Posts tagged publishing
University of Minnesota Launches Open Textbook Catalog
With college students spending, on average, over $1,100 per year on course materials, the drive to develop and use open textbook alternatives to traditional publisher releases is growing.
One issue in their adoption though has been quality control.
Enter the University of Minnesota with a plan to provide a growing catalog of peer reviewed books. Via Inside Higher Ed:
Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books. (Faculty members elsewhere are welcome to post their own reviews, but they won’t be compensated.) Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.
The project is meant to address two faculty critiques of open-source texts: they are hard to locate and they are of indeterminate quality. By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks…
…The goal of the Minnesota database is to curate texts in a way that empowers instead of frustrating professors. Material posted in the catalog must have an open license, be a complete book, have a print version and be adoptable outside the author’s institution. Minnesota isn’t creating any of the books, just assembling the best of what’s been published elsewhere. The catalog includes texts from Rice University, which launched a series of peer-reviewed open-source books earlier this year.
There are currently about 90 books in the catalog in subjects ranging from history to law to math and economics.
Here Goes Nothing: Microsoft, Barnes & Noble make a new entrance into the e-reader market
The audio clip above, courtesy of Scientific American, says it all: Microsoft and B&N hope to find strength in numbers as they 1) create a nook app for Windows 8 tablets and PCs and 2) form a subsidiary that will help make one very large, alternative (to Apple, Amazon) e-book library among other things, probably, once those things are announced.
E-books have no supply — if I buy one, it doesn’t reduce how many remain, because theoretically infinite copies remain. No cost to reprint. No cost to remake. It just… sits out there, attempting to be the very embodiment of the Long Tail.
This is what the audience sees and believes.
It matters little what the e-book actually costs.
It only matters what the audience thinks they should cost.
Wrote Chuck Wendig yesterday. GigaOM thought about it, too.
But since this is about us, the audience, then we should say so ourselves, whatever our opinions may be. So tell us:
Would you be willing to pay more for an e-book from an indie publisher than from, say, Penguin?
Reblog and answer or tweet us.
The future of content on the web – content that gets discovered, creates value, and builds audiences – is not cheap text cranked out by content farms. It’s high quality, editorial and entertainment created by experienced journalists and passionate bloggers. The future is a social media world, where humans are the arbiters of quality, and search algorithms reward sharing and human readability.
The Internet means publishers should no longer be confined to the limits of in-office staff, nor should they be forced to burn fuel to put reporters on the ground around the world. Creative talent lives everywhere; it can and should work from wherever it lives. And any quality publisher should have access to it. Though we may live far apart, the web can bring freelancers together into a community whose value far exceeds the sum of its members. This is the freelance revolution.
The delineation between “media company” and any other enterprise is no longer relevant; we embrace the notion that any entity – brand, nonprofit, news organization, or individual – can be a quality publisher. We believe the business model that “saves journalism” is myriad: Commerce, sponsorship, paid content, and philanthropy will sustain the craft and maintain journalistic integrity, so long as motives and authors are transparent.
If we are fixing prices for our benefit, we don’t seem to be very good at it.
Bloomberg reaches iPhone readers by giving them a word count
The Bloomberg Businessweek iPad app has been a success for nearly a year now, and this week they’re bringing it to the iPhone. The difference being that:
It gives readers a word count for stories, making it easier to pick out the most digestible piece given whatever amount of time you have. “We know through the course of the day on iPhone people are going to come in and out, and we want to give them a perspective of the (time) commitment,” Oke Okaro said.
Tip toeing around the other things people use their phones for, the global head of mobile there says there’s a lot to learn from watching how people use the app over the next few months.
Since the iPad version of the app has been out for some time, Bloomberg has data on their readers’ habits, and they generally line up with what we’ve seen elsewhere: People are reading the magazine in the evening and on weekends. The magazine has grown a steady stream of new subscribers and converted print readers to verify their subscription, so the iPhone edition is a play at expanding their audience.
Via Nieman Lab.
WordPress Dominates Top 100 Blogs
Via Pingdom:
We just completed a study and found that WordPress is in use by 48% of the top 100 blogs in the world. This is an increase from the 32% we recorded three years ago.
Other developments since then include that custom blog publishing platforms are more common now, TypePad has all but disappeared from the top 100, Tumblr has made an entrance, and some companies really don’t want to spill the beans about what solutions they use.
Nice to see Tumblr is in the top 100.
DOJ Sues Apple & 5 Publishers for Fixing E-Book Prices
The antitrust lawsuit accuses Apple and five separate publishers of colluding to fix the price of e-books in violation of federal antitrust law. Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have settled with the Justice Department, but the remaining three defendants—Apple, Penguin, and Macmillan have not.
Apparently, the price-fixing scheme began a few months prior to the release of the first iPad, and the publishers reportedly took steps to conceal secret communications with each other.
via Talking Points Memo:
The publishers and Apple ended up entering into an agreement. Jobs’ own email to a publisher proves to be quite damning with Jobs stating that the publishers could work with Apple or pursue one of two other choices: “Keep going with Amazon at $9.99” or “hold back your books from Amazon.”
In April 2010, publishers began charging $12.99, $14.99 or $16.99 for e-book versions of new hardcover titles.
Previously, the DOJ points out, e-book pricing occurred in a “wholesale model,” wherein publishers sold their books to retailers at varying prices, then retailers were free to charge whatever they wanted for them.
The “agency model” that Apple and the five publishers implemented involved agreeing to fixed prices prior to selling the books through Apple’s iBookstore, according to the DOJ.
If approved by the court, a settlement will grant retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble the freedom to reduce the price of their e-books. They would also be required to “terminate their anticompetitive most-favored-nation agreements with Apple and other e-books retailers.”
Snoop Dogg’s Smokable Book
Filed under publishing innovation: Snoop Dogg is releasing Rolling Words: A Smokable Songbook.
The book contains Snoop’s lyrics printed on rolling paper and has a twine cover with a spine you can light a match on.
H/T: Time.
[John Derbyshire’s] latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.
Rich Lowry, Editor, National Review. Parting Ways.
The National Review, a conservative political magazine, fired John Derbyshire Saturday over an article called The Talk: Nonblack Version that Derbyshire published in Taki’s Magazine, an unrelated publication run by its namesake Taki Theodoracopulos.
In the article, Derbyshire shares the advice he gives his children about how whites should perceive, understand and otherwise interact with blacks.
Lowlights among them: well, just about the entire thing.
For Publishers, Google+ Not Quite There Yet
In a letter to shareholders, Google CEO Larry Page includes some mind bending stats such as the fact that AdSense has paid out over $30 billion to content producers since its launch a decade ago.
Also noted is that Google+ has over 100 million active users.
How Google+ translates to the US news industry is taken up by ReadWriteWeb who report that so far it hasn’t gotten much traction.
Searchmetrics has released new data about the Google+ visibility of top U.S. newspapers that reveals stark differences in performance. But what it reveals most of all is that engagement on Google+ is still too low to send reliable social signals about a story to Google.
Of the top U.S. newspapers, The New York Times has the most popular Google+ page by more than double. As of April 2, when Searchmetrics collated the data, it was in the circles of 360,032 people. The Wall Street Journal had 149,905 followers. It drops off precipitously after that.
The Los Angeles Times had 21,294 encirclers, and The Washington Post had 19,674. Then it drops off another order of magnitude for USA Today and Chicago Sun-Times, and then you’re into the hundreds of followers.
As RWW notes, “360,000 of anything is a lot. Even 20,000 followers represent significant influence.” But the social signal news organizations are sending out through Google+ is scant with few readers actually using the platform to share articles.
Which is too bad since more activity around a publisher’s content within Google+ affects both Google search and Google news results.
Read through to explore RWW’s analysis of publishers’ Google+ numbers.
How We Will Read: Clay Shirky
This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.
This week, we were extremely honored to speak to Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Clay is a professor at the renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books, most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he could teach us about social reading. Clay is both brilliant and witty, able to weave in quotes from Robert Frost in one breath and drop a “ZOMG” in the next. So sit down and take notes: Professor Shirky’s about to speak.
How is publishing changing?
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.
The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.
The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.
What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?
One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.
But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”
Zite Launches Publishers Program
Zite, the personalized magazine app creator that CNN purchased last summer has had a busy couple of days.
Last week they announced the release of an Android version of their app. This week they announce that they’ve created a publisher’s program with eight partners including Fox Sports, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post and, of course, CNN.
The program integrates the publisher’s content into a dedicated section within the Zite app with the goal of first exposing readers to that content, and then — because the user likes the publishers’ content so much — getting them to download the publishers’ native apps.
Conversion, of course, is a tricky game to play and hard to succeed at but it is an important step for a company that was sent a cease and desist letter by publishers almost immediately after it first launched the product last year.
The model also differs from Next Issue Media’s “Netflix for Magazines” app that we highlighted yesterday, where publishers are bundling their content together under an all you can read buffet for $10 to $15 per month.
Perhaps its in their DNA. Zite considers itself a discovery engine rather than a personalized magazine news aggregator. In announcing the publishing program, they write:
Zite is uniquely positioned to innovate on distribution with publishers because of how Zite works. At our core, we are a discovery engine: a place where users can go to find interesting articles that are personalized to a user’s particular needs/wants. One of the most common compliments we receive from our users is: “Wow, I find stuff on Zite that I couldn’t have found anywhere else.”
Zite’s goal isn’t to be the only place you go to read news. Much like a search engine, we just want to be your starting point. On a person’s iPad, for example, we expect that a user will use Zite and a number of publisher applications that they read cover to cover. Zite gives you a taste, but you need to go the publisher for their full experience.
So, two days, two different models on how publishers are coming together on tablets and mobile devices. We look forward to watching where this leads, and seeing what new innovations others are coming up with.
LinkedIn Industry Trends
Note the bottom item left and second to top item right.
Read through for LinkedIn’s take on the numbers.
Meanwhile, over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram writes:
In other words, traditional media outlets like newspapers may not be succeeding, but online publishing has never been better. It’s not clear exactly what kinds of companies or businesses were included in LinkedIn’s definition of online publishers for the purposes of the report — presumably it would cover digital-only entities like The Huffington Post and the rest of the AOL empire, as well as Yahoo’s publishing units (both of whom have been hiring writers away from traditional print outlets) and a number of other online-only publishers such as Politico. And obviously some traditional companies like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have significant online operations, although whether they were included isn’t clear either.
It’s also worth noting that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have been hiring journalists at a fairly rapid pace over the past year or so, and while they fall into a different category in LinkedIn’s ranking, that’s definitely a sign that digital media is in pretty good shape (Bloomberg has also been able to absorb Businessweek magazine’s estimated annual losses of $20 million or so). For both companies, of course, the consumer-facing parts of their media businesses are funded by proprietary information services that are designed for financial and other specialty markets — so their digital businesses subsidize their “traditional” media assets, instead of the other way around.
Legacy publishers, he notes, are weighed down by the pre-existing business models and practices, and find themselves in a “valley of death” where they need to cannibalize the old in order to proceed with the new.
Image: LinkedIn Industry Trends: Shrinking and Growing Industries. Via LinkedIn.
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