Publishing is full of innovative people who love content. Mix that with a culture of collaboration and the future is bright, argues Rich Holman.

Hello, so first of all *disclaimer* I used to work in publishing (eight years in Macmillan as a web developer) and during that time worked with Jon. I currently work in a leading social business consultancy – Headshift. We help a range of organisations (BBC, British Airways, BP, NHS, Anthony Gormley’s One & Other) across all sectors and realise and build technologies in this ever-changing landscape. I have been there for two and a half years now, so feel I have a good historical understanding of the challenges facing publishers as well as a unique view of the differing cultures of both traditional publishing and a technology start-up.

I recently read a previous post, London Book Fair Digital Conference, with interest, and thought a lot of good points were made. I agree there is a lack of skills in the publishing industry to deal with new emergent paradigms. In fact, one of the reasons I left publishing was so I could emerse myself in an industry and culture that is purely concerned with thinking and building future applications online. I felt some of the post’s sentiments needed to go further, as it’s not just skills and structure that are lacking but culture and attitude. In a period of accelerating change we need vastly more efficient methods of developing new concepts: there is simply too much disruption to plan and build websites as we would plan and print books.

Our structures need to be more speedy. Speed used to kill now lack of speed kills. Lets have organisations that can iterate quickly and empower its folks to make decisions. Percolating decisions up and down an organisation makes little sense
VIVAKI’S RISHAD TOBACCOWALA

In this post I want to share some thoughts about some of the changes that would be required for publishers to become more agile, generalist and collaborative in an age where we are all becoming publishers, authors, creators and consumers and as such all have a voice and opinion as well as the ability to implement our own ideas. At the end of the post I will talk about a small project myself and a colleague ran to illustrate the speed and agility that such a cultural change could provide.

But first… an agile approach

Marty McFly: Doc, we better back up. We don’t have enough road to get up to 88.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
BACK TO THE FUTURE

Maybe just a film quote, but it illustrates a major problem when trying to consider future directions: it’s based on current knowledge and as such potential solutions are limited by current understanding and restrictions. What is required is a cultural shift and with regards to development we should be thinking more like start-ups, small, non-hierarchical agile generalist teams of creative, talented individuals of which there are increasing amounts as people tinker with the emerging web (such as that developer in the basement).

I’ll use my experience at Headshift as a small case study on how we approach new projects. Firstly, a project team of anywhere between 2 and 10 people is formed from the skills required to deliver the project. These will generally include:

• A project manager whose role is to manage client/stakeholder communications and ensure the project hits budget and/or schedule as well as meets client expectations (i.e. is it good?)
• A consultant (one or more of technical/general or user experience) whose role is to speak directly to project stakeholders and end-users to really define the scope of the project and the nature of the problem the project is trying to solve (i.e. question what you are really trying to solve not just what you think you are trying to achieve). Technical and user experience consultants are involved to ensure the project requirements are grounded in sound thinking and can be achieved within the timeframe / budget and match client expectations.
• A designer/user experience consultant to make sure the product not only looks good, but works well. A designer’s role is to ensure the application or website is easy to use and the end-user not only likes the look of the website but enjoys the experience and successfully completes tasks. Good visual/interactive solutions to complex problems can be more than half the battle.
• A developer(s) to realise the combined output of consultants and designers. It is essential they are involved in project planning and foster a close relationship with the designer/consultants. They are essential in realising the eventual product, as such they need to be heavily involved with the whole project team, early and often.

You may find that people will take on one or more of these roles. I myself have performed consultancy, design and development on one project. Project management and consultancy may also be combined. The generalist can be very important here in creating nimble teams.

Generally for most of our projects we approach them iteratively (build often and early) while checking back with the stakeholders with early test versions and regular staged releases to ensure that expectations are being fulfilled and to avoid the awkward situation when perceived outcomes differ massively. Generally we build projects against the methodology known as “Agile”, not so much a process as a philosophy that:

…values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software (aka outcome) over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. It’s not that there isn’t value in the latter, just that the former has more value.
NEIL PERKIN, Agile Planning

This approach requires that all people involved in the project work very closely together to ensure that end result is greater than the sum of the parts, by enabling project team members to have more control over the outcomes of a project indivual knowedge and creativety can add much more value to a project.

Projects are built around trusted, motivated individuals who are given the environment and support they need. Documentation is kept to a minimum, with face-to-face communication preferred, and a focus on simplicity – maximising the amount of work not done.
NEIL PERKIN, Agile Planning

This requires a major shift in the way projects are currently ran in most publishing houses, as many projects tend to be about writing a 400 page spec based on current business models and expected outcomes and then passing that to a software development house or to an in-house development team. In the more agile approach projects can be built around solving a problem iteratively and collaboratively, as well as questioning whether that problem even needs to solved (or indeed is this the correct problem). This is all achieved by actually working with, talking and listening to the people that will be affected by the eventual system, including end-users and stake holders, not just as a requirement of a business model.

Publishers in general have lots to offer in aggregation, quality control and understanding the needs of the end users. However in defining both the problems and the solutions they need a different approach, an approach that has been developing in Internet start-ups for over ten years and has a proven track record in delivering fast, smart, and useful applications not always based on a need but based on the simple fact that we can.

A delicious book – an example of building fast

So to illustrate what small, agile teams can do when not bound by process and business models a colleague (Felix Cohen) and I built an application to print our own books. The generation of the idea was no more than Felix’s desire to ’scratch an itch’ that was caused by our often cited problem of never getting round to reading long format articles on websites (based around the same reasons that many people reference, bright screens, distractions etc.)

The resultant application takes a list of websites and converts them into a styled PDF ready to print via a service such as Lulu. The list of websites is created by using an online service called Delicious – effectively an online version of a browser’s bookmarks, with the added benefit of being accessible from anywhere (and from a development perspective accessible to an application such as this). The outcome is a printed book based on bookmarked websites. The application goes though each link and pulls out the main body of content – and it is clever enough to strip out banner ads, links, navigation leaving only the article’s actual content, formatted and separated from styling. We then apply our own custom styling optimised for a print layout. The entire project took 8 hours to develop, and we can now create a custom typeset printed book in seconds. The code and the printed book is not perfect but it illustrates what can be done very very quickly given the right conditions.

We have released the code for this project so anyone can build and share the concept. Firstly we wanted to engage with people over the benefits of utilising a more innovate way of building projects as well as the obvious copyright issues in trying to commercialise such an application.

As Felix ends his blog post over on the Headshift blog (Ruby on Rails is the coding language Bookler is built on):

What is significant, though, is that ease. Neither of us are part of the Ruby on Rails team here at Headshift, but were able to pick up enough Ruby to build it in Sinatra (a very simple, very great framework for this kind of app), and find enough tools to make it fast, easy and ‘good enough’. The generalist skills and assumption that this would not be a hard problem, however, do seem important.
FELIX COHEN, Technical Consultant

If you wish to check out how and why this was built, as well as get access to the code see here.

This illustrates the need for cultural shift as well as some potential solutions and approaches. It’s pretty exciting to be able to build something like this so quickly just with modern tools, technologies and a “because we can” attitude. Simply employing a few geeks is not going to change much, if publishing is going to be part of the solution to the current problems then fostering the culture where ideas can be realised quickly and easily is essential.

Also, believe me when I say many many of my peers still love print (check out the Newspaper Club). They also have the ability to publish their own material, curate others and build applications to produce solutions for their own needs and desires. My experience working in publishing is of a dedicated, innovative, interested bunch of people who love content and delivering readers and authors a great service. Mix that with the abilities of people who can realise those qualities in a collaborative way (this is essential), and the future is not necessarily the dark place some assume.

With the arrival of the iPad, the Minority Report moment for magazines is finally here

When it comes to digital publishing, I’ve never been very comfortable with all that simulation of the physical reading experience: graphical page-turning ticks, even strange experiments with scratch-and-sniff e-books. It’s not a printed page. It’s an electronic device. Get over it.

It also shows a bewildering lack of imagination. Why slavishly copy the analogue reading model from print products when a much richer multimedia experience is possible? Is it because we don’t want to lose a perceived emotional connection with printed books? If so, I suspect that is much more of an issue for publishing staff who put “because I just love books” in their application letters than for today’s consumers who spend so much time on laptops and iPhones.

That’s not to say that user experience isn’t important – it is. User interface design is more important than ever. It’s just the metaphors that are wrong. In print, we open, turn and fold. In digital, we point, tap and scroll. We’re used to this now. Really. And it is still possible to create an emotional connection to a book or a magazine that exists in digital rather than printed form.

With the iPad just around the corner, one design company has come up with a highly intuitive conceptual model for how magazines might work on this and other devices.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Bonnier and BERG’s vision is particularly far-sighted, considering this video was released at least a month before the iPad was announced. But they’re not alone. WIRED Magazine is, unsurprisingly, at the forefront of putting digital magazine technology into practice.

YouTube – Adobe and Wired Introduce a New Digital Magazine Experience.

Many have seen online magazines and newspapers as a threat – notably Rupert Murdoch, who has curiously named his paywall plans Project Alesia this week.

But what if you could create content and a user experience so compelling that people would willingly pay for it? We’re already seeing signs of this with iPhone apps. The iPad could take things a stage further.

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of WIRED Magazine, says: “This is what we’ve been waiting for for 15 years. We’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal, to tell these stories in a way that is efficient that is multidimensional. But we also think it’s an opportunity to reset the economics: for the first time people may value this experience so much that they’ll pay for it.”

I talked about the Minority Report moment on this blog back in 2007. I also said magazines would get there before books. With the iPad, I’d say that moment is pretty much here. And the magazine will be WIRED – coming to an iPad near you this summer.

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Magazine Future from Bonnier (personanondata.blogspot.com)
• Will the iPad Save the Magazine Biz? (jkontherun.com)
• The new visions of digital magazines (betatales.com)
• Wired Magazine for iPad Will Launch By Summer (mashable.com)
• TED 2010: Wired for the iPad to Launch by Summer (wired.com)

The debate is not about which device is better than the others. It’s about authors and publishers embracing a whole new world of opportunity.

Much has been written over the last 48 hours or so about Apple’s new iPad. Some think it’s the best thing to hit the planet this decade and that it will change the face of publishing. Others are moaning about its bezel and that it doesn’t have a camera. Some are obsessed with the connotations of the word “pad”. Some people should also get a life.

I thought I’d let the dust settle and look at the introduction of the iPad from the perspective of authors and publishers.

As a serial gadgeteer and technophile, even I resisted the temptation to buy an eReader. By the way, when I refer to the Kindle, I am using it generically like Hoover. This applies to the Sony eReader, the Cool-er et al.

As an author, I don’t want an eReader; I want an e-writer too.

The iPad wins hands down on this front. The fact I can surf the Web for research too and Mind Map are other bonuses.

What about battery life and reading it in bright sunlight on a beach? Well I don’t want sand in any of my gadgets and to protect what little street-cred I may have; I’m more comfortable holding a paperback when I get to relax on holiday.

Apple brings more to the party than just screen technology. You get access to the riches borne by an operating system that is 30 years old. Email, word and image processing, calendaring to boot.

The iPad is a boon for a writer.

If all you want to do is read, however, as I predicted in this blog earlier in the year, then ereaders will go sub $100 on eBay this year and this is hard to resist.

With the fabulous e-ink technology, two weeks of battery life is just marvellous. So, if you are a reader and want to dabble in technology, get an ereader.

The biggest opportunity though lies in the user base.

For publishers and authors, the users of the various devices represent a new and growing sales channel.

There are something like 10 million iPhones already with predictions of a further 20 million more this year.

This compares to 2.5 million Kindles and a little less for Sony.

You can even get a Kindle reader for the iPhone which makes things even more complicated for us to get our head around. Will Kindle ever support iBooks though? I think not.

So the smart money is to get as many existing titles in as many formats as possible and to let the user decide how they want to consume the book.

For new titles however, there is a whole new world opening up. From books that can either read to you or be read, or books that contain multimedia elements, Internet content, geo-coded information and merge elements of gaming. Travel books for example will be completely different and contain videos, reviews, local information, the ability to make bookings and the like – all from the app or iBook as they will be known.

So the debate is not about which device is better than the others. It’s about authors and publishers embracing a whole new world of opportunity.

Useful Links:

iPhone stats for 2010

Kindle vs Sony eReader stats

Related articles by Zemanta

• EPUB, iPad and Content Interoperability (blogs.adobe.com)
• Video: Apple unveils iPad (benzinga.com)
• iPad vs. Kindle: It’s go time! (seattlepi.com)
• Why iPad is not automatically a Kindle killer (betatales.com)
• Exhaustive A-Z Coverage of Apple’s iPad Announcement (holykaw.alltop.com)

The various blogs and Twitter accounts covering the Book Fair include @thebookseller, the ever irreverent and entertaining @missdaisyfrost, and @pubperspectives – whose Frankfurt Book Fair Daily can be downloaded as a PDF.

It seems to have been a relatively subdued Fair, with fewer publishers than usual – at least fewer editors attending from the big publishers, allowing more space for independents. But there have been plenty of digitalists.

The highlight has to be the first European O’Reilly Media Tools of Change conference, held yesterday – which we could also vicariously follow with the Twitter hashtag #tocfrankfurt. Speakers included Sara Lloyd, Joe Wikert, Neelan Choksi and Cory Doctorow – and you can find some highlights over at The Scholarly Kitchen.

If you missed out on TOC Frankfurt, or want more of an author’s point of view, here is one of the highlights from the TOC conference in New York last year: Seth Godin’s presentation “Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books”. Enjoy – and maybe I’ll see you in New York next February!

The Kindle 2 is the next generation of Amazon’s wireless e-book reading device, and it started shipping yesterday. If you’re in the USA, that is. Amazon have confirmed that it will launch internationally – we just don’t know when. The device does work outside the US – but the wireless network it uses isn’t compatible with European telecoms.

Despite that, is this, finally, the iPod moment we all keep talking about? Many observers see this as yet another incremental step, rather than a tipping point – largely because the price tag (still $359) keeps it out of the mainstream. But take-up of the Sony Reader in Europe, plus the reading of e-books on the iPhone, seem to indicate a gathering of momentum at least. My money is on the iPhone proving to be the iPod moment – but we shall see.

The other trend to keep an eye on this year is the impact the Kindle will have on self-publishing. I know several authors who are ‘writing for the Kindle’ – self-publishing e-books specifically for the Amazon device. The Kindle is just another tool that facilitates the increasing move to authors doing it themselves. Self-publishing remains my key trend for 2009.

While many traditional publishers panic about keeping up with the tech, or how to price their e-books, the real revolution is happening over there, just out of sight – and could have a more profound impact on the publishing business than simply the format people choose to read books in.

An recent article in Computer World sums it up well:

The book publishing industry is one of the most backward, musty, obsolete businesses in our economy. While every other kind of information moves at the speed of light, the process of publishing a book is like something from the Middle Ages.

For authors, it can take months to even find a literary agent willing to represent their work. Then the agent takes months to find a publisher. Then it takes ages for the publishing company to get the book out there.

People are already circumventing all this by self-publishing. The self-publishing industry is the only area of paper-book publishing that’s thriving right now. Soon enough, a huge number of authors are finally going to get fed up with the publishing industry and just self-publish electronically. They’ll hire their own freelance editors, and do the marketing themselves. The publication of a finished manuscript will take minutes, rather than months.

Should publishers be worried by this? We all know that, by the time you’ve finished eating that cookie, you’ll remember that you don’t believe in all this publishing revolution stuff anyway, and go back to your paper peddling day job. And you can cheer yourself up with this video.

This is what we all really want to see: Jon Stewart interviewing Jeff Bezos, promoting the Kindle’s USP of one-handed reading. Visionary disruptive innovator or chuckling maniac? You be the judge.

Related articles

• Tips on How to Write an Amazon Kindle Book (kindlereaderreview.com)
• Stephen King Helps Amazon Launch New Kindle (Guardian, 9 Feb 09)
• The Revenge of Amazon.com’s ‘Chuckling Maniac’ (gawker.com)
• Doing the Math on a Amazon Kindle (puhala.com)
• Elgan: Here comes the e-book revolution (Computer World, 7 Feb 09)
• Kindle and eBook Formats (loo.me)

See also

• Joe Wikert’s Kindleville blog

1. download the slides from your favourite presentations
2. watch Chris Brogan’s presentation on Blogging and Social Media.

Enjoy!

Welcome back, dear reader, and a belated Happy New Year! Are you optimistic about this year? The news is so full of economic doom and gloom these days, I’d understand if you were feeling a bit mis. January was a long, dark month. Then today saw the start of the heaviest snowfall in the UK for 20 years. This is also the traditional season for a staff cull and restructure among some publishers. Those left may find their salaries as frozen as their fingers, their workload increased and their budgets squeezed.

The recession was declared a reality in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few high street shops close, including Woolworths, parent company of wholesalers Bertrams and EUK, causing a bit of a distribution flap at the end of last year.

But is it true, as Publisher’s Weekly predicted last month, that 2009 will be “the worst year for publishing in decades”? I think that’s a little bleak. Easy for me to say as an industry outsider, you might think. I’m not saying it won’t be tough. But I think there are opportunities for publishing this year. It’s just that I might mean something different than you when I say ‘publishing’…

What I think is in trouble is the traditional business model of print publishing by media corporations: bad times. But publishing is changing radically, and for those prepared to embrace the new realities, technologies and opportunities: good times.

Publishing doesn’t just mean shifting product. It doesn’t mean churning out ever-increasing volumes of paper products (including all those marketing leaflets and catalogues) when it’s clear that people do not access information in remotely the same way they did even a few years ago. People’s attention is shifting away from print and on to digital media.

Anyone who writes a blog, records a podcast, uploads a website, films a YouTube video – or uploads an ebook, a video or some music to Lulu, Yudu or Createspace – is also a publisher. When I press the ‘publish’ button on this post – I have just published something.

An article in Time Magazine a couple of weeks ago sums it up well:

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world–i.e., zero and nothing–printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic.

One of the interesting side-effects of the problems with EUK/Bertrams was that many publishers and booksellers were able to get around distribution problems by dealing with each other direct. The value of a distribution business is in its relationships. If we can manage without the middle-man and form our own relationships, do we still need large wholesale distributors?

Part of the value of a publishing business is in its production capabilities and marketing channels. If authors can cut out the middle-man, self-publish and develop relationships with their readers direct using free online marketing tools – do we still need publishers..? This is the year when ‘vanity publishing’ will stop being a dirty word. Publishing will, finally, become disintermediated.

Publishing will still be around, but it will change into something you may not recognise. The possibility of publishing increasingly becoming an activity done by authors rather than (or as well as) publishers is a very real one.

So will publishing as we know it become a service industry and provide production and marketing services to authors? Will it become a rights business? Will its value be in editorial judgment, gatekeeping and filtering? In providing a brand identity? What IS publishing? The Association of Online Publishers define it as “original, branded, quality content.” But how will that content be delivered in the future? Who will decide the quality, and who will brand it? Does the average reader really care who the publisher is?

Are we finally reaching a tipping point in the industry, as happend in the music industry a few years back? It seems very up in the air at the moment. But these are the questions to think about in the coming months. Meanwhile, wrap up warm – and don’t have disintermediation nightmares.

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world

…

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

Continue reading at: http://nymag.com/news/media/50279/

On a more positive note, here is one of the videos referred to earlier in the piece – staff at new imprint HarperStudio holding aloft yellow lightbulbs and having some bright ideas about book publishing:

We need a bit of yellow lightbulb thinking, rather than bemoaning the fate of publishing. Why not slash those absurd advances and offer 50% royalties instead – a model HarperStudio are experimenting with.

Like the Cult of Skaro, we need to break out of old ways of thinking, think the unthinkable, and evolve into something else. Bright Ideas on a postcard please.

Print sales are falling. According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2007 report To Read or Not to Read both reading standards and voluntary reading rates of traditional print material amongst young people are falling. Textbook publishers are fighting for sales; campaigning to alert students to the necessity of using their products. Hardback fiction has almost gone the way of the dinosaur. The open access debate rages on. Publishers and retailers have consolidated. More and more books are produced, but there is less and less choice on the high street. Leisure time is transferring away from books and reading, away from television even, to the Web; to social networking sites, blogs, instant messaging, video and music file sharing sites. The attention economy is shrinking, fast. Academic research is – for many students – all about search. Let’s face it, for most students, actually, it’s all about Google. Who needs books anymore? More to the point, who needs publishers?

In an ‘always on’ world in which everything is increasingly digital, where content is increasingly fragmented and ‘bite-sized’, where ‘prosumers’ merge the traditionally disparate roles of producer and consumer, where search replaces the library and where multimedia mash-ups – not text – holds the attraction for the digital natives who are growing up fast into the mass market of tomorrow, what role do publishers still have to play and how will they have to evolve to hold on to a continuing role in the writing and reading culture of the future? Will there even be a writing and reading culture as we know it, tomorrow? Is the publishing industry acting fast enough and working creatively enough to adapt to the new information and leisure economies?

Continue reading…

Free distribution of digital content (music, books, visual art) is embraced by—and benefits—customers because it gives them access to a much wider range of content. This is because the restrictions on the amount of content they could get—based on how much they can financially afford—is eliminated.

Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required to find content they’re interested in – this is where Google leads the field by providing an ever-improving and expanding search facility for finding the content, whether it’s webpages, books, news, academic articles, images etc.

Free distribution of digital content is slowly being embraced by—and will benefit—creators (artists, musicians, authors etc.) because it allows their work—and reputation—to be distributed to a much wider audience.

Musicians such as The Charlatans and Nine Inch Nails are making headlines with new ways to make money while giving away MP3 files of their music for free (and unsigned bands have been doing it for years).

Authors such as Suze Orman and Dan Solove are giving away free ebook versions of their books, in the knowledge that the wider distribution this gives them helps to sell more paper copies of their books.

So where does this leave publishers? The book publishing companies and music companies seem to have been left out of this equation. You could argue that they’ve left themselves out of the equation by desperately attempting to pretend that the business model of content creation has changed while vainly suing fans for the crime of being early adopters of a new economy.

Actually, there is a role for clued-up skills-rich publishers. It’s just a slightly different role than they’re used to. The clues can be found when you examine the new business model summarised above and look for the holes. That’s what I’m going to try to do now (but not exhaustively – I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me).

Continue reading…