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The acceleration of change and innovation in the publishing industry today is dizzying, and the pace can be overwhelming. But this change/ forward/fast environment is also ripe with opportunity for those who embrace it and learn to adapt and innovate quickly. O’Reilly Tools of Change delivers a deft mix of the practical and the visionary to give the publishing industry the tools and guidance needed to succeed— and the inspiration to lead change. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

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Best of TOC 2012

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Best of TOC 2012 by O’Reilly Radar Team Copyright © 2012 O’Reilly Media . All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribookson line.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected].

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Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Best of TOC 2012 and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

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Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii 1. The Adaptation of Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 A War Story, a Kindle Single, and Hope for Long-Form Journalism What is it like to write a Kindle Single? Why did you price “The Shores of Tripoli” at $1.99? Did the royalty factor in your decision? What has the response been thus far? How would you compare the response to your experience with traditional publishing? Why did you decide to experiment? How do you see Kindle Singles and their ilk benefiting and shaping the future of journalism? How do Kindle Singles compare to something like Spot.us? Do you see the Kindle Single as a viable funding model? This ongoing struggle with digital affects all aspects of the industry — how do you see it shaking out? How do you envision the future of long-form journalism? The Paperless Book The consequences of book updates Possibilities arise from a new name We’re in the Midst of a Restructuring of the Publishing Universe (Don’t Panic) What’s the story behind “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto”? This is a broad question, but what are the major ways digital is changing publishing? Which digital tools should publishers focus on? Why is metadata important to digital publishing? What will the publishing landscape look like in five years?

1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 7 7 8 9 10 10 11 12 12 12

iii

What’s the publishing schedule for “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto”? The Problem with Deep Discount eBook Deals Publishers: What Are They Good For? What do publishers offer? Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data What’s the current impact of piracy on the book publishing industry? Can content tracking tools, such as those from Attributor, curb piracy? What tactics are publishers using to thwart piracy? Is piracy really a threat to the book industry? Will publishers — and content producers in general — get past the “lost revenue” mindset attached to digital piracy?

13 13 15 16 18 19 19 20 20 21

2. Digital Publishing and the Legal Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Public Domain Here, Under Copyright There Legally Speaking, Think Before You Tweet How has libel law been affected by social networking platforms? In light of Courtney Love’s recent settlement, what are some guidelines people should keep in mind while tweeting or posting on blogs and other social platforms? Do libel laws for bloggers and tweeters differ from those that apply to professional journalists? Do you think we’ll get to a point where “Internet celebrity” (i.e., you’ve got 1 million Twitter followers) could serve as a threshold for actual malice? The Digital Rights Quagmire How have rights and licensing issues changed with the growing ubiquity of digital publishing? What new issues exist that didn’t with traditional publishing? How are digital rights any different from traditional print rights? How are digital rights affected by international trade relationships? Are they approached differently than traditional print rights? How do these issues affect the publishing industry as a whole?

23 25 26 26 27 28 28 29 29 30 30

3. Publishing Tech and Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 A Sensible Look at HTML5 and Publishing Why should publishers care about HTML5? So what is HTML5, exactly? The term is thrown around a lot, but it seems undefined. iv | Table of Contents

31 31 31

In your book, you instruct readers on using the element. What is that and why is it helpful? How can publishers make use of HTML5’s geolocation abilities? The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has signed off on EPUB 3. What effect will EPUB 3 have on HTML5? What’s your take on Kindle Format 8? What’s the best way for publishers to approach your book? Is it more of an introduction, or do they need some basic knowledge first? What should publishers keep in mind as they explore HTML5 for their own needs? Metadata Isn’t a Chore, It’s a Necessity How can metadata help publishers future-proof their content? How does metadata fit into digital workflows? Doesn’t this require an entirely different skill set? Do publishers need a completely separate digital workflow? What is the marketing impact of metadata now, and how might that role expand in the future? Why is ongoing metadata maintenance important? How does metadata relate to search engine optimization (SEO)? How do you see this relationship evolving? Six Ways to Think About an “Infinite Canvas” Continuously changeable Deep zooms Alternate geometries Canvases that give readers room to contemplate and respond Delight Jumbo content

32 32 32 33 33 34 34 35 35 35 36 36 36 37 37 38 38 38 39 39

4. The Edge of Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 The Future of the Book Easy-to-use authoring tools that enable content creation and distribution Readily available in all formats Continuous updates (more tech-oriented and some non-fiction) Rich media integration Socially and personally connects readers to publisher/author/ community Engages the distracted and partial attention society Written and translated simultaneously Gamification features Access from the source

41 42 42 43 43 43 44 44 44 45

Table of Contents | v

Culture, staffing, and innovation Open source Priced fairly Publishing Needs a Social Strategy Open-Ended Publishing Everything can be public Go forward or back whenever you like Just start Expectations and platforms Your thoughts? Tim O’Reilly on What Lies Ahead in Publishing How will ebooks change publishing? Does the definition of “publisher” need to expand? Does a focus on infrastructure block adaptation? How can publishers adapt to digital? What mindsets should they adopt?

vi | Table of Contents

45 45 46 46 48 49 50 50 51 51 52 52 53 53 54

Introduction

Welcome to the Best of TOC 2012 The Best of TOC 2012 is a collection of the most important publishing-related content we’ve published on O’Reilly Radar over the last year (with a few exceptions). Our coverage spanned a wide range of topics, from legal issues to publishing tools to what we can expect down the road. We don’t set out to cover specific sub-domains of publishing. Rather, we take an organic approach to the topics and themes that emerge through our interviews and analysis. That’s why, as we look back, it’s interesting to see that many of our pieces naturally fit into the following segments. The adaptation of publishing — The disruption in publishing is just getting started. Journalists are experimenting with ebook options over traditional outlets, readers are wrapping their heads around the concept of paperless books, and authors are wondering if they even need publishers. Digital publishing and the legal landscape — The emerging global market for books is stirring up all sorts of legal questions concerning copyright, public domain and digital publishing rights for authors and publishers. Existing laws are slowly adapting to new media platforms as well. Publishing tech and tools — Digital publishing is requiring tech education for everyone, from publishers to authors to readers. In addition, the rise of mobile is driving the development of publishing’s next toolset. The edge of publishing — Adaptation to a new publishing landscape starts with a change in thinking — not only in how we think about technology and books as objects, but in how we define our various roles and how we choose to collaborate. We hope you’ll join us as we continue to explore the future of publishing through Tools of Change for Publishing events, the TOC webcast series, and our ongoing coverage at radar.oreilly.com/publishing.

vii

CHAPTER 1

The Adaptation of Publishing

A War Story, a Kindle Single, and Hope for Long-Form Journalism By Jenn Webb Across the board, news organizations and publishers are struggling to find business models that let them stay afloat through the digital transformation. Journalists are a common casualty, with those who work in specialized areas encountering a market that’s particularly inhospitable. Marc Herman (@Marc_Herman_), a freelance journalist (notably for The Atlantic), is testing out a new solution: cut out the intermediary and sell the story directly to the readers. He recently took his long-form story, “The Shores of Tripoli,” and turned it into a $1.99 Kindle Single. In the following interview, Herman talks about the Kindle Single experience and how he sees the future of journalism playing out.

What is it like to write a Kindle Single?

Marc Herman: Writing “The Shores of Tripoli” was harder than writing a traditional magazine feature. It’s a demanding form. It’s like a small book, and 1

you have to write it really, really fast. Dave Blum at Amazon told me a reporter who did a Single on Occupy Wall Street wrote it in two days. That’s freakishly fast, Usain Bolt-type stuff. To give you an idea, the average story you read in a magazine like National Geographic is 3,000 to 6,000 words long. The “Shores of Tripoli” was 12,000 (the first draft was 18,000). And it has to be written well — the reporting has to be of a very high professional standard, or it’s just hackery. In terms of production, the Single was more like a magazine story than a book. The news cycle mattered more than it does for a book. I had to respond to Qaddafi’s death, for example, in real time. After returning from Libya, I happened to be in New York, and I looked up at that famous news ticker and it said, “Qaddafi killed.” That’s how I learned about the war ending. I have to confess, I had a very narcissistic response to Qaddafi’s death: To me, the headline read, “Qaddafi killed; and in other news, Marc’s deadline moved up two weeks.”

Why did you price “The Shores of Tripoli” at $1.99? Marc Herman: Most Singles are priced between $0.99 and $2.99. The guy who runs Singles said $2.99 only seems to work with brand-name authors. You’re buying the Single because you’ll buy anything by Stephen King or Amy Tan, not because that particular theme or story caught your eye. I went for $1.99 and not $0.99 because it seemed to me anything you’ll spend a buck for you’ll also spend two bucks for. Three bucks starts feeling like the price of lunch to me.

Did the royalty factor in your decision? Marc Herman: The royalty isn’t something I thought about too much, but it turns out to be a further wrinkle. Amazon pays a 35% commission for everything priced under $2.99. It offers a much better royalty — 70% — above $2.99. But only a handful of very well-known authors have found success at $2.99. So what to do? Fortunately, I was able to get a deal in which I get the 70% cut at the lower $1.99 price. That’s a special deal for being part of Amazon’s curated program, for which I was fortunate to have the story selected. My agent set that up. It’s a big question for the future, I think. Lots of people want the $1.99 price because it seems to be proving to be the sweet spot. But at 35%, I have to sell twice as many copies to make the same money. The royalty doesn’t change as sales increase, like they did under deals with legacy publishers.

2 | Chapter 1: The Adaptation of Publishing

For journalism, the royalty issue will probably encourage me to do one of two things. You can’t expect the sweet deal from Amazon more than once or twice because it’s not in their interest, unless you’re Stephen King. So, for non-fiction, you’d want to write shorter, faster, punchier stuff, even more closely timed to the news cycle — more like magazine stories — then price them at $0.99. If you produce good stuff at a pace that’s roughly the same as that of a monthly magazine — three or four big stories a year — you’d have a shot at making up the lower royalty on each item by producing more titles, and ideally having fans who bought them all. Four would cost the same as a single copy of, say, the New Yorker, right? The other way it might change is as the market evolves, viable rivals to Amazon may emerge and target that two-tier royalty scheme as a weak spot. In this space, an entity such as Barnes & Noble could compete for the best work just by offering 70% at any price point, no questions asked. We’ll see.

What has the response been thus far? Marc Herman: The most gratifying thing so far is that people seem to be reading the story with interest. I’ve received some really generous feedback from readers. In a business sense, I’m cautiously optimistic. We’re hanging around the top 500 of the million or so ebooks in the Kindle Store. Rankings measure movement, not volume, so I try not to pay attention to it. But hanging around the top 1,000 or 2,000 or so — the top few percent of sales — is clearly a good sign.

How would you compare the response to your experience with traditional publishing? Marc Herman: I feel like I’ll reach more readers this way than I have in the past. The trend is encouraging. I’ve sold more copies of “The Shores of Tripoli” in these first two weeks than I have in four years since my old publisher, Random House, brought out a $10 digital version of my first book, “Searching for El Dorado.” I’m very certain I’ll sell more copies of the Single in the next few months than I sold of that earlier book, despite similarly generous reviews, publicity, etc., for both. The scheme of doing some on-scene journalism for a known title, in my case The Atlantic, as a loss-leader, and then using that work as the basis for a directpublished, long-form item, seems to be working out. I’ve only tried this once, and we’re not even a month into this experiment. But already, I feel like I’ve reached a community of readers that compares favorably to my more traditional work — and the work is able to pay for itself. I’m on track to break even A War Story, a Kindle Single, and Hope for Long-Form Journalism | 3

on the investment I made to travel to Libya and report the story. Once that happens, the next question is whether people will continue to download the story in large enough numbers for it to become a viable funding mechanism for the next story I decide to do. Right now it’s looking promising. If things keep going how they are going, I think in a few months I’ll be able to say I have the beginnings of a viable business model as well as a viable way to bring long-form reporting about international events to the public. I’m still cautious in saying that, however, because it’s a very new form, and we just don’t know what’s influencing people’s decisions — it’s Christmas season, the Kindle Fire is selling well, Libya is still an important topic. It’s really hard to say what’s driving this.

Why did you decide to experiment? Marc Herman: I had nothing to lose. I’d published some of the reporting that became “The Shores of Tripoli” in The Atlantic, and it got a strong response. I had much more material, so I decided to expand it into a long-form story. The question I asked myself was whether the more comprehensive story had better odds of reaching readers in a broad market like Amazon’s or a more narrow one — that being the small club of traditional editors, mostly in New York, whom one has to convince to buy work. I’ve had some success with them in the past, but I decided to bet on the broader market this time. Traditional magazines have always been a tight, tough market in which to compete, particularly for international reporting. But post-crisis, sadly, it’s just not a viable business. You’re talking maybe 15 editors in the U.S. with the interest and the means to commission this kind of work. Digital news operations have greater interest but few salaried correspondents — and freelance budgets that boil down to between zero and $0.50 a word, which are not living wages.

How do you see Kindle Singles and their ilk benefiting and shaping the future of journalism? Marc Herman: The Kindle Single feels to me like an opportunity to prove, in a clear way, a continuing public interest in news, particularly literary journalism. That could use some proving right now. I get the feeling that traditional publishers either feel offended that they have to put effort into articulating their relevance, or are scared they can’t. I think we need to make the case because we’ve lost the public. Look at something like “Lost in Kandahar.” Lots of reporters I know want to cover Afghanistan. They can’t get enough work, so, as a professional commu4 | Chapter 1: The Adaptation of Publishing

nity, we’re having huge trouble keeping Afghanistan on the pubic radar. And then Alex Berenson comes along, spends three days at a base in Kandahar and writes a barn-burner of a story about the experience, and it becomes a best seller for the Kindle. I’d argue he got the same kind of penetration that something like a big story in a big magazine would garner. Great for him, but also great for the journalist who is thinking of going to Afghanistan and can build on the case Berenson’s made. We’re just out of the gate with “The Shores of Tripoli.” My hope is for it to become an example like Berenson’s, but for the Arab Spring. There will inevitably come a point where the editors and producers at legacy titles start saying, “Okay, this story is finished.” I’d hope this is an example that can say, “No, this is a richer story than that, and we know so because we can point to a place where a lot of people are still reading and commenting and talking about it, and even paying $2 for the opportunity.”

How do Kindle Singles compare to something like Spot.us? Marc Herman: Spot.us is great, but it’s slightly different: Funding journalism is different than linking that funding to the distribution — selling it. Those of us working in non-fiction have lagged behind the fiction writers in experimenting with direct publishing. That makes sense because a novelist’s biggest problem is finding readers while a journalist’s biggest problem is finding money. Journalism has higher initial costs than do works of imagination — plane tickets, cameras, etc. So naturally, when you decide to do a story, your attention goes first to solutions for paying expenses, like Spot.us. Distribution has always been something we expected the publishers or the hardware to solve. I think it’s been clear for a while that tablets and ereaders were going to play a large role in a reporter’s future prospects, but details were lacking. This year, the tablet boom implied the hardware was catching up to the problems the web had posed for journalism, and which traditional publishing still finds vexing. That finally moved the discussion from just funding to include distribution, in my opinion. Some of us in journalism started looking at what the fiction writers are doing because they’re clearly the ones moving the needle on distribution models.

Do you see the Kindle Single as a viable funding model? Marc Herman: I’m not expecting to be Amanda Hocking, but I do wonder if a few of us working with formats like the Single couldn’t do as well as a respectable magazine. Look at Harper’s. I trained there in my early 20s. I believe it has a circulation of 300,000 or so, it publishes two or three long features a

A War Story, a Kindle Single, and Hope for Long-Form Journalism | 5

month, and it sells for a few bucks a copy. That seems like an entity against which a small group of clever reporters could compete — or even better, collaborate — via the Kindle Single model or something similar. At a buck or two a story, you could run a little reporting project off that. The key is quality. The journalism has to be as compelling and as politically or socially relevant as the stuff the traditional titles are producing. But if I’m already putting my work up for consideration by that caliber of publication, then I should be comfortable putting it in competition against them, too.

This ongoing struggle with digital affects all aspects of the industry — how do you see it shaking out? Marc Herman: It’s a mundane thing to say, but I think it’s going to shake out by rewarding the publishers who get their organizational charts in order. I had a meeting at a big, big magazine recently, and I asked them exactly the same question. They’ve been smart, and their digital operation is profitable — except for the small detail that they are barely paying their writers. I think the bar’s too low if we’re willing to laud a business model that only works because it gets its raw materials for free — namely, me, reporting from Libya or wherever. The interesting question is that if they’re doing so well now, why do they need other parts of the company, or whole other industries — such as contributors who are professors or who work at think tanks — to subsidize the writers who work for them? Remarkably, at least to me, the editors said the problem was accounting. Many publications pay different rates for print and digital, and run two largely discrete business under the same roof. It’s complicated organizationally to start mixing the separate budgets. I realize that is a bit technical, but at bottom, it affects the quality of their journalism, and that affects their ability to hold an audience. They can’t hire some potentially fantastic contributors overseas because they can’t figure out how to pay them. They pay so little, it doesn’t reach the minimum for wire transfers, and paper checks written in dollars can’t be funded in, say, Pakistan. I also imagine that part of the future for Amazon and journalism will be a Video Single or Multimedia Single. The Kindle Fire seems to be headed in that direction. I have zero inside information, but I have to imagine that very soon I’m going to be able to embed video and audio and so forth, and at a reasonable download cost to the consumer. In fact, I’m already working with another reporter and a videographer on models for this, with the expectation that those stories are just around the corner.

6 | Chapter 1: The Adaptation of Publishing

How do you envision the future of long-form journalism? Marc Herman: We’ll be fine. The right business models and the appropriate technologies are all enormously important, but in the end, it comes down to the quality of the stories. If you tell a credible story in a captivating way, people won’t want it to ever end. We’ve been failing people, I think. Publishing is the only industry I can think of in which, when people stopped buying our product, we decided it was because they were too stupid — editors really say that to me. First, they blamed everything on the web or on Craigslist killing classified advertising, which generated a ton of money. Rather than think creatively, the publishers have moved on to blaming the schools for not raising good readers. Or on reality TV for lowering the bar. Or on video games and YouTube for killing attention spans. Readers on the whole are really, really smart. If they are not paying attention, it doesn’t mean they don’t want the story or can’t handle the story. It means the way we’re telling it isn’t very interesting or useful or fulfilling. There came a point after coming back from Libya where I got tired of hearing “no” — of discussing how the office politics of some midtown magazine would prevent this story from existing, where virtually every interaction with a publisher involved them somehow complicating the effort to be a non-fiction writer, which is already a considerable commitment. So, at this point I’ll go with whomever is expressing a desire to find solutions and with whomever will be most successful at helping me do work like “The Shores of Tripoli.” At the moment, that’s Amazon. In six months, it might not be. Journalists doing this kind of work are a species of pragmatic idealists — we just want to stay in the game. I don’t think we’re much concerned with whose team we’re on. This interview was edited and condensed.

The Paperless Book By Todd Sattersten Stephen Colbert opened his October 25th, 2011, show with his normal exuberance. He bragged about his special early access to the iPhone, the iPad, and the iV (a product that feeds the Internet directly into your veins; he assured us a short wait of six months before its release). The release of Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” would be no different, as Colbert pulled the 600-page biography from behind his desk. But Colbert immediately became perplexed. The single finger touchscreen swipe on the cover didn’t turn pages. When you turned the book upside down, the picture didn’t reorient. Colbert complained there was no place to plug in his headphones so he could listen to it. And then

The Paperless Book | 7

he tried to activate the voice recognition by touching the bottom of the cover, “Tell me about Steve Jobs. Where is the nearest church or camera store?” He ended the segment saying that the device would soon be released with “a revolutionary softcover.” The jokes played well to the geekish sensibilities of the studio audience, but I am not sure even the show’s writers knew how well the sketch described the confused state of book publishing. “Steve Jobs” will serve as a prominent road marker on the path from atoms to bits. The decision for Simon & Schuster to hold the digital release of the biography for two weeks to match the physical release even after the death of Jobs is worthy of a Harvard Business School case. And at the same time, even as computers now interface with us in almost every aspect of our lives and Jobs’ critical role in that proliferation, the majority of people will read his life story on paper. Colbert poking fun at the Jobs biography repeats, again, a meme that we in the publishing industry should be gravely concerned about — our customers don’t know what a book is anymore.

The consequences of book updates In July 2011, I launched an experimental project with O’Reilly called “Every Book Is a Startup.” The project is meant to poke at the boundaries of traditional publishing. The book was created around the idea that new material will be released over time, culminating in a finished work early in 2012. Readers are encouraged to constantly give feedback about the material. The pricing is dynamic, increasing slowly to match the amount of material released, but once purchased, a customer receives all future updates for free. We are only using one distribution point at the start of the project, oreilly.com, because the distribution system for electronic books is not designed to allow an ebook to be updated and released again. You might remember one of the side effects of Amazon’s 2009 recall of “1984” was that after the book was restored, customers found their bookmarks and notes had disappeared. We, unfortunately, found the same problem with our release strategy. Wonderful publishing startups like Readmill and SocialBook have created the possibility for readers using EPUB files to highlight important passages and share those with others back through the web, but when a reader of “Every Book Is A Startup” loads a new edition, their digital artifacts suffer the same fate as the readers of “1984” — the loss of their old thoughts as I present them with my new ones.

8 | Chapter 1: The Adaptation of Publishing

I have been hesitant to call “Every Book Is A Startup” a book because of the expectations people hold for a book: a finished work, written from a position of singular authority, available in some way in a physical form. What I never expected was how strongly the qualities of a book would be brought forward from the physical to the digital. Digital books have been designed to carry forward the same atomic quality of immutability of physical books. As I reached out to my colleagues working in the world of ebooks, the consensus was that no one had considered a reality where an author, given the ability to distribute directly and virtually cost free, would consider updating their work and the consequences that might have. Bits and atoms don’t behave the same way, but we have built the next step forward in publishing as though they do.

Possibilities arise from a new name The trouble to this point is that a book is a book. Stacey Madden used precisely those words to title an essay in the inaugural issue of “Toronto Review of Books” that describes this predicament. “I do not mean to argue the advantages of paperbound books over their electronic counterparts,” wrote Madden. “The contents of both are, for the most part, the same, and the differences lie mainly in medium. I am simply pointing out a semantic fact. E-books are not ‘books’ but digitized compositions.” Madden firmly believes the book’s 550year-old meaning that connects both form and format should be maintained. “Before a collection of human thoughts is transformed into what we call a ‘book,’ it is merely a story, a manuscript, a document, or a text.” Madden points to the need for more of us to see the difference between a book and its electronic counterparts. Now, Madden writes further about the poetic qualities of the book and declares the superiority of the bound volume for its weight, smell, and ability to act as apartment furnishing. This judgment undermines the broader point and shows from another perspective the real trouble we are in. The people who love books for what they are and what they have been are grabbing for their hardcovers and their paperbacks and saying “This word belongs to us.” The digerati paving the way with wireless tablets and social networking recommendation services are trying to say, “You don’t understand, we have books and we have made them way better.” This is messy and leads to confusion. We are living through a time in book publishing where words fail us, a situation that we should all find some irony in given the products we sell. We need some new language that describes what happens and, more importantly, what is possible when the words are separated from the paper. Those two things need The Paperless Book | 9

to be separated so we can build systems and infrastructures that support the new capabilities of the technology. For several decades, what we know today as a “car” was referred to as a “horseless carriage.” It was easier to describe this new invention as what it was not, rather than what it was. Maybe there are books and there are paperless books. I know it is a little awkward, and you want to ask yourself, “What does that mean?” — but when you remove the paper from a book, it becomes so much easier to see the possibilities.

We’re in the Midst of a Restructuring of the Publishing Universe (Don’t Panic) By Jenn Webb A new book released this week called “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto,” by Hugh McGuire (@hughmcguire) and Brian O’Leary (@brianoleary), examines the future of book publishing from an advanced perspective. Beyond pricing and delivery mechanisms, beyond taking print and displaying it on a screen, the authors look at the digital transformation as more than a change in format — as stated in the book’s introduction: The move to digital is not just a format shift, but a fundamental restructuring of the universe of publishing. This restructuring will touch every part of a publishing enterprise — or at least most publishing enterprises. Shifting to digital formats is ‘part one’ of this changing universe; ‘part two’ is what happens once everything is digital. This is the big, exciting unknown.

I reached out to the book’s co-author Hugh McGuire to examine some of the elements at play in the future of publishing and in the “exciting unknown” of doing things with books that have never before been possible. Our interview follows.

What’s the story behind “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto”?

10 | Chapter 1: The Adaptation of Publishing

Hugh McGuire: I’d been working on building PressBooks.com — a digital book production tool designed for publishers — and I wanted to get a real sense of how it worked, hands on. How better than to manage a real publishing project, working with a real publisher, from beginning to end, using PressBooks? Of course, it made sense to make it a book about the future of books and publishing. So much ink is spilled about that topic, but we wanted to get away from the abstract and right down to the nitty-gritty. We wanted to produce something that would be a handbook you could give to someone starting a publishing house today. I talked to my friend Brian O’Leary about co-editing with me, and he was on board. With that, I pitched it to Joe Wikert at O’Reilly — he loved the idea, and off we went. It’s been a bit of a challenge, producing a book while simultaneously building the book production tool on which the book is produced, but we’ve managed ... if a month or two late.

This is a broad question, but what are the major ways digital is changing publishing? Hugh McGuire: It’s more like in what ways isn’t digital changing publishing? First, we very quickly dispatched of the pre-Kindle, pre-iPad question of, “Will people read books on screens?” Yes, and the growth curves are spectacular. The publishing world has, in a pretty orderly way, adapted to this change — with digital files now slotting alongside print books in the distribution chain. I think is this just the start, however. The publishing world has managed the “digital-conversion disruption” pretty well. Publishers make ebooks now as a matter of course, and consumers buy them and read them on a multitude of devices. What we as an industry haven’t managed yet is the “digital-native disruption.” What happens when all new books are ebooks, and the majority of books are read on digital devices, most of which are connected to the Internet? This brings with it so many new expectations from consumers, and I think this is where the real disruption in the market will come. The kinds of disruption there include: speed of the publishing process, reader engagement with content, linking in and out of books, layers of context added to books, and the webification of books. I think the transitions we’ve seen in the past three years will pale in comparison to what’s going to happen to publishing in the next three years.

We’re in the Midst of a Restructuring of the Publishing Universe (Don’t Panic) | 11

Which digital tools should publishers focus on? Hugh McGuire: Publishing is such a strange, conservative business, and I think there is a real hesitancy to invest heavily early on until there is real clarity on what the long-term standards will be. But EPUB is based on HTML, and I think whatever happens, HTML will be with us for the long haul. So, tools I think publishers need to start working with: • An XML workflow process (disclaimer: PressBooks is a simple XML workflow tool) • A metadata management tool or system • A simple website content management system (say, WordPress) to manage a web presence These are the keys to having a successful publishing company that is futureproofed as best as it can be.

Why is metadata important to digital publishing? Hugh McGuire: Physical bookstores provide a range of crucial services beyond being a place where you can buy books. Stores offer selection, curation, and recommendation. The digital book retail world is very different because it offers nearly unlimited selection. While retailers like Amazon spend a fair bit of energy trying to recommend titles to readers, the task of sifting through and finding books is increasingly left to consumers. So, having good metadata — which really should be renamed “information about a book” so it’s less intimidating — means providing information that will: A) ensure that people looking for your book, or for the kind of content in your book, will find it; and B) help potential buyers of your book decide they want to buy it. On the web, companies spend lots of time making sure their sites are search engine optimized, so that people looking for those websites (or the information on them) will find them. Attaching good metadata to a book is much like search engine optimization — it’s the mechanism you use to make sure your book gets found by the people looking for it.

What will the publishing landscape look like in five years? Hugh McGuire: In five years: • Print is a marginal part of the trade business. • There’s a huge increase in the number of small publishers of all stripes.

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• • • •

There’s a massive increase in the number of books on the market. The Big Six publishers will consolidate to become the Big Two or Three. Most writers will continue to have a hard time making a living as writers. Good/successful publishers will be those that provide good APIs to their books. • All books will be expected to be connected to the web, allowing linking in and out, and contextual layers of commentary, etc. (Will this be driven by publishers or retailers? To date, retailers have lead the way.) • The distinction between what you can do with an ebook and what you can do with a website will disappear (and it will seem strange that it ever existed). • While books will become more webby, the web will also become more bookish, accommodating more book-like structures in evolving HTML standards.

What’s the publishing schedule for “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto”? Hugh McGuire: The book comes in three parts: 1. Out now: “Part 1: The Setup” — This addresses what’s happening right now in publishing. 2. Out sometime before Christmas: “Part 2: The Outlook: What Is Next for the Book?” — Given the technology we currently have, what can we expect to see happening with books going forward? 3. Out in early 2012: “Part 3: The Things We Can Do with Books: Projects from the Bleeding Edge” — Case studies of real publishing projects, technologies, and enterprises working right now at the bleeding edge. This interview was edited and condensed.

The Problem with Deep Discount eBook Deals By Joe Wikert This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog (“What Good Are Ebook “Daily Deals” & Other Deep Discounts?”). It’s republished with permission.

The Problem with Deep Discount eBook Deals | 13

I admit it. I check Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deal every day. Every single day. Why? As a publisher I’m curious to see what they’re offering and as a consumer I don’t want to miss out on a great deal. (In the spirit of full disclosure, at O’Reilly Media we offer an ebook or video deal of the day too. In fact, our program was in place long before Amazon started theirs. Everything I’m about to say below pertains not only to Amazon’s program but O’Reilly’s and everyone else’s as well.) As a publisher I worry about the mindset we’re reinforcing that content needs to be deeply discounted to garner customer attention. Amazon started this thinking by pricing so many Kindle editions at $9.99 even when they took a loss on each sale. And now the Kindle Daily Deals are often priced at $1.99$2.99 or less, so the effective discounts off digital list price are 80-90% or higher. You might ask, “what’s the harm”? After all, brick-and-mortar retailers of all shapes and sizes have offered deep discounts as a way of getting the customer into the store. That’s why a grocery store sells a gallon of milk at a loss and hopes that you’ll pick up several other profitable items between the dairy section and the checkout counter. And that’s the problem. When I go to the grocery store I always wind up buying something more than what I went in for but that never happens when I buy online. I find I’m willing to let more items catch my eye in a physical store than an online store, so impulse buys are the norm for me in a physical store. When I’m online I’m much more of a destination shopper. I have something in mind. If I find it at the right price I buy it and nothing else. So I’ve now bought three or four of the Kindle Daily Deal titles but they were all bought alone as single-title transactions. Each day when I check the Daily Deal I’m greeted by plenty of other products and offers on Amazon but I don’t bother with any of them. You might still say the deal is good for both Amazon and that day’s publisher/ author. I’m not so sure. One way of measuring that would be monitoring how long the discounted title continues to sell through at higher levels after the discount ends. I don’t have any statistics to prove this (since Amazon doesn’t share the data) but just watching Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list tells me the Daily Deal titles typically stick around the top 5 or so for another day or two and then pretty much disappear from the top 25-50. Maybe they’re still selling

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at a higher rate than they did pre-promo but if that’s the case you’d think Amazon would be playing that up with publishers and authors. I haven’t heard a word from them about it. Meanwhile, the Amazon program is causing me to change my behavior, but not in a good way. I used to take a closer look at the Amazon home page for other campaigns but now I pretty much check the Daily Deal and head out. To make matters worse, one of the recent Daily Deal titles was one I paid full price for several months ago. That one left a bad taste in my mouth all day. I should point out that I’m a fan of discounts and promotional campaigns ... as long as they lead to something more meaningful than a one-and-done transaction. So why not make these deals part of some membership program? There are a lot of directions that could head in. For example, if I buy five books at regular price I get the sixth one of my choice for only $0.99. Or what if the Amazon Daily Deal was always priced at $2.99 to $4.99 but if I’m a Prime member I get it for $0.99 cents? In that model the general public still gets a deal (albeit not as deep a discount as today) but customers are encouraged to join a membership program that should lead to even more purchases down the road. That’s all I’m asking for. Let’s get away from these one-product deep discount campaigns and start thinking about how to build a much more extensive relationship with our customers.

Publishers: What Are They Good For? By Mac Slocum Self-published author Amanda Hocking turned heads when estimates suggested she’s making big money. Hocking’s age — she’s 26 — and her distribution method of choice — low-priced ebooks sold directly through Amazon, et al. — undoubtedly contributed to the attention. The inclination is to paint this picture in broad strokes: An upstart author finds success outside the traditional method, which reveals the imminent demise of the stodgy incumbents (insert David vs. Goliath and/or “Innovator’s Dilemma” references as needed). It’s a good story, but Hocking isn’t buying it. In a blog post titled “Some Things That Need to Be Said,” Hocking makes two important points: 1. Success in any domain is unpredictable. “... While I do think I will not be the only one to do this — others will be as successful as I’ve been, some even more so — I don’t think it will happen that often,” she writes.

Publishers: What Are They Good For? | 15

2. Self-publishing and traditional publishing are branches on the same tree. “Self-publishing and traditional publishing really aren’t that different,” Hocking says. “One is easier to get into but harder to maintain. But neither come with guarantees. Some books will sell, some won’t.” Her full post is worth a read. News of Hocking’s success led to an interesting back-channel conversation on an O’Reilly editor’s list. The perspectives articulated in the resulting email thread reflect many of the important issues at play in today’s publishing world. With permission, I’m moving a few excerpts into public view below. I think (and hope) there’s an opportunity to instigate some broader discussion.

Screenshot of Amazon’s Amanda Hocking page

What do publishers offer? In the email exchange, Brett McLaughlin considered the return on investment of traditional publishing’s bread and butter: in-depth editing. Is editing as important as publishers think it is? Many of the things we think are of incredibly high value turn out to be of far less value to the consumer. Certainly, we can say that editing of a Kindle fiction book probably needs to be less rigorous than a print technology book, or even 16 | Chapter 1: The Adaptation of Publishing

more so in the case of a language-heavy theological commentary ... I’d do well to think hard about what’s worth holding a product up in the name of “editing” and what just doesn’t matter to the paying public.

Tim O’Reilly noted that good editing adapts to the author and the project: Sometimes, we need to almost become co-authors; at other times, we need to just step back and let the author speak, even if it’s a bit different than we would do it ourselves. But ideally, editing is a conversation in which the editor helps the author clarify his or her own ideas, the order and learning path, and the depth of treatment.

Russell Jones made an intriguing point about publishing processes. What once was mandatory is now optional: Rather than a required step in publishing, editorial is in the process of switching from an imposed step by publishers to an optional step by authors. It’s this change in focus that makes publishers nervous. But I don’t think it should, necessarily. As Tim points out, there are times when the author’s original voice is sufficient, and times when the editor/author conversation becomes paramount. As I see it, the future of publishing and editing is to identify those touchpoints and offer the appropriate services as required at that time. And we have numerous services to offer, including: artwork, audience research, marketing and advertising, public relations, design, technological expertise, sales and distribution, brand association, community services, update and notification services, bundling, and of course, editorial. The very fact that authors can publish works without a traditional publisher automatically changes the publisher’s role from one that imposes process on authors to one that offers services to authors. Nimble publishers will recognize this sea change and adapt.

Mike Loukides looked at the “cheerleading” editors give to authors: The economics of publishing are changing in ways that make it difficult for publishers to do the kind of rewriting and revision that we used to do, but that’s only part of the picture. A huge part that we haven’t thought about enough is what I call the “cheerleading” role: supporting and encouraging the author so that he or she makes it down the stretch. So, though we’re going to have to rely more on writers who can deliver good prose without lots of help, that’s a small part of the value we deliver. There’s a lot of value in shaping the approach and pushing the author toward the finish line.

Many characterize Hocking as a self publisher, but that’s not quite right. The companies that own the distribution/sales platforms Hocking and other authors use are in many ways the real publishers. In the email thread, Tim O’Reilly used Amazon to illustrate this point: I think it’s important to frame all this correctly. We’re not really talking about a situation where authors are self-publishing so much as one where we’re

Publishers: What Are They Good For? | 17

watching Amazon become a publisher. Amazon is starting with the now standard Internet approach of “publish first, curate afterwards” (vs. the old scarcity model of “curate, then publish”), but it’s also clear that as the ecosystem develops, Amazon will offer more of the kinds of services that Russell is talking about.

If Amazon and Apple and others are publishers now, what competitive advantage can traditional publishers claim? Brett McLaughlin said the things that happen around the writing process — the conversations, the shaping, and the author-editor relationships — are key differentiators: There is huge value in saying: You’re getting access and long conversations with an editor who is engaged in your field, who is reading and thinking and talking to others about the same topics, who reads everything you’ve already written, and will engage you. In short, you’re pair-writing, and the result isn’t just a spell-checked, greenunderline-less document in Word that can be turned into a web page or a Kindle product. What you’re creating is a book that is cognitively and substantively better, because you are thinking better. You are well-reasoned and provocative and well-organized, and you have had your pre-suppositions challenged by a great companion. Sure, your book is better as a result, but so is your speech, and your sessions at conferences, and your work product. Ultimately, you are a better thinker.

Portions of these excerpts were edited and condensed.

Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data By Jenn Webb [Editor’s note: This piece was published in early 2010. We’ve included it the Best of TOC 2011 anthology because many of the ideas outlined in this interview are driving current debates and proposed anti-piracy legislation.] As digital book publishing continues to expand at a rapid pace to meet reader demands, piracy rears its head at the forefront of many a discussion in publisher circles. Many publishers respond to the perceived threat with strict digital rights management (DRM) software. But is this the best solution? And does it even provide protection from piracy? In the following interview, Magellan Media founder and TOC 2011 speaker Brian O’Leary (@brianoleary) discusses the current state of book piracy, how measurement data isn’t sufficient to determine its impact, and why DRM is a poor anti-piracy tool.

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What’s the current impact of piracy on the book publishing industry?

Brian O’Leary: We don’t know. Some people will tell you that it’s the biggest problem facing publishing or that ebook piracy will kill publishing. None of those perspectives are informed by solid data. We undertook research two-and-a-half-years ago with O’Reilly, and we’ve been studying Thomas Nelson as well, to measure the impact of piracy on paid content sales. We approached it as if it were cooperative marketing. We would look at the impact of what sales looked like before there was piracy, say for four to eight weeks, and then we’d look at the impact of piracy afterward. Essentially, if the net impact of piracy is negative, then you would see sales fall off more quickly after piracy; if it were positive, the opposite. Data that we collected for the titles O’Reilly put out showed a net lift in sales for books that had been pirated. So, it actually spurred, not hurt, sales. But we were only looking at O’Reilly and Thomas Nelson. The results are not emblematic of publishing overall. It could be more conservative, it could be less conservative. We just don’t have enough data. I’ve tried to get other publishers to join in, but it really hasn’t been a successful mission. Even at a low- or nocost offer, publishers seem reluctant to collect the data required to reveal the true impact of book piracy.

Can content tracking tools, such as those from Attributor, curb piracy? Brian O’Leary: Companies like Attributor gather data that specifies how many files were uploaded or downloaded from pirate sites. Their methodology, to me, is a little problematic, but that’s not really the big problem. The most significant challenge is we don’t know what the impact is on paid sales. Common methodologies count the number of times that something appears on a site and assumes every one of those is a lost sale. I would offer two counter points: First, the method for counting downloads of pirated books is clunky at best. Second, you can’t say that every download is equivalent to a lost sale. Some are, but there’s at least some likelihood that

Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data | 19

the pirated titles either spurred sales or represented a download that never would have resulted in a sale anyway. The other thing, too, is you’ve got to look at where the downloads occur. If it’s a North American title and the downloads occurred in Romania, I’m not that worried about it if I’m a publisher. It actually, if anything, says to me I should be moving my English language rights and my translation rights faster. It’s not that piracy is not a problem, it’s just that it’s not demonstratively a problem until you know what’s actually happening. I think content-tracking tools are good if you’re using them as a starting point for a conversation. No one can sample all of the torrent sites and know exactly what’s going on. The sampling is limited in how broadly you can draw conclusions, particularly about things like trade publishing versus academic publishing. Companies like Attributor tell you when piracy is occurring. What they can’t do, and what publishers need to generate the data to do, is understand the impact of piracy.

What tactics are publishers using to thwart piracy? Brian O’Leary: Most publishers focus on variations of enforcement. They find out that piracy occurs, they issue a takedown order, and they escalate it if they so choose. The jury’s out on whether that actually works. I think in general for offshore torrent sites, it’s probably not that effective. All you need to do is look at WikiLeaks and you’ll see a whole host of examples of how hard it is in a global Internet environment to get something truly taken down. Some companies are focused on applying fairly strict DRM software to their digital books. I’m pretty adamant on DRM: It has no impact whatsoever on piracy. Any good pirate can strip DRM in a matter of seconds to minutes. A pirate can scan a print copy easily as well. DRM is really only useful for keeping people who otherwise might have shared a copy of a book from doing so.

Is piracy really a threat to the book industry? Brian O’Leary: I don’t have enough data to say unequivocally “yes” or “no” to the extent of the piracy threat. I think what leads to rampant piracy is not meeting emergent demands. The publishing industry should be working as hard as we can to develop new and innovative business models that meet the needs of readers. And what those look like could be community-driven. I think of Baen Books, for example, which doesn’t put any DRM restrictions on its content but is one of the least pirated book publishers.

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As to sales, Paulo Coelho is a good example. He mines the piracy data to see if there’s a burgeoning interest for his books in a particular country or market. If so, he either works to get his book out in print or translate it in that market. I think piracy has become more acute with ebooks, not because ebooks are easily pirated but because ebooks are easily visible. So, for example, if I’m living in South Africa and I speak English, but I want to read Nora Roberts, and Nora Roberts is only published in North America, I might have to wait through a four-year cycle to get her latest book. That lead time made sense when it was about ink on paper. But if it’s an ebook, as a reader, I want to read it today — I love Nora Roberts, and I’d pay for her latest book, but I can’t get it here because there’s no service that will sell me an ebook in South Africa. That’s when piracy starts to occur. Readers say: “I would have paid for it, but they wouldn’t give it to me. They frustrated my demand.”

Will publishers — and content producers in general — get past the “lost revenue” mindset attached to digital piracy? Brian O’Leary: I think they already are. Not globally and not entirely, but I think that people are beginning to say, “Maybe this isn’t as big a deal as we thought it was.” When you see companies like O’Reilly moving a lot of their sales from print to digital, you’d think they would be more prone to piracy. And yet, we didn’t see that in our research. Publishers have seen other things occur that suggest that being widely available in digital formats that are not DRM restricted has helped with predictable sales. Baen Books, again, is a good example. I think there are plenty of people paying Attributor and other companies to monitor and issue takedown notices. I’m just not sure that it makes a difference. The really interesting things are happening around innovation in how we deliver content to people. That’s what’s fun, and those innovators will find ways to make money. I just hope the folks who find interesting ways to make money are not all technology providers and platform companies, but publishers as well.

Book Piracy: Less DRM, More Data | 21

CHAPTER 2

Digital Publishing and the Legal Landscape

Public Domain Here, Under Copyright There By Jenn Webb

23

On March 7, 2011, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the Golan v. Holder copyright case. In a post for Duke’s Scholarly Communications website, Kevin Smith — who also wrote about the original case in 2009 — provided a nice background summary: Basically the problem is that a law passed to reconcile U.S. copyright law with the international treaties that we agreed to in 1988 and after had the effect of removing some works from the public domain. This had virtually never happened before; until the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994, things that were in the public domain stayed there, and users could safely depend on their availability for use and reuse. For a subset of materials, however, the URAA changed the rules pretty dramatically and, according to the petitioners, in a way that conflicts with the basic protection of free speech found in the US Constitution.

According to the official case file, the court agreed to hear the case on two issues: “(1) Does the Progress Clause of the United States Constitution, Article I, B’ 8, cl. 8, prohibit Congress from taking works out of the public domain? (2) Does Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act violate the First Amendment of the United States Constitution?” In an email interview, Dana Newman, a transactional and intellectual property attorney, described the case and the nuts and bolts of the decision with which the Supreme Court is faced: This is an important case because it tests Congress’ ability to extend the boundaries of copyright law. The Constitution gives Congress the power to secure exclusive rights for authors and inventors “for limited times.” Copyright terms have been lengthened under the Copyright Act to now protect most works for 95 years. The Golan case challenges Congress’ ability to take works that are in the public domain in the U.S. (but still under copyright abroad), and restore their copyright status to comply with international treaties. The law at issue acts as another extension of copyright protection, by “recopyrighting” a large number of foreign works that had been in the public domain in the U.S. for decades.

In a Wired post about the case, David Kravets quoted from a blog posted by Anthony Falzone, a Stanford law lecturer, executive director of the Fair Use Project, and a lawyer for the plaintiff in the case: The point of copyright protection is to encourage people to create things that will ultimately belong to the public. While the scope and duration of copyright protection has changed over time, one aspect of the copyright system has remained consistent: once a work is placed in the public domain, it belongs to the public, and remains the property of the public — free for anyone to use for any purpose.

In our interview, Newman pointed out that a decision in either direction will have far-reaching implications: 24 | Chapter 2: Digital Publishing and the Legal Landscape

If the law’s upheld, it will affect the conductors, performers, educators, libraries, archivists and others who rely on the use and distribution of those foreign works, and create uncertainty as to the status of works currently presumed to be in the public domain. On the other hand, if the law is struck down as unconstitutional, there is the issue of our copyright laws being out of alignment with foreign copyright laws, and the risk that U.S. copyrighted works won’t be recognized in European countries if we don’t respect their copyrights here.

What might ultimately be the larger issue is the increasing globalization factor of intellectual property and the legal world as a whole being slow to adjust. Newman noted: The case is also interesting in that it highlights the fact that despite living in the digital age of increasing globalization, there is no international copyright law, and rights in one country don’t necessarily translate to the same rights in another country. The recent copyright infringement case involving Lucasfilm and the Stormtrooper helmets was another example — the company couldn’t enforce its U.S. judgment in the UK.

Legally Speaking, Think Before You Tweet By Jenn Webb The relationship between libel laws and new media has moved into the legal spotlight with a settlement in the Courtney Love Twitter defamation case and a suit against blogger John Hoff. These examples, and others, put a new focus on libel. Many people are already familiar with libel cases against magazines and newspapers, but what about content published on Twitter or Facebook, or on personal blogs? And since so many of us are publishers now — whether we define ourselves that way or not — what do individuals need to know about libel? David Ardia, fellow at the Berkman Center and the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, recently walked me through a couple of examples of how libel laws are slowly adapting to new media platforms. He also offered some common sense best practices for avoiding libel litigation. Our interview follows.

Legally Speaking, Think Before You Tweet | 25

How has libel law been affected by social networking platforms?

David Ardia: Libel law, which has been judge-made law for a very long time, has a history of slowly adapting to technological change. I would be reluctant to say that these new social communication technologies have radically changed the law, because they haven’t. But I do think we’re going to begin to see their influence play out over time. One thing that has been very significant is that the means of publishing information, and the ability to reach many people, is now held by millions. As a result, there are many more instances of speech that could support a lawsuit — or threats of lawsuits — happening today than we have seen in the past. There’s somewhat of a disconnect in what people think they are doing when they update their status or send a tweet with what is actually happening. There’s a feeling that we’re not speaking to the world, we’re only speaking to our friends. Our speech spreads out to the world very quickly, even when we use social networking platforms where we’re intending to speak to a small number of very close friends and acquaintances.

In light of Courtney Love’s recent settlement, what are some guidelines people should keep in mind while tweeting or posting on blogs and other social platforms? David Ardia: The first thing to realize is that you’re not in a personal conversation. Online, people bring sets of conversational norms that you might apply when you’re sitting across the table from someone and drinking a beer with them. The Courtney Love Twitter lawsuit gave us a window into that thinking. This speech is not ephemeral, it’s not constrained — it reaches to all corners of the world, and it is for the most part permanent. So, you should think before you speak. Ask yourself, “if I say what I intend to say, would that bother me if someone were to say that about me?” If the answer to that is “yes,” it doesn’t mean you don’t say it. It means you have to make sure that what you’re writing or saying is what you mean to say, and that you have support for what you’re 26 | Chapter 2: Digital Publishing and the Legal Landscape

saying if it relates to factual information. Those kinds of simple questions often can reveal problems before they occur.

Do libel laws for bloggers and tweeters differ from those that apply to professional journalists? David Ardia: The answer is “yes and no.” The same laws apply, but it’s how they are applied that can vary. Context really does matter in a defamation lawsuit. One of the pre-Internet aspects of how context matters in a defamation suit is that news organizations were typically given more leeway on the editorial page than they were on the news page. On the editorial page, there was the expectation that readers understood what they were reading was opinion — it was not meant to be imparting factual information. The opposite assumption carried over to the news page. So, when courts have looked at some of the cases — on blogs, for example — they’ve noted that the blogging platform is often used for opinion-style writing, so they give the author the benefit of the doubt in concluding that what they’re saying are statements of opinion versus statements of fact. One of the more interesting cases related to this issue is the “Skanks in NYC” case. A site featured some pictures of a fashion model in New York and called her a “skank” and other offensive terms. The court in that case talked about how many of these terms don’t have a clearly defined meaning, but that in the context of this blog, the use of those terms in combination with other reporting on the blog made some of the statements seem like statements of fact. The court refused to dismiss the case outright on that basis. So, context really matters. In that sense, we do see the libel laws being adapted to the unique context for bloggers and tweeters. There’s also the question of applying these guidelines to professional journalists, because obviously journalists use blogs and Twitter as well. So, one aspect of the question is platform dependent — that’s the context question. The other question is what is expected of someone prior to publication with regard to verification and accuracy? In that area, we have a lot less guidance from the courts in the context of new media. Typically, in a libel case, the courts look at what a reasonable journalist would do. In a public figure or public official case, the plaintiff has to prove actual malice. That is a very high standard for them to overcome — it basically means the publisher has to have known that what they were publishing was false, or they had serious doubts as to what they were publishing, but they went ahead

Legally Speaking, Think Before You Tweet | 27

and did it anyway. Actual malice will apply in public figure cases whether the defendant is a professional journalist or not. For private figures, the standard is negligence — or what a reasonable person would do in that context. We don’t know how the negligence standard would apply in the context of a non-professional blogger or tweeter — would there be a lower standard? I imagine a reasonable journalist would do more, in terms of fact checking and vetting, than a reasonable person who is just blogging or posting. That’s an area where the law has yet to give us clear answers.

Do you think we’ll get to a point where “Internet celebrity” (i.e., you’ve got 1 million Twitter followers) could serve as a threshold for actual malice? David Ardia: Yes — that goes to the public figure test. Public figures are people who voluntarily enter the public eye. Courts really look at whether a plaintiff has voluntarily entered the public eye and how widespread interest is in them. Those folks are expected to show actual malice in order to succeed in a libel case. We have some guidance from the Supreme Court on this, but how that plays out on the Internet we don’t know yet. One of the reasons why a celebrity or a public figure has to prove actual malice is because they have access to the means of counter-speech that a private figure doesn’t. Someone who has a million-plus Twitter followers can correct the record themselves. There’s also an expectation when you’re voluntarily in the public eye that you take on the risk that people are going to say bad things about you. Courts have basically said that’s part of the price you pay for the benefits that come from that kind of position. It’s a good question whether this maps precisely to the online environment, where you can develop a sort of celebrity that can be a million-miles wide and only a half-inch deep, or a million-miles deep and only a half-inch wide. In those situations, should an individual have to prove actual malice in all instances? We don’t really know. This interview was edited and condensed.

The Digital Rights Quagmire By Jenn Webb Digital publishing brings to light a number of new challenges and areas of uncertainty for everyone, from publishers to authors to retail consumers. Sebastian Posth (@sposth), a partner at A2 Electronic Publishing, discusses some

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of these issues in the following interview. He outlines questions raised in the digital rights and distribution arenas and talks about why the waters have become so muddied. Our interview follows.

How have rights and licensing issues changed with the growing ubiquity of digital publishing? What new issues exist that didn’t with traditional publishing?

Sebastian Posth: Rights and licensing have changed dramatically with both the growing number of platforms available for digital exploitation and the introduction of new forms of usage for copyrighted works — à la carte download-to-own content, DRM-protected lending features, cloud computing-supported “digital lockers” for consumers, subscription services comparable to Napster or Spotify in the digital music world. Publishers are faced with long and complex agreements from Amazon, Apple, Google, Barnes & Noble and numerous ebook startups, and they all have the same questions: Do I actually own the rights these companies want from me? How can I make sure I don’t breach one agreement by signing the other? And how do I make sure I avoid costly injunction letters when there is a rights conflict with one of my licensors?

How are digital rights any different from traditional print rights? Sebastian Posth: In traditional print rights, the so-called “first sale doctrine” (also known as the exhaustion doctrine) means that once a lawfully made copy of a work has been distributed by the rights owner, the owner of that copy is able to sell, lend or otherwise give away this copy without further permission from the original rights owner. This means that no brick-and-mortar bookstore or public library ever needed any license agreements with any publishers to sell or lend books. In digital publishing, there is no first sale doctrine. This means there needs to be a “chain of title” — a chain of successive and corresponding rights assign-

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ments from the author via the publisher and the digital distributor to the retailer and, ultimately, the end consumer of an ebook. And this chain needs to be in place as long as the work’s copyright is actively exploited. For instance, when a public library “buys” an ebook from a publisher or aggregator, it still needs to maintain the rights to lend this book to its library users for as long as those users are given access to it.

How are digital rights affected by international trade relationships? Are they approached differently than traditional print rights? Sebastian Posth: Digital distribution opens up the world for big and small publishers in ways that most people couldn’t have imaged just a few years ago. Any publisher or even self-published author can sell books to people from Anchorage, Alaska, to Zhengzhou, China, without titles ever being “not available” or “out of stock,” and without huge print and distribution costs. At the same time, the legal aspects of this world-wide distribution are almost impossible to evaluate for smaller entities. A multitude of questions emerge: What tax implications will signing an “agency deal” for the U.S. have for a European publisher? Is my romance best-seller from Scandinavia violating any laws in the United Arab Emirates or Australia? Do I need to know about local fixed price laws for books in countries ranging from France to Germany?

How do these issues affect the publishing industry as a whole? Sebastian Posth: At the moment, publishers and retailers are the ones most challenged by this complexity. A natural reaction is to try to secure rights for every possible (and even impossible) digital exploitation from their licensors, just to be on the safe side. If we can, as an industry, more clearly define rights, then I believe we will not only introduce a clear and robust rights framework for our business, but also be able to offer readers the widest choice of ways to consume books electronically, which will help grow the market for everybody. This interview was edited and condensed.

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CHAPTER 3

Publishing Tech and Tools

A Sensible Look at HTML5 and Publishing By Jenn Webb EPUB 3 and Kindle Format 8 both boast support for HTML5, but what exactly is HTML5 and what is its role in publishing? For insight on these questions — and practical ways HTML5 can be used by publishers — I reached out to Sanders Kleinfeld (@sandersk), author of “HTML5 for Publishers.” Our interview follows.

Why should publishers care about HTML5? Sanders Kleinfeld: HTML5 is the future of digital publishing. If you’re a publisher who’s interested in staying competitive in the ebook landscape, it’s quite crucial that you understand what HTML5 is all about.

So what is HTML5, exactly? The term is thrown around a lot, but it seems undefined.

Sanders Kleinfeld: The term “HTML5” is indeed used very fluidly in tech discourse, and it has really become a signifier for a constellation of different technologies, some only loosely related to actual HTML markup. When peo31

ple refer to HTML5, they’re usually talking about some combination of the following next-generation web technologies: Canvas, geolocation, native audio/video, local storage, and CSS3.

In your book, you instruct readers on using the element. What is that and why is it helpful? Sanders Kleinfeld: The element allows you to embed an interactive sketchpad into your web or ebook content. You can control it with JavaScript. Because the canvas is scriptable, it opens the door to everything from computer-generated drawings to animations and full-fledged games. If you’re interested in “app-ifying” your ebook (i.e., adding the kinds of interactive features that are the hallmark of iPhone or Android Apps), the element and its associated API are the tools that are going to allow you to accomplish that.

How can publishers make use of HTML5’s geolocation abilities? Sanders Kleinfeld: Much as websites like Google already customize search results and advertisements based on users’ locations, geolocation enables publishers to tailor their ebook content based on where their readers are currently located. This seems particularly beneficial to publishers of travel or restaurant guides, as they can sort and customize hotel/dining reviews based on proximity to the reader’s location, suggest points of interest nearby, and perhaps even offer directions from one locale to another. In “HTML5 for Publishers,” I explore the possibility of geolocated fiction, where the reader’s current location actually figures into the text of the story. [Click here to see an example of this in action.] More avant-garde uses of geolocation in ebooks might extend to interactive activities and games like geocaching.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has signed off on EPUB 3. What effect will EPUB 3 have on HTML5? Sanders Kleinfeld: Prior to the finalization of EPUB 3, the EPUB format already had a huge amount of momentum behind it, as an open standard supported by nearly every major ereading platform: iBooks for iPhone/iPad, Nook, Sony Reader, Adobe Digital Editions, etc. — Amazon’s Kindle is really the only notable exception. The release of the EPUB 3 standard, which designates HTML5 as the language to be used for ebook content documents, firmly aligns the format with next-generation web technology. I think it’s going to serve as 32 | Chapter 3: Publishing Tech and Tools

one of the primary catalysts for publishers to get into the HTML5 game and for the major ereading platforms to adopt robust HTML5 support. Publishers are clamoring to enhance their ebooks with interactive and multimedia features, ereader manufacturers want to support these features, and EPUB 3 provides a clearly defined path forward. We’re already beginning to see support for HTML5 features emerge on some of the most popular ereaders. Both iBooks and the Nook Color already support HTML5 audio and video, as do cloud platforms like Ibis Reader. IBooks also supports many features. I think it’s just a matter of time before other ereaders follow suit.

What’s your take on Kindle Format 8? Sanders Kleinfeld: Kindle Format 8 (KF8) is Amazon’s answer to EPUB 3. It’s a proprietary standard for Amazon’s ereader platforms that adds support for HTML5 and CSS3. Amazon recently published a list of KF8’s new capabilities. Prior to KF8, Kindle’s CSS support in Mobi 7 was rather rudimentary, which posed many challenges to ebook publishers with highly graphical content that demanded sophisticated, precise layout. KF8 provides the necessary tools for producing these types of books. It will facilitate the creation of children’s books, comic books, and other graphically rich content for Kindle. More generally, KF8 is also going to make it easier for publishers to make “prettier” ebooks for Kindle, and I think it’s important not to dismiss the value of aesthetics to the ereading experience. With the release of the Kindle Fire, Amazon is clearly looking to establish itself as a player in the tablet market, and I think KF8 is going to help Kindle keep pace with iBooks. That said, while I’m encouraged to see Kindle adopt greater HTML5 support, as a staunch open source advocate and sometimes-beleaguered ebook developer who would love all ereaders to unite behind one file format, very little would make me happier than seeing Amazon adopt the EPUB 3 standard.

What’s the best way for publishers to approach your book? Is it more of an introduction, or do they need some basic knowledge first? Sanders Kleinfeld: In “HTML5 for Publishers,” I provide an overview of the HTML5 technologies I believe will be most important to the next wave of ebook innovation, along with sample code and demos showing these HTML5 features in action. No formal knowledge of HTML or programming is necessary to appreciate “HTML5 for Publishers,” but if you’re interested in diving

A Sensible Look at HTML5 and Publishing | 33

in and developing your own HTML5 content, some background in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will most certainly be helpful. I provide links to additional HTML5 resources throughout the book for those looking to learn more.

What should publishers keep in mind as they explore HTML5 for their own needs? Sanders Kleinfeld: As with every new technology, I think it’s important for publishers to take a step back and not allow the hype to distract from practicality. Consider what aspects of HTML5 might benefit and enhance your ebook program, and employ them judiciously. For example, if you’re publishing a series of foreign language guides, embedding HTML5 audio/video content throughout your ebooks will likely be received as a welcome enhancement to readers. But if you’re publishing serious literature, adding lots of audio and video may be a distraction. Don’t be afraid to be innovative, but always put your readership’s needs first. This interview was edited and condensed.

Metadata Isn’t a Chore, It’s a Necessity By Jenn Webb Employing metadata as part of a publishing process feels like a completely different world from traditional print publishing. On first glance, categories and descriptors have little connection to flowing prose. However, that’s an ill-advised perspective. As digital publishing grows exponentially — and discovery gets harder — metadata’s role becomes even more important. In the following interview, Laura Dawson (@ljndawson), content chief at Firebrand Technologies, explains how a focus on metadata will help publishers stay viable both now and down the road.

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How can metadata help publishers future-proof their content?

Laura Dawson: With the Internet, nothing really dies anymore. By creating good metadata and describing your books thoroughly and accurately, you can make sure consumers can always find your books. It pays to go back and revisit old metadata as well. Search engines are always updating their algorithms, and consumers are constantly finding new ways to search. If you can update an older title with newer keywords, that will ensure continued relevance.

How does metadata fit into digital workflows? Laura Dawson: Pretty much the same way it does for print workflow — you’re describing a book. You initially describe the title one way at acquisition, and you continue updating that description as you move through the publishing process. By the time the book gets to marketing, you’ll have richer descriptions, such as categories, keywords, a synopsis, and a book jacket image, that are very consumer-friendly. The only difference with digital is that you’re describing a file rather than a physical object.

Doesn’t this require an entirely different skill set? Do publishers need a completely separate digital workflow? Laura Dawson: Ideally, publishers should not need a separate workflow for publishing ebooks. We preached about that in the “Start with XML” project. But of course, that’s not truly the case. Up until the book is ready to be published — in whatever format — the process is basically the same: acquisition, editorial, crafting the marketing messages, and figuring out special sales, if there are any. The different skill sets come into the picture when it’s time to actually publish the book, when a file goes out to the printer, and another file goes out to a conversion house. At that point, a publisher has to run quality assurance (QA) on the conversion. And this is where things get a bit hairy. Do you do a line-by-line QA? What happens when you find a formatting error — do you go in and fix it yourself, Metadata Isn’t a Chore, It’s a Necessity | 35

or do you outsource fixes to the conversion house? Publishers have to weigh the cost/benefit of having certain skills in-house versus outsourcing those tasks. This is going to vary from publisher to publisher, depending on what sorts of books they’re publishing, what sort of volume they’ve got, and what their readers’ expectations are.

What is the marketing impact of metadata now, and how might that role expand in the future? Laura Dawson: Consumers are much savvier about metadata than they used to be. They have certain expectations about what they want to see online. If a book’s metadata is obviously error-ridden or incomplete, consumers are not going to trust the description of the book, and they’ll steer away from it until they can somehow find out more — if they get around to trying to find out more. They very well may not. Metadata is the first line of defense in the signal-to-noise ratio. Given that this ratio is only going to increase over time, there’s a huge role for metadata to play. I see a lot happening with keywords, expanded taxonomies, and identifiers over the next few years. It’s the only way we’ll be able to sort things out as publishing gets easier and, in turn, more content gets published.

Why is ongoing metadata maintenance important? Laura Dawson: Rather than groaning about how maintaining good metadata is a chore, publishers should instead look at metadata as a series of tools. You sharpen your knives so you can cut a tomato without squashing it; you put gas, oil and wiper fluid in your car so you can get where you need to go; you protect your computer with anti-virus software so you can work without interruption. Taking care of your metadata means you can publish and sell your books with greater ease than you could with poorly-maintained metadata.

How does metadata relate to search engine optimization (SEO)? How do you see this relationship evolving? Laura Dawson: SEO utterly relies on metadata. Publishers that describe their books explicitly and well can guide consumers to those titles. As for the future, we need distinctive taxonomies that sort books — and chunks of books — into precise groups. Right now, all we have to work with are the BISAC categories, which have the subtlety of a sledgehammer. I know BISG wants to work on this. I’m also really interested to see how metadata evolves in response to Google Books. That will be fun to watch. 36 | Chapter 3: Publishing Tech and Tools

This interview was edited and condensed.

Six Ways to Think About an “Infinite Canvas” By Peter Meyers This is part of an ongoing series related to Peter Meyers’ project “Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience.” (Note: This post originally appeared on A New Kind of Book. It’s republished with permission.) I’m speaking at the 2011 Books in Browsers conference on “the infinite canvas.” When I started chewing on this topic, my thoughts centered on a very literal vision: a super-ginormous sheet for authors to compose on. And while I think there’s some great creative territory to explore in this notion of space spanning endlessly up, down, left, and right, I also think there are a bunch of other ways to define what an infinite canvas is. Not simply a huge piece of virtual paper, but instead, an elastic space that does things no print surface could do, no matter how big it is. So, herewith, a quick stab at some non-literal takes on the topic. My version, if you will, of six different ways of thinking about the infinite canvas.

Continuously changeable The idea here is simple: refreshable rather than static content. The actual dimensions of the page aren’t what’s elastic; instead, it’s what’s being presented Six Ways to Think About an “Infinite Canvas” | 37

that’s continuously changing. In some ways, the home page of a newspaper’s website serves as a good example here. Visit The Boston Globe half a dozen times over the course of a week and each time you’ll see a new serving of news. (Haven’t seen that paper’s recent online makeover yet? Definitely worth checking out, and make sure to do so using a few different screen sizes — laptop, big monitor, mobile phone ... each showcases a different version of its morphing, on-the-fly design.)

Deep zooms Ever seen that great short video, “The Power of Ten”? It’s where the shot begins just above two picnickers on a blanket and then proceeds to zoom out so that you see the same picnic blanket, but now from 100 feet up, and then 1,000 feet, and on and on until you’ve got a view from outer space. (After the zoom out, the process reverses, and you end up getting increasingly microscopic glimpses of the blanket, its fabric, the individual strands of cotton, and so on.) Here’s a presentational canvas that adds new levels of meaning at different magnifications. So, the viewer doesn’t simply move closer or further away, as you might in a room when looking at, say, a person. As you get closer, you see progressively deeper into the body. Microsoft calls this “semantic zooming” (as part of its forthcoming touchscreen-friendly Metro interface). Bible software maker Glo offers some interesting content zooming tools that implement this feature for readers looking to flip between birds-eye and page views.

Alternate geometries A printed page is a 2-D rectangle of fixed dimensions. On the infinite canvas, the possibilities vary widely, deeply, and as Will Ferrell’s character in “Old School” might say, “in ways we’ve never even heard of.” Some possible shapes here: a 3-D cube with content on each side, or pyramid-shaped ebooks (Robert Darnton wrote about those in The New Age of the Book, where he proposes a multi-layered structure for academics with excess material that would bust the bindings of a printed book).

Canvases that give readers room to contemplate and respond I just got a wonderful print book the other day called “Finish This Book.” It contains a collection of fill-in-the-blank and finish-this-thought creative exercises. It reminded me that one thing digital books haven’t yet explored much is leaving space for readers to compose their reactions. Sure, every ebook reader today lets you take notes, but as I’ve written before, these systems are pale replicas of the rich, reader-friendly note taking experiences we get in print

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books. Job No. 1 is solving those shortcomings, but then imagine the possibilities if digital books are designed to allow readers to compose extensive thoughts and reactions.

Delight Print book lovers (I’m one of ‘em) wax on about their beloved format’s special talents: the smell, the feel, its nap-friendly weight. But touchscreen fans can play that game, too. Recall, for starters, the first time you tapped an iPhone or similarly modern touchscreen. Admit it: the way it felt to pinch, swipe, flick, and spread ... those gestures introduce a whole new pleasure palette. Reading and books have heretofore primarily been a visual medium: you look and ponder what’s inside. Now, as we enter the age of touchscreen documents, content becomes a feast for our fingers as much as our eyes. Authors, publishers, and designers are just beginning to appreciate this opportunity, making good examples hard to point to. I do think that Erik Loyer is among the most interesting innovators with his Strange Rain app, a kind of mashup between short fiction and those particle visualizers like Uzu. It’s not civilian-friendly yet, I don’t think, but it points the way for artists interested in incorporating touch into their creations.

Jumbo content A movable viewport lets your audience pan across massive content panoramas. Some of the possibilities here are photographic (Photosynth, Virtual History ROMA). Others have begun to explore massively wide content landscapes, such as timelines (History of Jazz). One new example I just learned about yesterday: London Unfurled for iPad, a hand-illustrated pair of 37-foot long drawings of every building on the River Thames between Hammersmith Bridge and Millennium Dome, complete with tappable backstories on most of the architecture that’s on display. These are just a few of the possibilities that I’ve spotted. What comes to mind when you think about the infinite canvas? Photo: masterpiece by 416style, on Flickr

Six Ways to Think About an “Infinite Canvas” | 39

CHAPTER 4

The Edge of Publishing

The Future of the Book By Mike Hendrickson

During lunch at TOC 2011, we had a roundtable discussion that centered on the future of the book. The conversation touched on many different areas, as you would expect. From distribution and inventory, to pricing and formats, to audience ownership and engagement. It was an interesting discussion but challenging because there is not one solution that will fit all publishers. We all have unique brands, focus, and particular ways of publishing, so finding a silver bullet will be virtually impossible. It occurred to me, that as an industry, we should try to build a list of important concepts, features, and ideas that will help us all work towards building The Book of the Future. So I will start the list here, and invite everyone reading to contribute to the list through the comments below. Pass this post onto your

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colleagues and start a discussion. Let’s change the The Book of the Future before we have to. These items are in no particular order.

Easy-to-use authoring tools that enable content creation and distribution Most publishers realized the inherent benefits of getting content into XML/ DocBook. Yet most authoring tools that are easy to use, are horrible at getting usable XML out of the authoring environment. I know, many purport to offer XML conversion, but it is still an arduous process to clean up those conversions, and what a waste of time and resources. The existing XML tools on the other hand, are typically for the more geeky authors who write in mark up naturally. They are not intended for significant works with lots of art, cross references, interesting layout. XMLMind, ASCIIDoc and Oxygen are the three that we recommend for creating easy to generate and use XML. There are proprietary tool chains that work for some publishers relatively well but they are not shared with the industry. There are other significant problems with XML — it’s based on the idea that content and appearance can be separated, so, as I already mentioned, it’s not particularly suited for books with significant art, or any type of book where the layout is part of the content. So I think one component of The Book of the Future needs to center on making the upfront writing and creative work easy, intuitive, and productive for authors. Better enabling our authors will benefit everyone, including the cheese sandwich makers.

Readily available in all formats Today we kind of know what formats people want to read their book in. Print, APK, DAISY, ePub, Mobi, and PDF are the most notable formats today. But what will be the most favored format three years from now? You might pick one format from the previous list, but what if some wiz-bang new device comes out and makes reading an amazing experience anywhere you are without effort, and knows when your eyes have stopped focusing so it tells you to take a break. The point is, we’ll need to be able to get our content onto devices and formats that are not yet available. So how do we get authoring tools to make it easy to get into all these different formats without a resource investment that kills a reasonable P&L? And how do you have print inventory right-sized to a changing market, yet stock is on hand? Can publishing do Just in Time much like Amazon does for retailing? The Book of the Future will need to be in all formats and all channels on its pub-date.

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Continuous updates (more tech-oriented and some non-fiction) For many categories in publishing, the content that is published has a very short shelf-life. There is a need to keep content updated and relevant. But how do you make changes without taking back inventory or having two similar, but not exactly similar products on the market? Is the solution similar to what happens when you purchase an App in an App Store? In other words, will publishers start pushing out updates, new chapters, and errata fixes, to registered users for all their content in the future? Will there be “in-app” purchases similar to what we see in app now? In essence, if someone purchases content, should they get lifetime updates, enhancements, revisions, fixes and the like? Is this something that The Book of the Future needs to provide?

Rich media integration We all know about, or have seen examples of integrated media. Will combining several of the various elements become the expected minimum viable product? Will publishing be hiring more producers with TV production in their background for creating great learning experiences? Will the early richproducts look like the early web-pages with a feature-overloaded look and feel? Are we going to see Media Designers become the highly-paid and coveted jobs in publishing? Will The Book of the Future really be a media-container for more than a book?

Socially and personally connects readers to publisher/author/ community Wow, this was a long time coming. Audience has always been a key focus of authors and publishers, but now days, we are getting closer to our beloved followers. Connecting readers to authors, and authors to readers, and readers to like minded readers, and readers to publishers, and publishers to communities is getting easier with the abundance of social media options. Will connecting social media as an in-App experience take publishing to a new level? Will making content passages easier to share help sell more books? Will publishers need to abandon DRM to make this social connections work on a large scale? Will books be judged based on how many followers, friends, posts, tweets, status updates, etc. there are related to the book? Will The Book of the Future be a social event rather than a static view of content?

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Engages the distracted and partial attention society We’ve all heard about how our attention is being overloaded by too many media and information options. How are we going to create learning experiences that are tailored to individual attention spans. Some people may be able to focus for 20 minutes while others may last several hours before needing a break. How do we win the the competition for our readers minds? Is the solution to create many smaller loosely joined components that work at bursty intervals? Does this let the reader learn, read, and enjoy at their pace? Will the social anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and watching the digital natives provide us with the insights to build The Book of the Future.

Written and translated simultaneously This has been long overdue and needs to be done soon. The simplified process for writing a book is 1) author writes, 2) publisher edits, 3) author/publisher approve changes, 4) book is printed and distributed in various channels, including digital. In the majority of cases, why are we waiting to throw the project over the fence to the international rights groups to begin translation, after the fact. In today’s world, with all the amazing technology, why do we wait for translations to happen? We have tools like Subversion, and Git that can make this straightforward, so why not write a chapter and have a translater work on a forked version. Translators would see any changes to the original and could alter their version. Will The Book of the Future be published in several languages simultaneously?

Gamification features There is plenty of evidence showing that people react to Gamification principles in a compelling manner, and in some cases an addictive manner. So why is the publishing industry waiting to build this into our products? Are we waiting to make sure it ‘sticks’ before we invest resources? Some people say Gamification will be to this decade what Social was to the previous decade. Can you imagine that people will earn things for reading, learning and engaging with your content? Shouldn’t students get more immediate feedback and fun from their textbook? Would it be great to leave one device you are reading on, continue your journey, game, assignment and login to a different device and pick up where you left off (some devices have this in nascent form now)? Will Gamification be a big part of The Book of the Future for your organization?

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Access from the source Will your future products put your customers more in touch with you, the publisher, rather than the retailer, professor, bookstore, or some other intermediary. Will in-book purchases (like in-App purchases) put you closer to your audience? Will your direct sales of The Book of the Future make up for any declines you see in your existing channels and will you create new channels?

Culture, staffing, and innovation As the landscape in publishing changes due to technology, disruption in market distribution, and a new generation of readers, will your company undergo a change in culture, staffing and leadership? When you compare the publishing industry to others, it looks as though we have moved quite slowly. Is Google the same company it was 10 years ago? Microsoft? Yet many in publishing have done very little to innovate and ignite this industry. As an industry, need to give Amazon a boatload of credit for forcing us all to be more innovative. Does our culture of building great, noble and scholarly works need to change to a more ‘fail forward fast’ mentality where we are meeting market demands in a “just in time” manner. Much more like a software company that releases early, often and continuous. I have heard over the years, that the publishing industry is like running with the slow kid on the block, so are going keep dragging our feet, or look for talent to bring in from other industries to help us create The Book of the Future.

Open source A natural reaction in a declining market, from most corporate entities, is to hoard their assets and keep them safely guarded with DRM and the like. This is a closed and proprietary view of doing business. There are enough case studies showing how Open Sourcing your products actually creates a larger eco-system and a more vibrant market. We need to think about the industry and not individual company success. How do you make money if you’re giving the content away? What is the cost of free? Most publishers won’t consider Open Source / Creative Commons licenses for some reason, yet those of us that do, are growing and thriving. What does open source do to the publishing ecosystem, make it larger and stronger? Margaret Atwood’s brilliant depiction of a part of the ecosystem, cautions publishing to neither accidentally or intentionally eliminate the author (part of the ecosystem). When the industry defines and deploys the The Book of the Future, we need to make sure the industry is healthy by making the ideas, technology and models Open Source in spirit. Obviously there are components that will help companies remain unique, but let’s get our industry moving in a healthy direction, together! The Future of the Book | 45

Priced fairly Creating more value than you capture is an essential ingredient for successful publishing in the future. Tim O’Reilly has instilled this sort of thinking in all of us at O’Reilly. If you use this train of thought to guide your pricing decisions, you’ll do well. There is something going on in our industry that needs to self correct. Average prices are going up, and average units sold is going down. I understand this pricing strategy helps a publisher not lose money (fewer units at a higher price can actually drive a bottom line profit). We need to think carefully about our pricing decisions when we figure how to price The Book of the Future. I wonder which rocket-scientist decided to price a digital edition so much lower the the print analog. I find the digital edition more useful, portable, and convenient. Yet somehow digital is valued less in our industry’s pricing strategy. Could it be that some large retailers have artificially set the price low and don’t care about the ecosystem so they can sell less-than-adequate devices instead of valuing the most important asset — the content. I don’t think we have to wait for a market correction, we are squarely in the middle of it now. Self-publishing, direct sales strategies, the rise of small publishers, new open devices, piracy and broken DRM are all indications that our pricing strategies as an industry are off-kilter. Create more value than you capture, think about your readers first, your ecosystem second, and your P&L third.

Publishing Needs a Social Strategy By Joe Wikert This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog (“Publishing in the Social World”). It’s republished with permission. I spent most of last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. If you missed it, you’ll find all of the video for it here. I came away from it with two things in mind. First, Google is under attack from every angle. Sure, they’ve felt competitive pressures before, but whether it’s from Facebook, Bing or some startup in a garage, I get the impression it’s more intense now than ever before. No wonder they’re giving all employees a 10 percent pay raise! Seriously, search is getting more social every day and tomorrow’s recommendations from people you know via Facebook are infinitely more valuable than search results from yesterday’s algorithm. That brings me to my second key takeaway from Web 2.0: The importance of a social strategy for every industry, including publishing. I can already hear the skeptics saying, “reading is a time of solitude, not something that’s

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done socially.” That’s mostly right, but it ignores at least two key areas where a social strategy can have a profound impact on the publishing industry: recommendations and remixes. Amazon pretty much pioneered the online recommendation aspect of book publishing. Everyone wants 5-star reviews of their book, but I’m pretty sure we could also agree that a trusted friend’s recommendation is even more powerful than a stranger’s. Almost every ebook purchase I make these days is because a friend suggested it. There are just too many options (and too little time!) to risk buying a dud, even if it’s only $9.99. What’s missing in the recommendation area though is a fast and easy way to share excerpts. If I come across a terrific sentence or paragraph I want to share from Drew Brees’ ebook, “Coming Back Stronger” (a terrific read so far, btw), what are my options? The Kindle reader on my iPad doesn’t offer a way for me to even tweet/email from within the app, let alone share an excerpt. Even though I mentioned Google could face challenging times ahead I think they’re on to a solution for this particular problem. Google Books lets you share links right into the book’s content. For example, I love it when Brees says, “Anyone can see the adversity in a difficult situation, but it takes a stronger person to see the opportunity.” I could tweet that sentence but it wouldn’t leave much room for an attribution. I prefer to share a link, like this one, which takes you right to that page in the book (the quote starts at the bottom of the previous page and runs through the top of the one linked to). Since Google Books already offers this service it seems likely the much-anticipated Google Editions will too. If it does, that’s one reason I’ll seriously consider switching from Amazon to Google for all my future ebook purchases. I want to be able to not only share excerpts but also give my friends more context though a service that lets them dive right into the book I’m talking about. Even though Google lets publishers determine what percentage of a book visitors can view for free in their Books service, it’s clear many publishers aren’t participating. For example, I’ve queued up Bill Bryson’s “At Home” to read soon but all you’ll find about it on Google Books is this content-free catalog page. Any publishers who are skittish about sharing content previews today are likely to choke on the idea of content remix in the future. Remix isn’t great for all types of content but it lends itself to formats like how-to, for example. The author may have one way of solving a problem but a reader might find an even better approach. Why not make that reader’s solution available to other readers, even if it’s just a small change to one of the steps originally provided by the author? Some readers will offer their approach for free and others might want some form of compensation; we need to come up with a model that Publishing Needs a Social Strategy | 47

supports both. And remember, nobody’s trying to jam these remixes down anyone else’s throat. I envision an ereader app that lets you hide all other reader comments and content. But for those of us who are curious to see what other readers, especially our own friends, have to say, I think this will be a nice new service. The social publishing/content options suggested in this post are things that can’t effectively be executed upon in the print world. Up to now, ebooks have mostly been nothing more than quick-and-dirty conversions of the print product. I look forward to a future where social options and other features more fully leverage the ebook medium.

Open-Ended Publishing By Mac Slocum All change begins with a thought. That’s why I’m big on mental shifts. If you start thinking a different way, you have the potential to adapt to that new mode. It takes enormous effort and commitment to manifest change, but that simple act of deciding to look at the world a little differently is always the catalyst. I was reminded of this when I ran across my colleague Russell Jones’ recent comment on a company email list. Here’s what he wrote: “Publishing,” in the past, was always tied to an event -- printing the book. That’s no longer true. The “book” now consists of whatever content you provide for readers to download -- and if you can update them automatically, that’s not even exactly true. For example, you could create a book that updates constantly, a book that consists entirely of reader input, a book that is actually a series of links, a book that readers interact with, a book that grows over time, and, of course, book readers that collect their own metadata. Books that are applications, books that are interactive tours. Books where the ending (or the whole story) changes as people read them ... There are no reprints. There may be editions, but in most cases, that’s not terribly useful to readers. Everything has changed. The sky’s the limit. [Note: This was published with Russell’s permission.]

Russell’s comment got me thinking about how a mental “change filter” applies to the content industries. It also made me want to share some of the questions I’ve been noodling on over the last few years. Specifically: What if all content is on a continuum? What if there’s no end? What if there’s no finality anymore?

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That’s a huge change from what most of us are used to. From early on, we’re trained to create editions: an essay, a book, a magazine, a newspaper, a movie, a game, etc. Those are projects with defined beginnings and endings. But digital content doesn’t really exist in an edition-based world. It moves, it flows. It gets chunked up, mashed up, and recombined. It can be copied and pasted at will (whether you like it or not). It can be added to. It can be deleted from. It hibernates and reappears unexpectedly months or years later. Just look at the revision history on a Wikipedia entry. Digital content is fluid. What’s odd and interesting is that many content creators -- even folks who truly understand digital -- are stuck in editions. I fall into this trap all the time. Too often I see the world in terms of “posts” or “articles.” But by thinking that way, I’m leaving opportunity on the table. I’m limiting my creative output to a defined amount of content that’s poured into a defined container. So that’s the set up. As you’ll see, my thoughts about open-ended publishing are nascent. I’m not entirely sure this process has long-term utility. Nor do I know if it’s viable as a business model. Nonetheless, here’s a few ideas on how open-ended publishing might play out.

Everything can be public Under an open-ended model, notes, excerpts, links, and drafts can all be published online. Few people would care to access this content -- heck, its disorganization could make it private while in public view -- but it’s been my experience that pushing material into the public space changes it in an important way. Public content holds the content creator accountable. This is why I dump all sorts of quotes and excerpts and half-baked ideas into my Tumblr. That’s my big bucket of slop: all the stuff that informs the posts I write and the interview questions I ask. I put it out there not because I think it has value to all (it doesn’t), but because public content makes me want to follow through. I used to collect similar dribs and drabs in private Google documents. Despite good intentions, I never closed the loop on any of that stuff. It just sat there, locked in a doc no one will ever look at again. But publishing that same material publicly is like creating an alpha version for a future piece of content. You’ll notice I wrote everything “can” be public. It doesn’t have to be. If there’s a competitive advantage connected to a particular insight or breakthrough, you might want to hold that back. That’s fine, but I’m of the mind that almost everything can and should be blithely tossed into the public space. After all, a stunning idea means little without great execution. (Note: Nuclear launch

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codes, secret herbs and spices, and private corporate data don’t apply here. Just so we’re clear.)

Go forward or back whenever you like We’re so accustomed to sensing “the end.” We see that last paragraph or feel that last beat and we know, subconsciously, that the ride is almost over. Because of this, open-ended publishing feels weird -- perhaps even wrong. But I think we need to fight through that. A content creator can always reach a full-stop with their work. He or she could tie up loose ends and make their creation cohesive. But even in these cases, the “never say never” adage will always apply. If a related idea pops up, what’s to stop that same person from firing up the engine again? Or, if someone else wants to run with the same ball, why not? This is already common in the film industry, where franchise “reboots” are a norm (and given what we’ve seen from Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” films and JJ Abrams’ “Star Trek,” a reboot can be a very good thing). The big takeaway here is that if content is open ended, creators can go forward or back whenever they like. Personally, I find that liberating.

Just start The world is filled with people brimming with ideas. The world is not filled with people who will act on those ideas. Content creators are naturally scarce because writing, filming, and editing requires effort -- often lots of effort. Some of us are blessed (or cursed) with a need to create. It’s a compulsion. This section doesn’t apply to those people. I don’t subscribe to the notion that all great material comes from borderline psychosis. “Writers have to write,” that’s true, but others have it in them to create interesting things as well. The key is to reduce the barriers to entry. When that happens, we’ll see two things: 1. Ungodly amounts of hideous material. 2. A small but vital percentage of beautiful stuff. YouTube is the embodiment of this. Much of that content is very, very bad. But nestled amidst the shaky home videos and cringe-inducing “comedy,” you’ll find genuine voices and genuine talent. But YouTube is using technology to lower the barriers of content creation and distribution. What I’m proposing is a barrier-busting mindset.

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The key is this: Instead of pushing the notion that all material of merit must only appear after countless revisions, we could instead just start. Just publish it. Just write it. Just put it out there. Let it become a thing instead of an idea. Since this content is open ended, you can always revise the material, or rework it, or completely alter its intent. The most important thing you can do is begin. (This is why NaNoWriMo is a fantastic project.)

Expectations and platforms I know it sounds like I’m suggesting that all content should become stream of consciousness blather. But that’s not true. I’m an editor. I value clarity, and I know clarity is only achieved through structure and revision. (This post, for example, was reworked and then reworked again.) I also see quality as a competitive advantage. Because there’s so much bad stuff out there, committing to the good stuff sets you apart. As such, open-ended publishing needs to mesh expectations with platforms. That’s why I dump my random gatherings on Tumblr, where the expectation -- if there is one -- is quite low. I would never post that material on Radar. But I would (and do) take the ideas and links that bubbled up in my Tumblr and use those as building blocks in Radar posts.

There’s a missing piece here, though. If Tumblr is where the ideas start and Radar is where they manifest in a better-formed way, then what do I do when a related idea or development pops up? Do I add to a pre-existing Radar post? Do I create an entirely new post? Or, do I use a separate platform for these “director’s cut” versions? I’m not sure about the execution, but abandoning a line of thought because there’s no home for it doesn’t sit well with me. A story with energy deserves to continue. And with all sorts of low-cost and easy-touse digital platforms now at our disposal, there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue.

Your thoughts? In a way, this is a meta post. I’m gathering the threads I’ve collected over years of working in, and thinking about, digital content. Those individual threads were already “published” in various places: Tumblr, blog posts focusing on adjacent topics, emails, tweets, etc. Now the threads have been partially bun-

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dled here on Radar (for good or bad). This story is on a continuum, and I imagine it’ll chug along in one form or another. But is there anything to this idea? Does open-ended publishing make any practical sense? I welcome any comments, counter arguments, enhancements, or rebuttals (drop me a line at [email protected]).

Tim O’Reilly on What Lies Ahead in Publishing By Mac Slocum Tim O’Reilly recently offered his thoughts and predictions for a variety of topics we cover regularly on Radar, including publishing. Our interview follows.

How will ebooks change publishing?

Tim O’Reilly: Andrew Savikas, our VP of digital initiatives at O’Reilly, likes to make a distinction between “formats” and “forms.” A hardback, a paperback, an audiobook, and many an ebook simply represent different forms of the same work. New formats, on the other hand, represent deeper changes in how authors develop content and readers consume it. The graphic novel is a recent format innovation in the West (albeit one with deep antecedents), as are the cell phone novels that have become popular in Japan. People think of ebooks as simply another format, but ebooks actually represent an opportunity for a change in form. For example, you used to buy a printed atlas or a printed map, but now you have a dynamic, perpetually-updated, real-time map that shows you where you are. The old paper maps aren’t very useful anymore. Applications from Yelp to Foursquare can be seen as elaborations of the potential of the map in its electronic form. Or look at Wikipedia. As an encyclopedia, it’s actually pretty close in form to what it replaced, but there are important layers of reinvention. A printed encyclopedia doesn’t have articles on breaking news; it can’t be a real-time en-

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cyclopedia in the way that Wikipedia now is. Notions about what an encyclopedia can do have changed. Changes in form have significantly affected O’Reilly’s publishing business by providing new kinds of competition. Our bestsellers are now tutorial books. The old reference-based books have been cannibalized by the web and search. This is why we try to define Safari Books Online as a library of content that people can search across. Reference material now carries an expectation that it will be searchable. And our tutorial books are increasingly challenged by other forms of tutorial, such as screencasts and online video. O’Reilly may appear to be in the same category as HarperCollins -- we both put ink on paper and sell products through retailers -- but in other ways we’re not even in the same business. HarperCollins publishes literary fiction, serious non-fiction, biographies, and other popular literature. We publish technical how-to and reference material. Their competitors include other forms of entertainment and erudition; ours include other forms of teaching and reference.

Does the definition of “publisher” need to expand? Tim O’Reilly: Publishers think way too narrowly about what kind of business they are in, and as a result, are blind to how the competitive landscape is changing under their feet. If someone has roots in ink-on-paper, they are a publisher, but if they are web- or mobile-native, they are not. But this is wrongheaded! Put another way: Why would you think Zagat is a publisher but Yelp isn’t? They both perform similar jobs. Competition should be defined by the jobs publishers do for users. That being said, curation and aggregation are among the core jobs of publishing, and it’s clear to me these jobs still need to be done. There is a real need for someone to winnow out the wheat from the chaff as more content becomes available online. (Of course, Google is also in the curation business, but they do it algorithmically.) Eventually, there will be new ways publishers get paid for doing these jobs, but there are also going to be new ways to do them.

Does a focus on infrastructure block adaptation? Tim O’Reilly: I gave a Publishing Point talk and someone in the audience asked how new publishing models could pay for “all this,” and they pointed around to the lovely room and by reference, the building we were in, the headquarters of a storied publishing company. It was as if maintaining what they already own is the heart of the problem. That’s like Digital Equipment Corporation asking, back when the PC era was just beginning, “Will the personal computer pay for all of this?”

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HP and IBM figured out how to make the transition to the personal computer era. Digital didn’t. Now, Microsoft is struggling with the transition from the PC era to the web era. Could you imagine somebody at a Microsoft conference asking, “But will the web pay for all of this?” You would think that was ridiculous. In technology, we understand the reality of competition and what Schumpeter called the “creative destruction” of capitalism. Why is it when somebody asks that same question in the context of publishing it’s treated as a serious query?

How can publishers adapt to digital? What mindsets should they adopt? Tim O’Reilly: Publishers, including O’Reilly, need to ask themselves: How can we make our content better online? How can we make it better through mobile? In non-fiction, there are simple improvements to be made in the form of links -- after all, what is a link but a better version of the footnote? There are also ways to add more content, in much the way that DVD publishers add deleted scenes, director commentary, and other extras to the original movie. Other times, “better” will be defined by making something smaller -- at least from the user’s point of view. For example, Google has more data than any print atlas, but the user sees less. Consumption is defined by the user’s particular request: show me where I am now; show what’s around me; show me how to get from where I am to somewhere else. There’s a huge opportunity for books to be reconceived as database-backed applications that show you just what you need to know. Former computer-book publisher Mitch Waite now publishes a fabulous birder’s guide for the iPhone, iBird Pro, demonstrating the power of this model. Books give people information, entertainment, and education. If publishers focus on how those three elements can be performed better online and through mobile, innovation and business models will follow. If we don’t innovate to do those jobs better for our customers, it’s only a matter of time before someone else steps in.

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