Yellow Cucumbers Edible
2 years ago
Saturday, February 27, 2010
No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You
No dustjackets required
from The Guardian UK
What is the point of dustjackets? The clue can't be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn't cover (these days, anyway). Decoratively, too, they are a recipe for disappointment. Bring home your expensive new hardback, lift up its gorgeous plumage, and underneath – in the UK at least – you're liable to find rough-textured and drably covered board, with the only graphic element a cruder reproduction of the lettering on the spine of the jacket. In America, land of the deckle edge, your chances of a pleasant surprise are greater; but the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance. That, at least, is how it has always seemed to me – and some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.
Jacketless hardbacks with cover art printed on them (the technical term is "casewrapped") were once a format reserved for rough environments. It was the style for set texts to be handed down across generations of schoolchildren, and workshop manuals to be kept within reach of greasy fingers. Now, however, it seems to be becoming an increasingly popular option for literary fiction.
What is the point of dustjackets? The clue can't be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn't cover (these days, anyway). Decoratively, too, they are a recipe for disappointment. Bring home your expensive new hardback, lift up its gorgeous plumage, and underneath – in the UK at least – you're liable to find rough-textured and drably covered board, with the only graphic element a cruder reproduction of the lettering on the spine of the jacket. In America, land of the deckle edge, your chances of a pleasant surprise are greater; but the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance. That, at least, is how it has always seemed to me – and some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.
Jacketless hardbacks with cover art printed on them (the technical term is "casewrapped") were once a format reserved for rough environments. It was the style for set texts to be handed down across generations of schoolchildren, and workshop manuals to be kept within reach of greasy fingers. Now, however, it seems to be becoming an increasingly popular option for literary fiction.
Digital Disappearance
from Miller-McCune
Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper “morgues” and rarely saw the dusty light of day.
Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online — an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you’re someone who was actually in the news.
In a recent survey of 110 news organizations, the Toronto Star found that increasingly, publishers are fielding regular requests from anxious and embarrassed readers to “unpublish” information, sometimes months or years after it first appeared online.
Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper “morgues” and rarely saw the dusty light of day.
Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online — an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you’re someone who was actually in the news.
In a recent survey of 110 news organizations, the Toronto Star found that increasingly, publishers are fielding regular requests from anxious and embarrassed readers to “unpublish” information, sometimes months or years after it first appeared online.
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
From The New York Review of Books
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.
Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.
Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Survey: Paying for online content a tough sell
from SFGate.com
With big media companies grappling with ways to increase online revenues, a new survey released Tuesday showed 85 percent of Internet users believed that online content that is currently free should remain free.
Yet the extensive survey by the Nielsen Co. research firm found online consumers may be more willing to pay for certain categories, such as movies, games, TV shows and music, and less likely to pay for news, blogs and user-created videos.
While there were no clear-cut categories of content that will successfully sell online, there was a "definite maybe," Nic Covey, Nielsen's director of cross platform insights, wrote in a blog post about the report, "Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online.
"When asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants are more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before," Covey wrote.
Previous studies have shown a long-standing online culture preferring free content still runs deep. For example, a Forrester Research report in November found that 80 percent of U.S. consumers would not bother to access online newspaper or magazine sites if they were no longer free.
But the Nielsen report was broader in scope, surveying 27,000 consumers in 52 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East about various forms of content.
In four categories - theatrical movies, music, games and professionally produced videos - 50 percent or more said they would consider paying or have already paid for online content.
At the other end, less than 30 percent said they would consider paying for social networks, podcasts, news-talk radio, consumer-generated video and blogs.
In the middle were magazines, newspapers and Internet-only news sites. But 78 percent said they should be able to access newspaper, magazine, radio or television service free online if they have already paid for a subscription.
Meanwhile, 79 percent said they would no longer use a Web site that began charging for access, "presuming they can find the same information at no cost," the report said. That sentiment was highest - 85 percent - in North America.
With big media companies grappling with ways to increase online revenues, a new survey released Tuesday showed 85 percent of Internet users believed that online content that is currently free should remain free.
Yet the extensive survey by the Nielsen Co. research firm found online consumers may be more willing to pay for certain categories, such as movies, games, TV shows and music, and less likely to pay for news, blogs and user-created videos.
While there were no clear-cut categories of content that will successfully sell online, there was a "definite maybe," Nic Covey, Nielsen's director of cross platform insights, wrote in a blog post about the report, "Changing Models: A Global Perspective on Paying for Content Online.
"When asked to focus on specific types of content, survey participants are more willing to at least consider paying for particular categories, especially if they have done so before," Covey wrote.
Previous studies have shown a long-standing online culture preferring free content still runs deep. For example, a Forrester Research report in November found that 80 percent of U.S. consumers would not bother to access online newspaper or magazine sites if they were no longer free.
But the Nielsen report was broader in scope, surveying 27,000 consumers in 52 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East about various forms of content.
In four categories - theatrical movies, music, games and professionally produced videos - 50 percent or more said they would consider paying or have already paid for online content.
At the other end, less than 30 percent said they would consider paying for social networks, podcasts, news-talk radio, consumer-generated video and blogs.
In the middle were magazines, newspapers and Internet-only news sites. But 78 percent said they should be able to access newspaper, magazine, radio or television service free online if they have already paid for a subscription.
Meanwhile, 79 percent said they would no longer use a Web site that began charging for access, "presuming they can find the same information at no cost," the report said. That sentiment was highest - 85 percent - in North America.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome
from The New York Times
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”
But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”
But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” said Dr. Berger, a social psychologist and a professor of marketing at Penn’s Wharton School. “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
As Data Flows In, the Dollars Flow Out
from The New York Times
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.
And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on entertainment over devices as they are on dining out or buying gasoline.
And those government figures do not take into account movies, music and television shows bought through iTunes, or the data plans that are increasingly mandatory for more sophisticated smartphones.
Publishers Win a Bout in E-Book Price Fight
from The New York Times
Could book publishers suddenly be in the position of telling Google what to do?
With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control — at least temporarily — of how much consumers pay for their content.
[...]
How e-books are sold — and for how much — has been a crucial topic of debate among publishers and retailers for the last two years, as digital books have taken off. Led by Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reading device, the e-book market is growing at a fast clip, fueled partly by cheap digital editions. Amazon and several other retailers now offer new releases and best sellers for $9.99, far less than the typical $26 cover price on hardcovers.
Publishers have been fretting that such pricing has devalued books in the minds of consumers and have been looking for ways to regain control of what readers pay. When Apple unveiled its iPad, it said it had agreements with five of the country’s six largest publishers. Under those agreements, publishers would set e-book prices — within limits — so that new releases of most general fiction and nonfiction would sell for $12.99 to $14.99. Apple will act as an agent of the publishers — a set-up known in the publishing world as the agency model — and take a 30 percent cut of each sale, leaving the rest for publishers to split with authors.
In early negotiations, the 63 percent Google had been offering publishers was based on a wholesale model, but executives briefed on the discussions said that Google was now open to talking about an agency model and was also prepared to discuss paying publishers 70 percent of each sale.
Even Amazon has been forced to back off its $9.99 pricing in an agreement with Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers. In a recent dust-up after Macmillan told Amazon it was moving to the 30 percent agency model with higher consumer pricing, Amazon removed direct access to Macmillan’s physical and electronic books from its site for a week. Amazon later surrendered to the publisher’s terms.
Could book publishers suddenly be in the position of telling Google what to do?
With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control — at least temporarily — of how much consumers pay for their content.
[...]
How e-books are sold — and for how much — has been a crucial topic of debate among publishers and retailers for the last two years, as digital books have taken off. Led by Amazon.com’s Kindle electronic reading device, the e-book market is growing at a fast clip, fueled partly by cheap digital editions. Amazon and several other retailers now offer new releases and best sellers for $9.99, far less than the typical $26 cover price on hardcovers.
Publishers have been fretting that such pricing has devalued books in the minds of consumers and have been looking for ways to regain control of what readers pay. When Apple unveiled its iPad, it said it had agreements with five of the country’s six largest publishers. Under those agreements, publishers would set e-book prices — within limits — so that new releases of most general fiction and nonfiction would sell for $12.99 to $14.99. Apple will act as an agent of the publishers — a set-up known in the publishing world as the agency model — and take a 30 percent cut of each sale, leaving the rest for publishers to split with authors.
In early negotiations, the 63 percent Google had been offering publishers was based on a wholesale model, but executives briefed on the discussions said that Google was now open to talking about an agency model and was also prepared to discuss paying publishers 70 percent of each sale.
Even Amazon has been forced to back off its $9.99 pricing in an agreement with Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers. In a recent dust-up after Macmillan told Amazon it was moving to the 30 percent agency model with higher consumer pricing, Amazon removed direct access to Macmillan’s physical and electronic books from its site for a week. Amazon later surrendered to the publisher’s terms.
To Deliver, iPad Needs Media Deals
from The New York Times
This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?
Yes and, sadly, no. The iPad’s glories as a media consumption device open up a whole new frontier for developers and publishers. But they also raise large questions about the business models that will drive that content to the screen.
[...]
But there’s a sticking point here, too. The consumer side of both newspapers and magazines is in the database business, trying to expand their base of credit cards and information about consumers. In a world of applications, a share of the revenue will go to publishers, but the information about customers mostly belongs to Apple. The big question for publishers is, will Apple allow them to develop their own relationship with the consumer?
This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?
Yes and, sadly, no. The iPad’s glories as a media consumption device open up a whole new frontier for developers and publishers. But they also raise large questions about the business models that will drive that content to the screen.
[...]
But there’s a sticking point here, too. The consumer side of both newspapers and magazines is in the database business, trying to expand their base of credit cards and information about consumers. In a world of applications, a share of the revenue will go to publishers, but the information about customers mostly belongs to Apple. The big question for publishers is, will Apple allow them to develop their own relationship with the consumer?
In the World of Facebook
From The New York Review of Books
What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.
[...]
If Facebook Connect spreads through the rest of the Internet, it will begin to produce even more radical effects. Google, the dominant force on the Web for the past decade, explicitly stated its goal at the company's founding: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." But there are some things that many would rather not make universally accessible—and not just books under copyright. Facebook, with the private information of over 350 million members, now constitutes what Wired magazine has called a "second Internet." By encouraging members to bring their Facebook settings with them onto the rest of the Web, Zuckerberg hopes to take this new Internet, with its pretensions to privacy, and place it at the foundation of the old one.
What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.
[...]
If Facebook Connect spreads through the rest of the Internet, it will begin to produce even more radical effects. Google, the dominant force on the Web for the past decade, explicitly stated its goal at the company's founding: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." But there are some things that many would rather not make universally accessible—and not just books under copyright. Facebook, with the private information of over 350 million members, now constitutes what Wired magazine has called a "second Internet." By encouraging members to bring their Facebook settings with them onto the rest of the Web, Zuckerberg hopes to take this new Internet, with its pretensions to privacy, and place it at the foundation of the old one.
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