Social Media Overload! What to Unplug?
Google+ is an intriguing mash-up of Facebook and Twitter, but its use of “circles” does a better job of reflecting and managing the variety of solid and permeable walls that exist in real-life networks, and when it comes to privacy, I trust our robot overlords a slight bit more than the new kids on the virtual block.
Dumb Pipes, Devaluing Content: It’s All About Context
In backing down, I suspect Jobs saw the HTML5 on the wall and realized he was fighting a rare losing battle, playing hardball with major content producers whose early, enthusiastic and unabated promotion of the iPad — as inherently a consumption device as has ever been conceived — helped demonstrate its value to consumers. It was, theoretically, a mutually beneficial relationship until his reach finally exceeded his grasp.
The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
The Influencing Machine is an insightful graphic manifesto that offers a broad, contextual overview of the history of media, recounted with a healthy sense of humor, and a refreshing undertone of optimism.
Where’s My Penguin Football Jersey?
The reality is, once the eBook market shakes out in the next year or two and becomes more efficient, the publishing industry will still be the dominant supplier of books people actually pay for. Will the players change? Maybe, maybe not. Will the business model have to change? (drink!) Sure, for some publishers. Same for agents and authors, too.
Why Don’t More Authors and Publishers “Get” Libraries?
The public library is one of the fundamental pillars of our peculiar flavor of democracy, and yet, recent events in both political and publishing circles suggest that our commitment to them is wavering. And there’s certainly no shortage of opinions about their place in the “digital future,” some optimistic, but most some ignorant variation on “Who needs libraries when we have Kindles, Netflix and Wikipedia?”
Bookish vs. Amazon, Goodreads: Community or Commerce?
Of course, last week’s much hyped and completely vague announcement of Bookish, a new joint venture between three of the “Big 6? – Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Group — caught my attention, not for its unusual (but not unprecedented) collaborative angle, but for its disappointingly unimaginative and shortsighted value proposition.
How Does a Writer Balance Sunlight?
Now, with a new job serving a new community that doesn’t officially (or unoffically) require my writing skills, there’s an exciting light at the end of the tunnel and I’m seizing the opportunity while trying to find the right balance to ensure it’s all sustainable.
Ebook Project: Handmade Memories (Part I)
Inspired more by friends like Chuck Wendig, Will Hindmarch and Jane Friedman than Joe Konrath, et al, and emboldened by everything I learned from working with Joshua Tallent while running Digital Book World, my goal for the project was two-fold: do enough of it myself to have hands-on experience of what it takes, what’s “easy” and what isn’t; and to get the monkey of finally publishing this particular book off my back!
Unleashing Stories; Engaging Communities
Stories just as powerful and compelling as those Waiting for Superman put in the spotlight are confined to the printed page instead of being unleashed across multiple platforms for people to connect with, share with others, and inspire action.
When Content is Everywhere, Marketing is Queen
Right now, the relative ease of digital publishing — not yet the equivalent of blogging, but getting closer every week — and the exceptional successes of a relative handful of authors masks the larger challenges ahead for authors and publishers alike, regardless of their business model: discoverability.