Publishers Do the Movie Thing with Staged Releases for eBooks
December 10, 2009
Short honk: The movie folks now release movies in ways to maximize revenue. I have been in a miserable nowhere country where electricity is a hit and miss proposition. In the motion picture facility, the same film playing in Harrod’s Creek was on the screen. In the local video store a copy of the film was for sale, sometimes legal, sometimes not so legal. In “Simon & Schuster Imposing Four-Month Delay on E-book Versions of Major Upcoming Releases” and chuckled. Readers are not the largest group in the US of A’s demographic pool. Making me wait to get an electronic version of a book won’t change my buying habits. I think Kindle is miserable. My Sony reader was more miserable. Nevertheless, I travel with a Kindle in order to minimize the hassle of traveling with books. When i shipped books to myself before I went to Italy, those books never arrived. Why not treat those who read as customers, not as problems. Why not charge those who don’t read lots of books more. Punish them.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to fess up I was not paid to point out that eBooks weigh less than the real thing. Now to whom do I report? Oh, yes. Fish & Wildlife. That’s what we book readers are—“wildlife”.
Reed Elsevier and Trade Newspaper Paywall
December 10, 2009
Reed Elsevier is trying to deal with the digital avalanche that is sweeping down Mount Information. I read in the Straits Times’s “Variety to Begin Charging.”
We fundamentally believe that the readers should pay one price and get all or any of our content,’ said Neil Stiles, president of Variety Group, a unit of London and Amsterdam-based Reed Elsevier Group PLC. ‘If you don’t pay, you don’t get anything.’ While the 104-year-old newspaper expects to lose many of its roughly 2.5 million monthly online visitors, it values more highly the 25,000 subscribers of its daily printed version and 30,000 subscribers of its weekly printed version.
The question is, “Will there be enough Hollywood hungry folks to make the content generate enough revenue to keep the lights on?” My hunch is that there will be some people who will pay, but the margins of the print publication from 10 years ago are not going to be achievable.
What will happen? I anticipate these events:
- Big splash.
- Lousy numbers
- Regrouping
- Relaunch
- Sale of the property.
Don’t get me wrong. Silobreaker’s consumer service is generating cash. That service uses smart software, not humans. AOL and Yahoo offer entertainment sites. I can create a Hollywood feed on Congoo.com with a few mouse clicks. These competitors are not performing equally well. That’s not the point. There are lots of sites that generate Hollywood content. You can download a podcast from KCRW that delivers “the Business.”
Something more than a paywall will be needed to keep Variety healthy. I have some ideas, but these are not for this free, Web log. Get my drift?
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
I feel compelled by the imperative of a 40 page movie script to report to the custodial contractor for the Old Executive Office Building that I was not paid to write this opinion piece. Wow, confession cleans out the doubt.
Adobe Winning a War or Adobe Trying to Make a Paper Canoe
December 10, 2009
Short honk: You will want to read “Amazon’s Kindle Winning Battle, but Adobe Poised to Win E-book War.” * Then * you will want to do some walk throughs of publishers, assuming you can find one that is giving tours and has staff on site. In today’s world 100 of anything is not exactly a crowd that will fill the River Creek Inn here in Harrods Creek. Libraries face some severe budget pressures. Publishers are late to the online game and generally not exactly the best fishermen at Lake Cumberland, also in Kentucky.
In my experience, Adobe’s software is a standard in photo editing and illustration. I am not to thrilled with Adobe’s handling of Framemaker. I use Version 7.2, which is pretty annoying when it tell me I can’t undo an image import, when I can. Versions 8 and 9, in my opinion, rival Venture in the Corel era. Adobe’s Acrobat software, which I supported when I was at Ziff Communications, has become a bloated boatload of code. After more than a decade of “innovation”, it is still not possible to have a PDF kill itself after a specified number of opens.
The notion that 100 libraries and publishers are going to win a battle strikes me as the type of assertion that gets sold to a buyer who has just stepped off a flight from LAX to Auckland, a flight taken without sleep and moderation in the food and drink department.
With content shifting to new types of platforms and different types of information companies sprouting in the fertile field of those born after 1994, I think Adobe is fighting Harvey the Rabbit. Maybe Adobe can see the rabbit, but I can’t. Furthermore, the rabbit is not much of a competitor. Adobe will have its hands full with customers saying no to meaningless upgrades. Adobe will have its hands full with dear old Googzilla who may change course and drive its nuclear power destroyer up to Adobe and blast away. Adobe will have its hands full with next generation information systems, including some “toys” like blogging software, enterprise publishing systems, and data management systems.
Just my opinion. But if you buy this “war” stuff, just load up on Adobe stock and buy your own ocean going vessel. You can get a heck of a deal on a ghost ship anchored off the west coast of England.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
I wish to disclose to the Government Printing Office, one of the early supporters of XyWrite III+, that I was not paid by anyone to share my views of Adobe’s technical mastery of publishing systems. I wanted to use the word “boat” with “bloat”, but I was not in the mood for rapping.
Axel Springer Plans to Rewrite 30 Years of Online Revenue Evidence
December 9, 2009
Want a memorable passage to tattoo on your tummy? Now I think only the hip traditional journalists and publishers will embrace the needle. Here is the segment from the Gray Lady’s “Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers”:
What kind of content would come at a cost? Any “noncommodity journalism,” Mr. Keese said, citing pictures of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia — published this year by the Spanish daily El País — as an example. “How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said.
The phrase “non commodity” is not applicable to online information. I would suggest “must have” content. Furthermore, motes of info trivia won’t generate much money. What makes money online is aggregation, scale, and data that answer even the most poorly formed query.
Axel will burn rubber trying to make progress. I think the springs will break under the pressure. Note: the Guardian, recycled the New York Times’s story here. That’s what bloggers do. Don’t tell Mr. Murdoch. He believes in “real” journalism. Fox-y business mogul.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
Oyez, oyez, the goose wrote this for nothing. I am not sure what US government agency is providing oversight for free articles about big companies about to enroll in the school of hard knocks. Maybe the National Science Foundation?
Libreka: Belgium Builds a Google Killer for the Europeans
December 8, 2009
I am not sure if this headline is accurate, but that’s what I wrote in my notes after I saw a demo of Libreka. This is not a new service. Ars Technica wrote about it in October 2007. You may find this write up useful: “German Publishers Challenge Google Book Search with Libreka.” The article said:
The new program, called Libreka, has attracted plenty of German publishers who like its “opt-in” approach. Publishers who don’t want to make snippets or sample pages of their works available have that option, unlike with Google, which shows tiny snippets of text even from copyrighted works. Those who want to offer sample pages and make their books searchable can do that too.
I saw a document on Wikileaks that suggested that the Libreka service was not scoring hat tricks at the cash register. You can find that document here.
Libreka has hit my radar a number of times. I have in my files a copy of presentation given a year ago. You can find the document online here. The Libreka business model is quite ambitious, maybe too ambitious:
The document asserts:
- 100,000+ books fully searchable online
- 30m+ book pages online
- 11,000+ E-Books for sale
- 1,200 participating publishers
- 600 participating booksellers.
According to my source in London last week, Libreka is software built by Bureau Marcel van Dijk. You can run queries on the system. Notice that it has a number of Google Books features. The service offers a “wish list”, which allows me to “reserve a book”. I am not sure I will use this feature. User query terms are highlighted in the page displays. I set up a user account, and then I was able to run a query and display a number of pages. I installed the Adobe Digital Editions software. (Once I ran a couple of queries, I uninstalled this software. Yuck. Adobe.) The system also supports PDF “flavors”. (Yuck. Adobe.) My estimate is that the pages displayed are dictated by the publisher participating in the program. If you read German, there’s an FAQ at http://www.libreka.de/help#faq. If you are a Google Translate fan, the Google system cannot parse this particular url, so you will be on your own or you will need to find a German reading friend to assist you.
Too little, too late in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Library of Congress. I wish to disclose that I am writing this article for free and in English. My German is rusty but I figured out enough to conclude that German booksellers are pushing the wrong way in the digital data flows.
Kindle Craziness
December 7, 2009
For some interesting MBA logic, read “Kindle Fantasies Are Running Wild — But, For Now, Amazon Is Losing Its Shirt.” I am not too keen on Amazon or the Kindle. Amazon’s financial reports are not too informative, and the data about its cloud services are expressed in mythical Amazon units. Spare me. The Kindle is annoying in its various incarnations. Among the reasons is the dorky snap on cover that can break the device and the when-pigs-fly search system that often launches itself when packing the gizmo away when the pilot tells me to turn off electronic devices. I have learned to live with the gray on dark gray screen and the clumsy keyboard, the experimental browser, and odd buttons. Kindle 1 had buttons that were too easy to push. Kindle 2 have buttons that are tough to use when reading on the elliptical exercise machine. The big Kindle is an invitation to breakage. PDFs and graphics generally are miserable experiences.
The article cited above sidesteps my points and goes into a more murky area; namely, the finances of Amazon’s selling eBooks. The key passage in the write up in my opinion was:
Publishers should be able to sell e-books to distributors like Amazon at $5 and still maintain the profit margins they enjoyed on print book sales. In turn, distributors like Amazon should be able to sell e-books at the current $9-$10 price and still enjoy a healthy profit. The bad news for authors is that their royalties will decrease since they are based off of retail sales price.
I think that books of any type are going to be a financial challenge whether in print, online, or on a device like the Kindle. In case you have not noticed, books are not the way folks under 20 get their info. I don’t see the demographic bulges that are bursting with video, Web, and tweet consumers suddenly jumping on the book bandwagon. There are 320 million or so people in the US and most book readers are concentrated above 42nd Street, in university burgs like Charlottesville, Virginia, Washington, DC, and a half dozen other major cities.
The numbers presented in the write up appear rational, but the thinking that gives rise to this type of analysis is oddly disconnected from the reality of the publishing business. Can traditional publishing survive with a shrinking pool of book readers? Check out the argument in Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America. That 1992 future is now here. When a blockbuster fails to materialize for book publishers, the decline will be sure and steady. In fact, that’s what is happening right now in publishing. When Google provides good enough options to get nuggets of information, the revenue bleeding will be slow and the open wound will lead to financial Streptococcus pneumoniae. Prognosis: no marathons for the victim. Publishing outfits may just wheeze along.
Don’t expect gizmos and price wars to change the descent. Just take a look at your kids. Reading a book? Not likely for the majority of families I assert.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to disclose to the Department of the Army that books are not what they once were. If you know someone in the Army responsible for recruit training, run your book argument by that non commissioned officer and let me know what you hear. By the way, this is a free blog. You will have to pay the author of the cited article to get their reasoning for financial bonanzas.
Maggwire: A Remarkable Reinvention of a 1980s Database
December 7, 2009
I saw a reference to the “iTunes of magazines.” I took a few minutes to track down this reference. I located what may be the ur-reference, an interview with Ryan Klenovich and Steve DeWald, two former investment bankers with Deutsche Bank. You can find the full text of the interview in which this phrase appears in Mr. Magazine’s Web log article “Magazine Innovation in Practice: Maggwire, the iTunes for magazines?” Several points in the interview made it into my paper notebook via a goose quill pen. For more insights about this “iTunes for magazines”, read the article and watch the video.
- “We’re trying to become an online destination for reading magazines, similar to YouTube where users associate YouTube as the online destination for viewing videos.”
- “Initially, the excitement is going to come from the added traffic.”
- “You can call us the Google of magazines, where we crawl the web for these great magazine articles, the users go on there to read and rate the articles, and the idea is that the best ones will come to the top.”
- “The ideality is to create this marketplace using one ID.”
- “Like I said, we’re not going to replace print, what we’re trying to do is compliment the print magazine.”
- “Another thing that we have thought about is, after we do reach a certain critical mass, we believe people will be willing to pay a nominal subscription for our service especially as the publishers continue to expand their offerings and partner up with us and our site will just get better and better and better.”
- “I think now we’re really in an interesting phase where you have these e-ink devices and iTablets coming out so the hardware will be there, so you need some kind of central destination to back that up.”
Interesting premise.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2009
Oyez, oyez. A freebie. I wonder to whom I report this fact. Perhaps to the iTunes of the US government, the National Archives, maybe?
The Google Gong Rings for ProQuest and Dissertation Content
December 7, 2009
A MOVIE CAMERA BUSINESS TRIES TO ADAPT
In June 1986, I was sold along with the electronic publishing assets of the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co. to Bell+Howell. B+H owned a new media company, which in the late 1980s did business as University Microfilms with the acronym UMI. At that time, the company’s product line up spanned a number of media. At one end of the spectrum was the original business based on creating microfilm replicas of documents. These microfilms were sold to libraries. Generations of students used technology perfected during World War II for their access to information not in a library’s collection. At the other end were the electronic products from the Courier Journal: ABI/INFORM, Pharmaceutical News Index, and Business Dateline (the first full text local business news database with corrections made when the source updated the story’s facts).
Now this is an efficient research tool for today’s student. Source: http://www.archivalsuppliers.com/images/Picture%20284.jpg
When I was a student, I did research with microfilm. It was okay but it took a long time to get the reels, get them set up, and reviewed. Getting a hard copy of a document was a hassle. Some of the prints turned black and became unreadable quickly. I once dropped a reel and watched in horror as it unspooled, picked up dirt, and was unusable. I had to pay the library for a replacement. I think in the 1960s, a single reel cost me about $45 which was more than I made in my part time job. I loathed the stuff.
At the recent Online Information 2009 event in London, my colleague Ulla de Stricker was the keynoter for the “Publishers Delivering Value” track on December 3., 2009. In her talk – which she mentioned the Google move into dissertations. Her reference inspired me to write this opinion piece. You can get iinformation about her at DeStricker.com. One of her example was the fact that Stanford University students may now submit their dissertations to Google while it is optional to submit them to ProQuest.
So I wandered over to the exhibit hall to visit with ProQuest, all the while reminiscing about my past experience with that company – known as UMI at the time.
MICROFILM: HARD TO USE, EASY TO DAMAGE AND MISFILE
When I was working on my PhD, I remember my fellow students talking about the costs of getting their dissertations “published” and then included in the Dissertation Abstracts index. I never had this problem because I took a job with the nuclear unit of Halliburton, never bothering to submit my dissertation once I got a real job.
A microfilm readers. Source: http://www.ucar.edu/library/collections/archive/media/photographs/481_1976_microfilm_lg.jpg
The whole system was a money making machine. When a library burned down, backfiles could be acquired when physical copies were not available. When a university got a grant for a new field of study, a collection of journals could be purchased from UMI on microfilm. Bang. Instant academic reference material. I don’t recall how much content the “old” UMI moved to microfilm. My recollection is that there were books, journals, newspaper, and, of course, dissertations. With all this film, I understood why B+H had paid tens of millions for the Courier Journal’s electronic publishing expertise. Buying expertise and using it are two different things, in my opinion.
MECHANICAL PRODUCTION WRONG FOR DIGITAL PRODUCTS
The production process for creating a microfilm was quite complicated and involved specialized cameras, film, and chemicals. The image I have of the UMI facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the first time I visited was a modern day castle surrounded by a moat. The castle was a large, one-story building surrounded by a settling pond. The chemicals from the film processing were pumped into the moat in order to separate certain high value residue from other chemicals. UMI processed so much film that the residue silver from the photographic process warranted this recycling effort.
Dinosaurs struggle with the concept of an apocalypse. Adapt or get grilled I suppose.
UMI had a silver mine in its monopoly on certain types of content. My recollection of UMI was that its core product was getting universities to require or maybe strongly recommend that doctoral dissertations had to be “published” by UMI. The microfilm copies of the dissertations were sold back to the doctoral students and to libraries interested in having a compact, relatively easy way to store volumes on a mind boggling range of topics. I did a project that required me to use a microfilm copy of something called the Elisaeis by a wild and crazy religious poet named William Alabaster, and several dissertations written about that nearly forgotten literary work. I also did a project for the Vatican and worked through microfilms of sermons from the middle ages in Latin. Now that was fun! Pretty sporty content to. Nothing like a hot omelie.
News Corp and Its MySpace Case
December 5, 2009
I have not recovered from my wonderful Delta flights from Louisville to London. In fact, the goose’s wings are tired. I was not in the mood for commenting about stories and issues that caught my attention. Then I noticed a headline from a newspaper under the control of the outfit that used to run Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. (No joke.) The headline was “The Rise and Fall of MySpace.” The idea is that News Corp bought MySpace.com when its perceived value was high: money, promise, and users. Now, under the firm hand of the hegemons at News Corp. the perceived value of MySpace.com is less money, little promise, and fewer users. Yep, these traditional media companies have figured out how to manage digital properties. There was one statement in the write up that merited the goose’s attention; to wit:
Murdoch himself was responsible for dealing the company the first in a series of blows. On a 2007 News Corp earnings call, a punchy Murdoch told analysts that Fox Interactive Media would generate $1bn in revenues for the 2008 fiscal year (up from about $550m in 2007). With MySpace representing almost all of Fox Interactive’s revenues, the implication was clear: Murdoch thought MySpace’s meteoric rise would continue. There was only one problem: the MySpace management team had no idea Murdoch had set them a new target until he opened his mouth. “It came out of thin air,” says a former MySpace executive. At a stroke, the site’s free-wheeling, entrepreneurial days were over: it had to perform exactly as expected – or else.
Read the FT’s article for more of this quasi-“we know what News Corp did wrong” view of a fellow traditional media company’s handling of a digital property.
Several observations:
- The write up makes clear that at one point in time, folks perceived News Corp’s heavyweight champion of business as “punchy”. Wow. Punchy as in punch drunk or as in too much fruit juice and vodka? Ambiguous but metaphorically rich.
- News Corp’s ability to manage programmers is interesting. Hopefully there will be a non fiction book from one of the “Sergey and Larry eat pizza” type writers. I want more of this insightful business writing.
- Any plan to save traditional media hatched by News Corp may have some MySpace.com DNA. Genes of greatness perhaps?
I thoroughly enjoy old media reporting on the foibles and follies of other old media company.
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
Hark ye heralds of ethical blogging, this is a freebie. I think I will report this fact to the National Capital Planning Commission.
The Digital Gutenberg Cranks Out a Dictionary
December 5, 2009
I find it interesting that the Google is moving more quickly into content publishing. A recent example appears in “Google Quietly Rolls Out Dictionary”. Now Google has had a dictionary for years, but it was limited to defining nerdy words and phrases. The most recent incarnation of the automated service includes some interesting features:
…looking up a word on the Dictionary website provides a list of definitions pulled from a variety of academically authoritative sources (oh, and Wikipedia). It has a few cool features. You can mark words with the star button and come back to them later, see a list of recent searches and switch to translator resources or dictionaries for other languages.
The part of the write up that surprised me was this statement: “Dictionary companies have expected Google would saunter into their realm any day.” No kidding. I think it is encouraging that dictionary publishers have anticipated Google’s move. Google works dictionary magic with software. Some traditional dictionary companies use humans. Which approach has the financial advantage? I wonder what traditional dictionary publishers are doing to challenge the Google.
Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009
I wish to disclose that I was not paid to point out that Google is a digital Gutenberg, powered by tireless, smart software. I think I have to report this to the Government Printing Office. Yep, for sure.
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