2023 was a pretty good year for my personal relationship with immersive media, though. I enjoyed a range of new-to-me books, games, movies, and TV, while also uncharacteristically diving back into some old faves when I needed a bit of comfort food.
"A dim future for big publishers is not a dim future for readers." Five things for February 16, 2023. That's it! That's the excerpt.
"Accountability rolls downhill in Corporate America." Five things for February 2, 2023. That's it! That's the excerpt.
It's not a huge stretch to posit Amazon as the reverse-Valve of the ebook world, constantly pushing the envelope in unexpected ways, aggressively experimenting with pricing, developing a core of popular franchises, while staying focused on delivering and optimizing the best consumer experience.
Therein lies the real problem with Klout. While its Topics feature is an intriguing attempt to add a much-needed contextual layer to its linear scoring and might have some long-term potential (most likely as acquisition bait, to complement PostRank or Radian6?), overall, it's a pretty useless, Foursquare-style gamification of the worst aspects of Social MEdia.
In publishing, every day it seems there's a new upstart or three that's going to disintermediate (or even better, KILL!) traditional publishers, but with the exceptions of Open Road Integrated Media and, possibly, Ruckus Media Group -- notably, both are run by major publishing veterans and have partnerships with a variety of "traditional" publishers -- you'd be hard-pressed to name too many others that have had any truly notable impact to match the hype surrounding them.
Just as many entrepreneurs no longer need venture capitalists to launch their companies, authors no longer need publishers to publish.
Mark Coker, Do Authors Still Need Publishers?
Picture this: In the future, as the risks of publishing shift from the publisher to the author, publishers will be able to invest in technologies that allow them to bypass authors completely, developing sophisticated algorithms to scrape their content from the Internet, repurpose and repackage it for non-discriminating readers, and charge advertisers fistfuls of money for their wandering eyeballs!
It sounds even better if you say it out loud in Dr. Evil’s voice. Or Chris Anderson’s. Or Arianna Huffington’s.
Resistance is futile!
If Coker’s second linkbait advertorial for the Huffington Post didn’t add anything new to the conversation, it did at least spawn a new hashtag on Twitter, #publishersmatter, and generate some interesting discussion around the value publishers do, and don’t, offer authors nowadays.
My take?