New Media Archives | Page 13 of 18

Reflections on, Takeaways from #eBookSummit

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:December 17, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:7 Comments

mediabistro.com eBook Summit in New York by Mediabistro

“I suppose we could sum up this entire two-day conference under the headline ‘too early to tell.'”

–Steve Wasserman (Kneerim & Williams)

I attended MediaBistro’s eBook Summit this week and Wasserman’s summation is perfect; consumer book publishing is smack in the middle of the digital transition, and solid answers about how it will all play out are hard to come by. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t plenty of people willing to throw their two cents (and millions of VC dollars) into the conversation.

While ostensibly a competitive event with Digital Book World, my sense was that both the program and attendees were very different from ours — the former more theoretical and broader; the latter… well, just different, I’d say. There’s clearly room for both events, which I was actually glad to see, because I’m a fan of MediaBistro and I don’t want the wonderful Carmen Scheidel getting mad at me after we just became friends!

I live-tweeted both days of the Summit — Day 1 and Day 2 (sorry LiveJournal friends!) — and after cleansing my palette by reading more of the latest issue of Monocle (an absolutely beautiful example of what can and should be done only in print), here’s my top five takeaways:

(more…)

eBooks: The False Dilemma

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:November 30, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:31 Comments

People will continue to read printed books for a long time, just as some people still watch movies on VHS. But the printed book will be "dead" in a few short years in the sense that the bulk of the adoption curve, the pragmatic majority, will have moved on. --Arvind Narayanan, "The death of the printed book is closer than you think" Narayanan's post is the latest addition to the tiresome "print is dead" meme, and like the vast majority of digital evangelists, he presents a false dilemma, posits a zero-sum scenario, and evokes the tired and largely irrelevant example…

Do Publishers Still Need Authors?

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:October 28, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:19 Comments

Its a giant cupcake and Android! (@ Googleplex - B44) by David Recordon — It's a giant cupcake and Android! (@ Googleplex - B44) by David Recordon

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?

(more…)

New Media’s Credibility Problem

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:October 6, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:4 Comments

By offering consumers a low cost digital product, the economics of ebooks create a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle. The low price expands the available market by making it affordable to more consumers; low production and distribution expenses allow the publisher to earn a healthy margin; and the larger addressable market allows publishers to sell more units at greater profit margins.

Mark Coker, Why We Need $4.00 Books

One of the problems with the new media business model of trading exposure for content and attempting to monetize the eyeballs (a la The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Geek Dad, etc; all a variation on the B2B editorial model, but with even more of a self-promotional angle) is that it makes the content suspect. Without a firm editorial vision, the result is typically a mish-mash of shallow opinion and punditry, with the occasional gem slipping through.

In his first essay for The Huffington Post‘s new Books section, Smashwords founder Mark Coker offers a half-hearted op-ed on ebook pricing, taking the narrow position that print books are too expensive for many consumers, especially those in developing economies, and that $4 ebooks are the mass-market paperback of the future.

Of course, there’s not a single mention of the prohibitive costs of eReaders, smartphones and their expensive data plans, or broadband Internet access. It’s a classic case of willfully ignoring the forest for the trees.

(more…)

Motivational Cliches Aren’t Business Models

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:October 4, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:28 Comments

Snake Oil shading and coloring by opacity

“If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.”

John Abrams, The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place

I hate pundits.

[ETA: Maybe I should have said I hate Twitter? Update at the end of the post.]

Whether in politics, sports or publishing, on radio, TV or Twitter, they’re the know-it-alls who usually have no skin in the game, no accountability and, worse, no interest in seeing the big picture. They love to hear themselves talk, to offer their opinions on how things should be done, and to stir things up just to see what happens.

They also tend to love motivational quotes, dropping them into their speeches, and blogs, and tweets as if they were offering actionable advice and original insights; precious wine from water for the thirsty!

“Meh,” I say. “Meh.”

(more…)

On Branding, Tribes, and Seth Godin Goes Wild

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:September 27, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:15 Comments

“If you can just assemble these 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 people who love literary fiction, then you’ve earned the right to be the ringleader, the leader of that tribe—and you’ll never, ever again have trouble selling literary fiction.”

–Seth Godin, How to Fix the Publishing Industry

Seth Godin arguably did not have the Best Week Ever last week, between his ill-conceived Brands in Public initiative, and his controversial talk at a brown bag lunch put together by the Digital Publishing Group here in New York City. Harsh reactions to both raged on Twitter and in the blogiverse, and he quickly walked back his brandjacking project, a brazenly opportunistic social media scam that effectively sought to leverage the real-time web and SEO tactics to extort $400/month from brands looking to control the presentation of their dirty laundry via his Squidoo site.

Between these two incidents, and his ill-advised comments on non-profit organizations and social media a couple of weeks ago (for which Geoff Livingston and Ike Pigott deftly cut him down), I’m starting to think the old man has lost a step.

Or three.

(more…)

Will eBook Exuberance Kill Publishing?

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:September 10, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:9 Comments

One iPhone Case To Rule Them All by Photo Giddy

“Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. We started to market it that way, and it just took off.”

–Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs on Amazon and Ice Cream

There’s a particularly virulent meme running through the publishing industry that says the only thing keeping eBooks from supplanting print books tomorrow is a great eReader, and that Apple’s long-rumored Tablet is that killer device. Yesterday, another Apple event came and went and, as has happened every single time, there was neither an announcement of a Tablet, nor any mention of eBooks being a critical part of their plans for world domination.

Interestingly, Jobs specifically noted that eBooks weren’t a significant market yet, pointing to Amazon’s continued silence on the actual number of Kindles they’ve sold: “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

Two other notable developments popped up yesterday that suggest the hype surrounding eBooks has hit an unwarranted level of “irrational exuberance”: the premature demise of Quartet Books (“there are very few industry best practices“), and Tor.com’s announcement of a POD-based imprint.

(more…)