Two surveys bode well for digital publishing, HMH teams with Amazon, and books aren't the library's only game.
Jemm Webb
@JennWebb
2012-01-27
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Here are a few of the stories that caught my attention this week in the publishing space. Two surveys indicate a bright future for digital publishingBack in June, a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed ereader ownership in the U.S. had doubled in six months. As impressive as those statistics were, the latest survey released by the company this week showed that both tablet and ereader ownership in the U.S. nearly doubled again, but in a much shorter time frame between mid-December and early January (the holiday season, of course).
The survey also indicated that "[t]he number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January." And ownership wasn't gender biased in terms of tablets: The survey showed that the same percentage — 19% — of both males and females own a tablet. Ownership of ereaders, however, skewed female: 21% of women in the U.S. own ereaders but just 16% of the men do. Pew attributed the dramatic growth not only to holiday shopping, but to the timely release of devices priced in the double digits by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Another survey released this week by RBC Capital indicated that Amazon may be making more bank per Kindle Fire device than initially thought — meaning it may not be losing money on each sale in the long term. Eric Savitz at Forbes quoted analyst Ross Sandler:
 codeMantra collectionPoint 3.0 — Compose it; convert it; package it; distribute it; track it; re-price it; control your digital book workflow and metadata from one platform with collectionPoint 3.0, now available Houghton Mifflin Harcourt strikes a deal with Amazon
Owen astutely observed that this agreement may pave the way for Amazon to get its books in the hands of Barnes & Noble brick-and-mortar shoppers, a feat Amazon has yet to accomplish. Also this week, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a feature piece on Larry Kirshbaum, the man behind Amazon Publishing East Coast's success thus far — or "Amazon's hit man," as Businessweek dubbed him. The feature also dipped into the history of Amazon Publishing and its relationship to traditional publishing and the Big Six. It's well worth the read. A call to arms for librariesMuch of the current discourse around libraries centers around ebook availability. But the importance of the future existence of libraries goes way beyond whether or not the digital version of James Patterson's latest bestseller can be had with a library card. A Slideshare post by Ned Potter this week elevated the discussion to a higher plane. Some highlights from the presentation include:
Here's the presentation in full: To stay current with the library discussion, other library experts to follow include Peter Brantley, Andrew Albanese, Justin Hoenke, and Sarah Houghton (to name just a few). Related: |
Finding the real pirates, Microsoft's plan for Hadoop and big data, and thoughts on a theoretical Amazon store.
Mac Slocum
@macslocum
2012-01-27
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Here's a look at the top stories published across O'Reilly sites this week.
Strata 2012, Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work. Save 20% on Strata registration with the code RADAR20. |
The New York Times looks at the word counts of presidential candidates.
Audrey Watters
@audreywatters
2012-01-27
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'Tis the season for political infographics, what with the 2012 presidential election well underway as well as this week's State of the Union address. All of that speech-making provided plenty of opportunity for data visualization. Following the State of the Union address, The New York Times posted the following visualization comparing "selected words used by President Obama in his State of the Union addresses and by Republican presidential candidates in their debates, television interviews and major speeches since May." Although this example is just a "simple" bar graph, these sorts of visualizations are becoming increasingly popular in making political arguments — whether by politicians or by newspapers. You can view the full visualization here. Found a great visualization? Tell us about itThis post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.  Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20 More Visualizations: |
ValoBox looks to combine access to content, analytics and conversion.
Jemm Webb
@JennWebb
2012-01-27
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Earlier this year, I chatted with Anna Lewis (@anna_cn) and Oliver Brooks (@cn_oli) about their new startup, ValoBox — a platform that allows readers to consume books by the page, chunk, or as a whole. The duo has been hard at work through the summer and fall, and ValoBox has launched. I got in touch with Brooks to see how the platform and development have progressed. Our interview follows. How has ValoBox evolved since our interview in May?
ValoBox is really comprised of two applications, the publishing system and the ValoBox reader. The changes to the publishing system have focused on ease of integration use and quality of output. The system can now create a ValoBox book automatically from an ONIX and EPUB file feed. A lot of effort has gone into making sure the content is presented perfectly, even when split into small, purchasable sections. We've also built a system similar to Google Analytics for books, which provides the publisher with information for each book, such as where on the web is best for selling books (Twitter feeds, blogs, etc.) and details about how each book is used. In our earlier interview you discussed a "premium layer for the web." Is that still guiding your efforts?Oliver Brooks: Absolutely. We believe books are just the start of our game — we see ValoBox as suitable for premium articles, audio, video, and even web pages. We think premium content should integrate with the web rather than be a separate ecosystem. The existing book reader interface will be one of many portals into premium content. We have designs for interfaces that don't intrude on the design of a website at all. When you want to buy something, you will see ValoBox branding and have an easy way to purchase the content. As almost everyone is always signed into a system of some kind — be it Twitter, Facebook or Google — our vision is that you can always access premium content with just a click. How does ValoBox work?Oliver Brooks: It's an HTML5 application that runs inside any modern web browser. This means you can access it from any website, on any device wherever you are. Content is stored in the cloud and streamed securely from our servers on demand. A future enhancement will mean you won't even have to be online to read books you have read before; they'll automatically be stored on your device for later.  TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.Register to attend TOC 2012 How does ValoBox help readers?Oliver Brooks: The core benefit is accessibility to premium content. ValoBox lets you access an entire catalog, and you can choose which pages you want and buy them for cents at a time. So, you might see a book reviewed on your favorite blog or hear about an interesting topic from a Twitter feed. A couple of clicks and cents later, you can be reading what they are talking about. We think it's ridiculous that books are locked behind lengthy and expensive checkout and download processes, and then require special applications to read when videos and audio are available with a click. Another huge bonus is our social retail system. If you like what you read and think you know someone else who would like it, you can share it with an embed or a link. Anything that is bought from your share will earn you a 25% cut. How does it help authors and publishers?Oliver Brooks: Authors will have an awesome tool for promoting their books. Books can be integrated with their websites and social media promotions, providing the tip of the pyramid leading to many other shares and embeds. All the activity is tracked in real time to give an unparalleled level of knowledge about where books perform best. Don't forget that if an author sells the books, they will not only get their royalty but also the 25% ValoBox social retail cut. As for publishers, they get a great way to empower their readership to create new and sustainable sales channels. Imagine thousands of innovative readers finding the right places for books inside their personal and professional networks. No traditional retailer could dream of going into places such as a university e-learning environment or a team management wiki, or of garnering sales from inside a full-scale social network. Just like authors, publishers have real-time, detailed analytics of how each book is being bought. They also have a view of how all of their books are read across the entire web. I like to think of ValoBox as a way to realize the value of creating a symbiotic relationship between the content creation and consumption communities, rewarding each one for their efforts appropriately. This interview was edited and condensed. Related: |
Why remotes need buttons, lawmakers need a clue, and life-critical software needs many eyes.
James Turner
2012-01-27
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It was 56 degrees in Boston on Tuesday. It wasn't a record (you need to go back to 1999 for that, when it hit 62), but it definitely is another page in what has been a very, very bizarre winter (so far, the largest snowfall occurred back on Halloween, for example). Call it climate change, call it elves, call it sunspot variations, but whatever you call it, call it weird. Meanwhile, while we wait for the the great Northeast Football War to commence, a few notes on the week's events. Sometimes, you need a buttonI suspect that somewhere, once a day, a journalist is taking a pair of 20-sided dice and rolling on a table called "What product Apple might work on next." The latest incarnation of this madness is a rumor that Apple might enter the smart remote control market with a touchscreen product. The problem is, there are already touchscreen apps for the iPhone and iPad that talk to remote control widgets. And they suck. As much as Apple hates buttons and clutter, remote controls need buttons, or at least a few. The problem is kinesthetic, and has to do with the fact that many activities that we do with a remote control involve looking up at the screen while using the remote, such as skipping through commercials. Touch screens, by their nature, don't provide tactical feedback, which means you need to look down to see what you're pushing. This is a powerful reminder that as much as we want cool interfaces and minimal design aesthetics, sometimes it's more important that the darn thing does what we want it to do. The Apple crew has (to date) been great at paring devices down to their essential functionality, but it may meet its match in the remote. Maybe Apple will come up with a work-around for this. One answer would be to have a duplicate of what's on the TV appear on the remote, so that you could see what you were doing while pushing buttons. But that would require DVR, Blu-ray and cable companies to adopt a universal way to get the video streaming to the controller. Of course, they could make it only work with the Apple TV (and rumored new Apple televisions), but that would be vendor lock-in, and Apple never does that ... Time to invest in disk drive companiesShould you have any doubts that Big Brother is watching more and more, Australia is now proposing that telcos and ISPs be required to retain data about all emails and phone calls made in the country, and make it available to law enforcement officials. Apart from the privacy issues, think about the data management nightmare that would be — because it's not just a month or a year that they would be required to retain, but all records in perpetuity (or until the policy is overturned). This means that providers will need to figure out how to store this data in a way that will allow it to be accessed decades into the future. Like SOPA and PIPA, this is an example of legislators writing checks that the providers have to pay. Add in the U.S. Patent Office, and you have a grand collection of bureaucrats and politicians trying to regulate technologies that they understand not a wit. Maybe it's time for all the technically adept of the world to form their own country, but I fear civil war would break out the first time they had to decide if Greedo shot first. Open
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Hosting Jurisdiction, Net Serendipity, Kindle Autographs, and Text Box Hackery
Nat Torkington
@gnat
2012-01-27
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O'Reilly Android Open Conference October 9-11, 2011 San Francisco, CA |
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TOC Frankfurt October 11, 2011 Frankfurt, Germany |
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Web 2.0 Expo NY Co-produced by O'Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb October 10-13, 2011 New York, NY |
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Web 2.0 Summit Produced by Federated Media Publishing, O'Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb The Data Frame October 17-19, 2011 San Francisco, CA |
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Amazon Publishing East Coast announced a deal this week in which HMH will publish the print editions of Amazon's East Coast titles and, as 
Oliver Brooks: The product has stayed laser focused on keeping things light and simple. It has gone through a lot of tweaks to the user interface and system, to boil it down as much as possible.