

Three years ago, at the first iteration of Books in Browsers, I got to deliver a talk that asserted:

Clearly, we’ll need new skill sets to compete in an era of abundance.  We’ll probably have to add a lot more training than we have ever done internally.  But those aren’t the toughest challenges.  Changing workflow is.

I still think changing workflow is a significant challenge, but I wish I'd said more plainly then what I still believe today: we have to change our metaphors. Limiting ourselves to the container robs us of a chance to lead. We need to become fluid enough to tell stories, not just efficient enough to fill books.

Last month I wrote a post tied to two talks I gave at the annual meeting of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. In the post I noted:

The disruptive impact of digital technologies, particularly the way that they change both consumer expectations and the threshold for a "minimum viable product", is a regular theme here (and elsewhere). The impact was once something on the horizon, a thing we should be thinking about. It's not on the horizon anymore…

While we were gathered in Alberta, Random House announced that it was using Flipboard, the digital-magazine platform, to launch two custom publications for books by two of its authors, Margaret Atwood and George R.R. Martin. I added the announcement at the end of my second presentation, using it as an example of how publishers can think about disaggregating supply.

As reported by GigaOm's Laura Hazard Owen, the Atwood magazine expands on the world created for a trilogy that culminates with MaddAddam, released in August. Owen captures Random House's view of the project:

The magazine will enhance the experience of being immersed in the brilliantly imagined world that Margaret Atwood has created in the trilogy.

In contrast, Random House is promoting the George R.R. Martin project, but the magazine was created by a fan site. Its content is based on Song of Ice and Fire, a series written by Martin; the magazine extends the world created by the author into a new medium.

Revamping content to test magazine formats, engaging with fan sites, tapping into a loyal and interested community ... all good things. They're here now.

On Pandodaily, Hamish McKenzie recently reported on the launch of Beacon, a $5 a month subscription site that shares its revenues with the journalists who write the articles that appear on the site. The model is similar to those in place for NSFW, which charges $3 a month, and The Dish and The Magazine, which charge $2 a month each.

At least for the moment, Beacon provides journalists with access to audiences interested in their particular journalism, and little else. Contributions are self-edited, with somewhere between 60% and 75% of revenues allocated to contributors.  To McKenzie's eye, the "roster has a bias towards freelance international correspondents", certainly a type of reporting that deserves a wider audience.

I like the idea of a platform that supports niche content. I continue to worry that it is delivered in a "write once, read once" model, one that has simply changed the method of aggregation. The idea of "funding one writer for a month" is an admirable one, but it will take more than a few hundred loyal followers before journalists can say they are making a living on it.

Last month, BoxWorks introduced a number of upgrades to its product suite, improving support for mobile access to the cloud content it hosts. Today, the company's clients are primarily outside the publishing industry, but two parts of their upgrade have implications for periodical and book publishers.

First, BoxWorks "announced a completely redesigned preview experience, which integrates Crocodoc’s HTML5 document conversion technology to deliver crisp and clear documents right to your browser, incredibly fast. In addition to the technology update, the new Box preview interface also includes a completely new user experience that brings your content front and center while placing powerful collaboration tools at your fingertips."

Second, the company is "adding metadata capabilities on Box, letting you bring additional context to your files stored on Box. From appending accident details like photos and locations for insurance claims to adding patient information on medical records, you’ll be able to store, access, view and edit details that aren’t constrained by standard file system parameters."

Both sets of enhancements are being rolled out this fall, with the metadata improvements officially described as "beta testing". I found the announcements useful on a couple of fronts:

• They underscore the growing importance of the browser and HTML5 - open platforms for content consumption
• We're opening up metadata creation and management to the people who use the data

It's not always popular to say, but content is content. People who read in an open, web-based platform that supports annotation will use their experiences to evaluate the closed, proprietary platforms evident in devices like the Kindle, Nook and iPad. It will be interesting to see how those experiences affect their willingness to buy digital objects that are accessible only in narrow ecosystems.

Writing at Forbes.com, contributor Emma Woollacott last month posted "Netflix checks piracy stats to help it decide what to buy". Citing an interview that first appeared on a Dutch website, Woolacott quotes a Netflix executive who claimed, "When purchasing series, we look at what does well on piracy sites."

Offering subscribers a paid path to obtain heavily-pirated content may actually reduce piracy in the markets where a legitimate option exists. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has claimed that "BitTorrent downloads in Canada fell by half after Netflix launched", while Ipsos MMI released the results of a study that showed illegal downloads dropped by 54% after Netflix and Spotify launched in Norway.

I've written a number of posts that explore my claim that "piracy is the consequence of a bad API". If you make it hard for people to buy the content they want, in the formats they want, then the piracy option becomes more appealing.

This is different from "viewing all instances of piracy as an indictment of a publisher's marketing program that has failed to figure out how to monetize those non-paying users", a summary that was attributed to me recently. Infringing use is infringing use. My research suggested that some piracy may help spur sales, and the data in all cases can help publishers better understand market demands. Netflix appears to comprehend those ideas.

Last summer, Baldur Bjarnason posted a series of observations about digital reading, culminating in a call to "Make eBooks worth it". He explains: 

Of course ebooks as they currently exist are fine for many people. But those who assume that this is acceptable are also assuming a stable media industry. In entering the digital arena books (e- or not) are brought into direct competition with not only other time wasters (games, video, etc.) but other forms of reading, namely the web and apps.

If the ebook ecosystem cannot support a diversity of content and interfaces, the web and apps will step in to fill the gaps.

To address the gaps, Bjarnason writes his own "digital manifesto", calling for (presented verbatim):

• A diversity of new modes of reading.
• A wealth of new tools for reading and writing that are impossible in print.
• The ability to enable new modes of learning and skills development (just adding interactive quizzes is a massive bankruptcy of imagination).
• Democratised tools of publishing. It’s still too difficult to create good looking ebooks and distribute them widely.
• A more peer-like, less hierarchical, relationship between the reader and writer.
• A more symmetrical relationship between reading and writing. Reading, annotations, quotes and more should feed directly into writing systems.
• A greater variety of models for how we extract value from writing, from gift-giving (pay-what-you-want) to subscription to dynamic pricing (like automatically increasing or decreasing prices the more people buy to create either scarcity or abundance, depending on what you want).

This is a great list, one that I'd like to return in weekly installments through the balance of 2013 - before the web and apps step in to fill the gaps.