Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

Google & the Future of Books - The New York Review of Books

Don't get me wrong. I know that businesses must be responsible to shareholders. I believe that authors are entitled to payment for their creative labor and that publishers deserve to make money from the value they add to the texts supplied by authors. I admire the wizardry of hardware, software, search engines, digitization, and algorithmic relevance ranking. I acknowledge the importance of copyright, although I think that Congress got it better in 1790 than in 1998.

Interesting article that looks at the future of the book in light of the recent settlement betewen Google and the major publishing houses.

Robert Darnton- an important figure in Book History- is concerned about the future of the information society as major players increasingly hold the greatest sway

What will happen if Google favors profitability over access? Nothing, if I read the terms of the settlement correctly. Only the registry, acting for the copyright holders, has the power to force a change in the subscription prices charged by Google, and there is no reason to expect the registry to object if the prices are too high. Google may choose to be generous in it pricing, and I have reason to hope it may do so; but it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.

newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

I'm glad I'm not an old skool newspaper

The expense and waste of daily newspapers is probably one of the few things that make me froth with rage.

"Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead."

A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books.

Really nice discussion of the history of the ebook market.

A veteran of a former turning of the e-book wheel looks at the past, present, and future of reading books on things that are not books.

The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. ...ja uskottava rahoituspohja, mutta se on eri stoori.

"Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. "

Clay Shirky tells us why micropayments for news will not work.

open source ebook platform

Application

!!!!

Info to check later

Google Book Search Library Project

This is an article on Google Book Search by the Association of Research Libraries

how to make your own book

Here are six great sites that will help you publish your work, guaranteeing you a published book that can be sold via different outlets, such as Amazon.

6 Ways to Publish Your Own Book

Peer Review für "Jedermann"

We intend for the peer-review web to do for scientific publishing what the world wide web has done for media publishing. As it becomes increasingly practical to evaluate researchers based on the reviews of their peers, the need for centralized big-name journals begins to diminish. The power is returned to those most qualified to give meaningful reviews: the peers.

GPeerReview attempts to makes it easy for authors to seek post-publication endorsements of their works. We provide the following tools: * A command-line tool to digitally sign endorsements (done and available). * A web-based version of the signing tool (about 70% done). * Client tools for analyzing endorsement graphs to establish credibility (in planning stages). * Additional tools to facilitate the running of endorsement organizations (in the brain-storming stages). * Tools for analyzing citation graphs (in the brain-storming stages).

• Create their own virtual store with an unlimited number of downloads, ringtones, CDs and merchandise items. • Sell directly to fans on any website, blog or social network on the web. • Have one central place to design custom products and manage all e-commerce. • Easily buy high quality, affordable CDs and merchandise with no minimums for live shows and events. • Focus on making music while Audiolife handles all on-demand manufacturing, distribution, customer service and accounting.

online music service

Summaries of the best content from around the Web.

shortcut to the news of the day...

news and information

save

Since 1993, people have been telling news executives that their business model is doomed.

<3 clay shirky

The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now.

what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

A good epitaph for the newspaper, by Clay Shirky. Now if only Elsevier would go bankrupt too.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it's been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it's been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it's you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can't be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Oh, newspapers, please stick around. The revolution of the printing press was only, what, a few decades ago?

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stevenberlinjohnson.com%2F2009%2F03%2Fthe-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html

There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.

Johnson argues that journalism in the future will look a lot like how technology and politics are covered now because those two topics are the "old growth forests of the web", i.e. they've been covered long enough on the web that old media has had time to adjust, react, and in many cases, go out of business in the face of that coverage.

"That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL."

a major American city could be left without a daily paper

Heavy debt has dragged several newspaper companies into bankruptcy. The industry’s dwindling revenues have forced some money-losing papers to close, and papers that are for sale are having trouble finding buyers. Experts say that before long, a major American city could be left without a daily paper. (Related Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/media/12papers.html)

Some interesting thoughts on how to spread a blog post. Could be useful! :)

mashable

Merlin Mann talk about making money to do more art

We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies

"My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. / [...] / No one gets into something like this without an obsession, but if your obsession is with the money, and your revenue is directly correlated to page views, then rather than write or produce anything with any actual merit or integrity, you’ll dance like a monkey and split your articles across multiple “pages” and spend more time ginning up sensational Digg-bait headlines than writing the articles themselves. It’s thievery — not of money, but of readers’ attention." / [...] / The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient."

"There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient. Obsession times voice is a pretty good stab at a simple formula for doing it right."

Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone

kindle ebook e-book

数图研究

wow.

What would you have printed?

The Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait in 5 minutes

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one.

Tim O'Reilly on the future of books.

new web books be ...

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I've said for years, that's a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that's pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. ... (+ own "TwitterBook":) The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task.

O'Reilly Radar post from Tim on the #twitterbook

Tim O'Reilly and his O'Reilly media empire are reimagining the way they look at publishing books, and providing some insight into their thought process.

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.) But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning.

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

I wanted to test Lulu’s capacity for hardback books, to continue experimenting with the literary cornucopia machine, and to see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kerning issues). No, most of it doesn’t mean anything, certainly not to anyone else, but it makes physical a very real time and effort.

This is nifty - use the twitter api to download your tweets and publish them to a book using Indesign and Lulu. Ok, so you need a bit of time on your hands, but still, the results are cute.

booktwo.org physical twittering

Literary social networking

הגדלת גדלי הבאנרים

Tror Oliver IA skrev om idén för ett år sedan.

It's a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired.

プリント、印刷

While the details are still debated, the broad outlines of tomorrow's media are becoming clearer. Consumers must pay for more of what they read; publishers and the media buyers who purchase advertising must be given technologies that will make online display ads more competitive with the keyword ads that search firms sell. Some of the things that must be done cannot be done by the media itself; it won't be easy, and it might not happen, but it can be done.

By the publisher of Technology Review If media companies can't earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that "amateurs" (Shirky) and "sources" (Winer) will be part of a "decentralized" media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by "excitable 14-year-olds" (Shirky). This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. Below is my prescription for saving magazines and newspapers.

If media companies can't earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that "amateurs" (Shirky) and "sources" (Winer) will be part of a "decentralized" media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by "excitable 14-year-olds" (Shirky). This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media.

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.

Great quote! "Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins." from @timoreilly (Kindle vs Open Book)http://is.gd/kwWx [from http://twitter.com/LoXD/statuses/1245406729]

rt@timoreilly My post on Forbes: Why Amazon Kindle needs to support open standards. http://bit.ly/hjtfO [from http://twitter.com/frankhellwig/statuses/1253515333]

While users can load some of their own documents onto the Kindle, there is no easy way to "rip" a book.

He makes sense and is sane. I hope amazon listens.

tim o'reilly

Excellent article on the future of newspapers. Good explanations on why micropayments will not work. Excerpts: To put it another way, the geographical constraints on the distribution of printed news required the fragmentation of production capacity, with large groups of reporters and editors being stationed in myriad local outlets. When the geographical constraints went away, thanks to the Net and the near-zero cost of distributing digital goods anywhere in the world, all that fragmented (and redundant) capacity suddenly merged together into (in effect) a single production pool serving (in effect) a single market...But we'll probably also end up with a supply of good reporting and solid news, and we'll probably pay for it.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.roughtype.com%2Farchives%2F2009%2F02%2Fmisreading_news.php

Nicholas Carr/Rough Type, Feb. 10, 2009. Why micropayments won't work, but controlling supply online and charging for it might.

There are more orphans than in a Dickens novel. Google won’t say how many there are. But UC Berkeley Professor Pamela Samuelson estimates that 70 percent of books that are still in copyright have rights holders that can’t be found. Copyright infringement can be expensive – up to $150,000 per violation. So if you scan an old book and start selling copies of it, or displaying chunks of it on the web, and the orphan’s father shows up one day waving a paternity test in your direction, you could face a mean copyright infringement suit. Unless you are Google: Since all U.S. book copyright holders are now plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Google gets liability protection from authors who abandoned their books by not registering in its books database. If they show up later, all they can do is collect a little cash, change their book price or ask Google to stop selling the book.

So in partnership with major university libraries, Google began scanning and digitizing millions of books in 2002, from ones like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that are no longer copyrighted to the Harry Potter series to books whose authors and publishers cannot be located. The idea is simple, and audacious. Make the library of all libraries by converting every book ever published into an e-book that can be indexed, searched, read — and sold — online.

"The Google Book Search Settlement has been much in the news recently, with the Internet Archive, Philip K. Dick’s heirs, consumer groups and Microsoft registering their objections to the search giant’s agreement with authors and publishers. And now Justice Department anti-trust lawyers are meeting with Google about the settlement, raising the possibility of a full-blown anti-trust court showdown between the government and the world’s biggest search and advertising company."

Wired article about Google archiving books.

Blogs and Twitter have almost eliminated any barrier to publishing. You have an idea and in a few minutes your thoughts can be online. Think about it – with every person thinking about more than 50,000 thoughts a day, producing online content can be simple. Maybe. But simply churning out meaningless content does not guarantee that others will read what you write. Make this mistake and people will read what you write and write you off. What’s the alternative? Use your creativity to generate content that will inspire and transform the lives of the audience in a positive way. Remember that it costs time (and indirectly – money) for your audience to read what you write. And, they expect a good return for that investment. You will know whether you are succeeding in influencing your audience in a positive way because the audience will tell you. No, maybe not directly but by the way they respond to your content. So here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

Create your own printable magazines and ebooks

zinepal-ebook Frames

Crear libros digitales

Create your own printable magazine from any online content.

well, this got me worked up, didn't it now?

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

Thoughtful listing of key issues affecting the production and consumption of 'literature'

terrifying and exciting and wow

"This was preserved because the author had been Emperor. How much ancient wisdom was lost because the common Roman citizen lacked TCP/IP?"

"[by 1700 bc, the minoans were trading with spain, had big cities with flush toilets, a written language, and moderately sophisticated metalworking technology. had it not been for the eruption of thera (on santorini), it is quite possible that romans would have watched the assassination of julius caesar on television.]"

'This article, prepared to support a talk at Wordcamp 2009, discusses how writing itself has changed because of the availability of the Web and the Weblog.'

Seth Godin telling it like it is when it comes to the type of thing students are learning in marketing classes from outdated, overpriced, and misguided textbooks. I've seen this firsthand at so many interviews with business school students. A-frickin-men, Seth!

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

good

from A. Courosa

Publish full articles without needing a blog or site.

escrever 1 resources tools web article articles writing editor freeware technology microblogging Publishing blogging twittertools publish write4.net content http://write4.net/en

publishing

This wiki gathers information about publications that LIS professionals might want to write for -- whether they want to reach their colleagues or their communities. All editors, publishers, and LIS professionals are welcome to contribute to the publication profiles. T

This wiki gathers information about publications that LIS professionals might want to write for -- whether they want to reach their colleagues or their communities. All editors, publishers, and LIS professionals are welcome to contribute to the publication profiles.

SLIS developed featrues in ALA Direct

An intersting artical about "orphan" book. Those book out-of-print but still under copyright. Most of which it is impossible to find the appropraite rights holder.

Summary of the legal and commercial implications of Google book search by Pamela Samuelson.

"The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is."

article

Google and the Book Rights Registery

"Conclusion In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses. The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is."

Publishing

When incremental change doesn't cut it. "It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story.""The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture - like firing your photographers - don’t make your situation better, they make it worse.""The only way to get from one organizational architecture to the other is to make drastic, painful changes."An early sign of impending disruption is when there’s a sudden flourishing of startup organizations serving an overlapping customer need...organizational architecture is radically different..."

about scientific publishing disruption, and disruption in general

Scientific publishers should be terrified that some of the world’s best scientists, people at or near their research peak, people whose time is at a premium, are spending hundreds of hours each year creating original research content for their blogs, content that in many cases would be difficult or impossible to publish in a conventional journal. What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium. By comparison, the journals are standing still.

The answer is "Yes".

Gladwell perspective on 'free'.

Here's an excerpt from Malcom's New Yorker piece pointing out the flaws in Chris's argument. Malcolm was paid to write the piece, of course. Handsomely. As was Chris for writing his bestseller: There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).

Here you can create your own story, share it with friends and visit the gallery to see what other Storymakers have made.

Fer històries

oh wow - this is fun;)

mi piace la grafica

Enables digital stories to be made and shared with friends.

Book publishers Penguin have developed a website where children can write, illustrate (and add sounds) and publish their own stories.

Clay Shirky - a man who can tease out the issues that affect us in publishing with exquisite precision. change Journalism for Scholarly Publishing and you have the issues that face us today...

The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B. Chaos is our lot; the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures. Two of the most important are the changing natures of the public, and of subsidy. As Paul Starr, the great sociologist of media, has often noted, journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience. For a TV show with an audience of a million, no one cares whether it’s the same million every week — head count rules. A public, by contrast, is a group of people who not only know things, but know other members of the public know those things as well. Both persistence and synchrony matter, because journalism is

This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.

"This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all."

Googles own view on Googlebooks

We denken dat het een geweldig voordeel voor de uitgeversbranche zal zijn om auteurs en uitgevers in staat te stellen geld te verdienen aan boeken waarvan ze dachten dat deze nooit meer op de markt zouden verschijnen.

Three years ago, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers filed a class action lawsuit against Google Book Search. Today we're delighted to announce that we've settled that lawsuit and will be working closely with these industry partners to bring even more of the world's books online. Together we'll accomplish far more than any of us could have individually, to the enduring benefit of authors, publishers, researchers and readers alike.

website where you can publish your own game

Print-on-demand comes to game making. Quite a cool resource for rapid prototyping.

They make boardgames that you design.

self publishing site for diy board games

It is time you took that game you created and publish it.

Author: 10% (This in fact ranges between 8% and 15%, depending on the author's clout -- e.g. Stephen King does better than most. If the author has an agent, the agent's cut comes out of this. It is indeed tough for new authors.) Publisher: 30% (This ranges between 25% and 32%, again depending on the author's clout -- e.g. their percentage is less with Stephen King because the risk is lower too. Note: this is their net revenue, after deducting author royalties and printer fees.) Printer: 10% Distributor: 10% Retailer: 40%

- Tools of Change for Publishing

"Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they're not paying for the goods they're paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download."

Do you want to become a better writer? Silly question, eh. The good news is that writing makes you a ...

Great blog about writing

Federated Media - Rep Agency

ANNALS OF READING about the Kindle 2. The writer ordered the Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could he not? Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important. Writing and publishing, wrote Steven Johnson in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, would never be the same. In <i>Newsweek…

Can the Kindle really improve on the book?

The Kindle vs. the book by Nicholson Baker

Via ...? Nicholson Baker gives the Kindle 2 a test drive, compares it to printed books and the iPhone, and gives us a history of how the Kindle came to be.

A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing.

K-12 textbooks; influence of Texas on the process; influence of Texas 'conservative Christian activists' on the selection process; "A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing."

/ Connect, Write, Self-Publish and Promote Your Book - all in one place.

FastPencil is a free service Here's what you can do on FastPencil FREE: •Write and organize your book •Collaborate and share with friends •Format and layout the inside content •Generate a beautiful color cover •Publish to the FastPencil Marketplace •Sell your book on your profile page How do we make money? When you buy and sell published books. We also make money when you purchase additional services like publishing packages, multi-channel distribution or editing. For example, using our free platform you can write, edit and publish a beautiful 100 page paperback book, get one copy printed and delivered to your doorstep for under $10 bucks.

A sight for creating stories around images.

Storybirds are short, visual stories that you make with family and friends to share and (soon) print.

8. We would embrace the hyperlink in every possible way. Our website would include the most comprehensive possible listing of other media in our community, whether we were a community of geography or interest. We’d link to all relevant blogs, photo-streams, video channels, database services and other material we could find, and use our editorial judgement to highlight the ones we consider best for the members of the community. And we’d liberally link from our journalism to other work and source material relevant to what we’re discussing, recognizing that we are not oracles but guides.

Dan Gillmor's list of how to run a news organization.

Dan Gilmore presents us with some things he'd do if he ran the news, very progressive, community-involved ideas. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fmediactive.com%2F2009%2F09%2F12%2Feleven-things-id-do-if-i-ran-a-news-organization

(see comments on vetting audience participation)

Eleven Things I'd Do If I Ran a News Organization

"1. We would not run anniversary stories and commentary except in the rarest of circumstances. They are a refuge for lazy and unimaginative journalists."

Can 'Curation' Save Media?

'Curation is the sibling of aggregation, a word that the web has know for a while. Aggregation means gathering; finding all videos with the key words "Easter Supper" in them. But as more devices like cell phones are used to create content (video of a hotel room, a tweet from a rock concert, an audio post from a political protest) gathering no longer adds value. In fact, aggregation can equal aggravation.'

"Curation is the new role of media professionals. Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly - giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It's what we always expected from our media, and now they've got the tools to do it better."

Curation is the new role of media professionals. Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly - giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It's what we always expected from our media, and now they've got the tools to do it better.

Curation is the sibling of aggregation, a word that the web has know for a while. Aggregation means gathering; finding all videos with the key words "Easter Supper" in them. But as more devices like cell phones are used to create content (video of a hotel room, a tweet from a rock concert, an audio post from a political protest) gathering no longer adds value. In fact, aggregation can equal aggravation. ... But today curation is quickly becoming central to what many editorial teams are looking to embrace. The New York Times is curating blog posts from outside sources. And what the Times knows is that content that they validate with their brand and redistribution becomes more valuable, both to readers and to the content creators.

Writing a book can be a daunting task, but there are a range of web apps that can help you from start to finish as you attempt to make your novel a reality.

An excellent analysis of whether people actually pay for content -- a point I've made before. And colleagues look at me like I'm crazy.

"In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either."

"Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics. Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don't need as much paper. "

When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content...What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for. The first is probably the future of most current media. Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts

Online magazine

As the author of Beginning Ruby, I make money for every copy sold in print and electronic formats (as well as some miscellaneous income I’ll cover later). It’s not much money – but that wasn’t the motivation for writing the book. In this post I’m going to show you how it all works from my point of view including sales figures, pictures of my royalty statements, information about my advance, and similar gruesome stuff. There’s even a section at the end about how Apress pissed me off a bit (though I don’t regret the experience with them) and why I’m happy with you pirating my book if you so choose.

Nice summary of why you shouldn't give up your day job to write a technical book. The guy is wrong however in thinking he would make more money in giving the ebook away for free. It would be better to give a chapter away for free.

funny cos it's true

The New Yorker

Referenced in Chronicle Wired

The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites.

The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.

This would be awesome to install on all of the school servers as part of plan ceibal.

Cory seems to understand the new publishing perspective from an author's point of view as well as anyone

Cory Doctorow kicks off a unique publishing experiment--and a monthly PW column

This makes Overclocked into a fine control for my little experiment. It is a good book. It sold well and was critically acclaimed. But it is solidly a midlist title, a short story collection published by a house turned upside down by bankruptcy. It will be the baseline against which I compare the earnings from With a Little Help. And those earnings will be diverse—like the musicians who've successfully self-produced albums in a variety of packages at a variety of price points (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Jonathan Coulton), I have set out to produce a book that can be had in a range of packages and at a range of price points from $0.00 to $10,000.

New publishing experiment by Cory @Doctorow http://tr.im/CxHw via @inkyelbows @bencrowder @1rick [from http://twitter.com/midnighthaircut/statuses/5046801028]

A lot of designers think CMYK is the way to go when designing for print. We will, of course, always use CMYK-based ink, but this does not mean you have to work with CMYK files. You can work with RGB images to perfectly optimize your print colors and save a great deal of time in the process.

Find step-by-step help through the writing process and see how master writers craft their work. Publish your writing online.

SUBJECT: HOW TO

Step by step writing help

I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties.

As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the Federalist Papers.

Don’t Say, “Hand It In.” They say, “Publish It!

Educators who ask students to, "Hand it in" rather than, "Publish it" are stuck in the past and not preparing 21st century students.” The Innovative Educato

“Educators who ask students to, "Hand it in" rather than, "Publish it" are stuck in the past and not preparing 21st century students.” The Innovative Educator:

Excelente post sobre como pasar del entregar al docente al PUBLICAR!!!!

o Clay Shirky says “no, it’s too easy to obtain free content elsewhere on the Web” and Steven Brill says “yes, some consumers will pay for some content.” '

The Debate Zone: Will people pay for content online?

WTF?

Has a manifesto on how to build a platform for a best-selling book

<p>This online book marketing manifesto is being offered to you as a vehicle to:</p><p>Open your eyes to the massive change that’s happening in the world of book marketing<br />Bust a lot of myths, expose scams and stop you from throwing thousands of dollars away<br />Help you understand how to get the biggest advance possible or self-publish and [...]</p>

mostly applicable to domain specific tech books but interesting to think how this would apply to fiction and non-fiction authorsaik

<p>It’s an amazing dream…<br />You wake up at 2:00am with an idea. A story, a vision for a book. You’ve been writing, journaling, maybe even blogging for years. Pen to paper, fingers to keys…it’s in your blood. You’re genetically compelled to craft literary magic. But, now. Oh now. You’ve finally got the big idea!<br />The one that’s [...]</p>

Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.

chrisbrogan.com

Tankar om framtiden. Annonser kan inte vara den bärande inkomstkällan.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations. "How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air," Barber said in a speech at at a Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night. "But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content."

Point de vue du Financial Times sur l'évolution de l'actualité payante

Building payment platforms is one of key challenges facing news organisations, says Financial Times editor Lionel Barber

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.

Adobe Air based news reader from the New York Times.

Welcome to the future. Your newspaper is here.

Lector online de The New York Times para Adobe Air

Your website visitors will love it! Make your pdf documents flippable and quickly loading. It is like touching a real document.

Sistema de publicación en formato de revista digital a partir de un PDF (gratuito). Muy visual pero poco práctico a mi gusto para leer en pantalla

Make your pdf documents flippable and quickly loading. It is like touching a real document.

James Warren article

By James Warren, former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune

rticle on the state of newpapers, and their imoprtance to our culture

A former managing editor of The Chicago Tribune probes the collapse of the newspaper industry and tries, mostly in vain, to find hope for the future of journalism.

In journalism’s new Internet-dominated landscape, in which attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth, handiwork like Crewdson’s is seen as taking too long and costing too much. His situation is hardly unique—the other investigative reporter at the Tribune’s D.C. bureau was told to leave at the same time, as was the top investigator at the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, which is also owned by the Tribune Company. But as an example of journalism’s very best, Crewdson's dismissal is a symbol of the extent to which the news media are imploding. And that implosion is a development with far-reaching implications.

Good essay by a journalist on the current disintegration of paid journalism, but it is exactly this writer's attitude about the noble and essential role of journalism in a democracy that has set the project up for destruction.

"In journalism’s new Internet-dominated landscape, in which attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth, handiwork like [John] Crewdson’s is seen as taking too long and costing too much. His situation is hardly unique—the other investigative reporter at the [Chicago] Tribune’s D.C. bureau was told to leave at the same time, as was the top investigator at the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, which is also owned by the Tribune Company. But as an example of journalism’s very best, Crewdson's dismissal is a symbol of the extent to which the news media are imploding. And that implosion is a development with far-reaching implications...."

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience. The purpose behind MediaCore was to make a central media library that could pull media from any source, track statistics, enable commenting, and provide a high degree of control over the presentation and administration.

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience. The purpose behind MediaCore was to make a central media library that could pull media from any source, track statistics, enable commenting, and provide a high degree of control over the presentation and administration.

Podcast Publication Platform

Penenberg, Adam (Fast Company, Julio 2009)

Amazon aims to disintermediate publishers by working directly w/ authors

Large format eReader not released yet.

This website provides links to articles and other websites related to student online publishing.

Book piracy may explode soon, now that books are becoming widely available in electronic form. Here's an interview with a fellow who already trades extensively in pirated e-Books.

stealing books the electronic way

Great piece on bank pirating, with a huge discussion thread. Also, great stuff on this ebook / print book marketing plan: How about doing what Manning Publications did with a recent purchase; add a unique ‘code sheet’ in the book, ask for 3 random entries from it and, if not previously used, allow the person who bought the hard copy to download a *personalised* (ie their email address is embedded in various places throughout) electronic copy. Most books that I want to read in an electronic form I’ve already bought the dead tree version of! All credit to Baen and their authors though. Fantastic library, bought many more books they’ve published as a result."

"Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out, and after a few hours of searching ... I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk. He lives in the Midwest, he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands. We discussed his file sharing activity over the course of a weekend, via email, and in his answers lie a critical challenge facing the publishing industry: how to quash the emerging piracy threat without alienating their most enthusiastic customers."

1) With digital copies, what is “stolen” is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that was worth x dollars. With digital copies, it is more difficult to assign cost. The initial file costs x dollars to create, but you can make a million copies of that file for no cost. Therefore, it is hard to assign a specific value to a digital copy of a work except as it relates to lost sales.

Hmmm, I never considered myself a pirate. I just thought I was reading. The people who lock ideas away behind hard-to-use uneeded "technologies" seem to be some kind of bad-guys though.

I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk. He lives in the Midwest, he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands. We discussed his file sharing activity over the course of a weekend, via email, and in his answers lie a critical challenge facing the publishing industry: how to quash the emerging piracy threat without alienating their most enthusiastic customers. As is typical of anonymous online communities, he has a peculiar handle: “The Real Caterpillar.”

Blog post on ideas for "socializing" the Kindle. Some good ideas here...

Using ebooks.

Article by AVC about importance of local media

If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I'd do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I'd do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.

Great article on local media.

"If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything... I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them"

utch blogger Marc Drees of Recruitment Matters has posted recap and commentary of this post, including a very nice graph summarizing my results:

Payer pour ses infos ? Selon Martin Langeveld, ça ne colle pas.

International Digital Publishing Forum collects quarterly US trade retail eBook sales in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Don't look now but e-book sales are growing ever-so-rapidly in the trade market. 200% in the last year.

Trade #ebook sales for October up $254% over October 2008, per AAP/IDPF: http://bit.ly/oH21b (via @andrewsavikas) – Tim O'Reilly (timoreilly) http://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/6716317310

線形から指数関数的に

Resource for various online publishing websites

Links for students to publish their writing online

"The Books We Make embrace their physicality"

"As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?"

Very reasonable, and well said. I agree with his recommendations and conclusions.

Scanned, read in detail later.

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.

If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier. Subsidizing newspapers may be the only answer.

The real problem isn't that newspapers may be doomed. I would be severely disheartened if I was forced to abandon my morning ritual of sitting on my deck with a coffee and the papers, but I would no doubt get used to burning out my retinas over the screen an hour earlier than usual. As Nation columnist Eric Alterman recently argued, the real problem isn't the impending death of newspapers, but the impending death of news -- at least news as we know it.

The death of the news If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier. Subsidizing newspapers may be the only answer. By Gary Kamiya in salon.com

If reporting vanishes, the world will get darker and uglier. Subsidizing newspapers may be the only answer. by Gary Kamiya

Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish

Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never...

Did you know that blocking adverts really hurts your websites a person go to? Many of us recently realized of which many of our readers did not know this particular, so I'm going in order to describe the reason why.

Ars Technica angenehm nüchtern über das Problem Adblocking und das Experiment, für kurze Zeit für Adblocker-Nutzer auch den Content auszublenden.

Did you know that keeping advertisements genuinely hurts your internet sites an individual go to? All of us lately figured out which many of our readers would never know that, so I'm about in order to make clear why.

Right now keeping advertisings truly affects the particular internet sites anyone check out? We all lately discovered in which quite a few audience would never know that, so I am going in order to make clear the reason why.

Kirjojen ja julkaisemisen tulevaisuus

Espresso Book Machine

"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends."

Without the contents of our libraries—our collective backlist, our cultural memory—our civilization would collapse.

About the future of books

New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

Helps students think of cool fun new story subjects

Twitter is killing RSS. Twitter gets people through to the website and can get conversions and will be trackable via analytics. RSS is not!

twitter and rss

polling sucks

via Popego.com

reading "Is Twitter killing RSS?" http://jeffnolan.com/wp/2009/04/01/is-twitter-killing-rss/ [from http://twitter.com/PaulDJohnston/statuses/1439921486]

Publishing a short run magazine used to be a rather pricey and labor-intensive process. MagCloud is an inexpensive way to bring your specialty magazine to press without hefty upfront fees.

Twitterfeed grows readerships.

A post about not just using RSS feeds on your social network site. Making it personal and sharing links and information from other places.

Many newsrooms are doing this through “live Tweeting” everything from ball games to trials. Tweeting while watching is certainty a popular use of Twitter, so this is promising.

Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission. If a webmaster wants to stop us from indexing a specific page, he or she can do so by adding '<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">' to the page. In short, if you don't want to show up in Google search results, it doesn't require more than one or two lines of code.

Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission: User-agent: * Disallow: /

Ein Video, in dem eigentlich nur ein Text vorgelesen wird. Dieser dreht aber mittendrin und wird wieder rückwärts gelesen.

Make books your way! Share with the world. •Free to Make & Publish books •Bookstore Quality Books, Buy One or Many •No Software, Easy Book Builder, 100% Online

Makes interactive, online books, including digpix, uploaded graphics. Start from word files, PowerPoint slides, or templates. Shared by URL. Printed copies of books can also be ordered (for a fee).

If you care about the future of books, you need to understand the Google Book Settlement. It's a complicated legal document, but we've talked to some of its architects, detractors, and defenders - and break it all down for you.

Understanding Google Books Copyright Settlement

Good, long article.

5 Ways The Google Book Settlement Will Change The Future of Reading: http://bit.ly/cAirab – Evgenia Firsova (diffidence) http://twitter.com/diffidence/statuses/12493469991

Bookstores, particularly independent bookstores, help resist this trend by championing authors the employees believe in. "In a bookstore, there’s a serendipitous element involved in browsing," Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice-president and publisher of HarperCollins, says. "Independent bookstores are like a community center. We walk in and know the people who work there and like to hear their reading recommendations." ... "If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant," ... Assked to describe her foremost concern, Carolyn Reidy, of Simon & Schuster, said, "In the digital world, it is possible for authors to publish without publishers. It is therefore incumbent on us to prove our worth to authors every day."

Ken Auletta.... good article on publishers, ebooks, Amazon and Apple. Good statistics.

Publish or Perish

Among the "horror stories" Rosemary Feal has heard: Assistant professors who work in digital media and whose tenure review panels insist on evaluating them by printing out selected pages of their work. "It's like evaluating an Academy Award entry based on 20 film stills," said Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association.

challenges facing using digital scholarship for p & t

MLA and humanities consortium start effort to be sure scholars up for promotion receive fair evaluations of electronic contributions -- and to give peer review a needed update.

From: Inside Higher Ed, 26 May 2009 Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching, what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees. In an effort to confront this problem, the MLA and a consortium called the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory have decided to find new ways to help departments evaluate the kinds of digital scholarship being produced today.

Question 4 of hzau09. Article about tenure in the digital era.

Tenure & digital practices.

"American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances."

Walter Pincus/The Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2009. Internet isn't the threat, stenography and narcissism is. Repetition rather than length.

New comic book delivery system

ask online folks to help them finish "mission impossible" in 48hr !!! amazing ideas love it!!!

If you're not following 48hrmag, you should be. Here's how to buy issue zero: http://48hrmag.com/ – Dave Coustan (extraface) http://twitter.com/extraface/statuses/13811482504

A good explanation of how to create a podcast

March 2009

News about MIT OA mandate: http://tinyurl.com/c9w4cl [from http://twitter.com/MyOpenArchive/statuses/1399671252]

Peter Suber writes about and comments on MIT's decision to adopt a faculty-wide OA policy, the first of a university doing so across all its departments unanimously. As he rightfully points out, this will send out strong signals to lawmakers and other educational institutions.

0309 - Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by...

Ability to clip and save articles

Coverleaf is a free service to browse, search and preview magazines. Purchase print subscriptions and get free digital companion editions, or single digital issues. Join Coverleaf for free to save and share them with friends.

Online Magazine's

Write me a story: Kids read (and vote on their favorite) and write short stories on this kid-friendly site

Use the prompts to write your own story online and submit it. It might be published the next week!

students can practice their writing skills, stretch their imaginations, read fun stories, and maybe even get published on the Internet! Each week students are challenged to write a story using a preselected character, place, and prop. Five stories are randomly selected each week and showcased in the Web site’s Stunningly Stupendous Stories section the next week.

Students can write their own stories and comment on other students writing

Each week this site gives a character, place and prop and asks you to create a short story.

"The Orphan is a non-profit, biannual, web-only entity devoted to demolishing literary preconceptions."

literary/ arts webzine

The Orphan is incomplete, unpublishable, moloch-less, disrespected, bizarre and roundly rejected.

Interesting post from the founder of Shiny Media

An interesting rant about the UK-media-blogs and an entrepreneur who wasn't successful.

Article on why blogging "failed" in the UK

Using social media to create debate - sometimes it backfires... Just ask Pocket-Lint editor Stuart Miles. Ouch!

[T]he BBC’s reluctance to link to British blogs and smaller independent media organisations, while at the same time endlessly plugging established media groups (Five Live is one long plug for mainstream media brands) makes life even more difficult.

""I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken," said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. "Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?""

"Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. 'I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken,' said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. 'Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?'"

Scholarly publishing takes a digital hit.

The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital. Within two years, press officials expect well over 50 of the 60-plus monographs that the press publishes each year -- currently in book form -- to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems to produce versions that can be held in their hands, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. Many university presses are experimenting with digital publishing, but the Michigan announcement may be the most dramatic to date by a major university press.

"The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital."

The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital. Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. Michigan officials said that they don't plan to cut the budget of the press -- but to devote resources to peer review and other costs of publishing that won't change with the new model. Significantly, they said, the press would no longer have to reject books deemed worthy from a scholarly perspective, but viewed as unable to sell. ...move to the idea that a university press should be judged by its contribution to scholarship, not "profit or loss," which has become too central as the economics of print publishing have deteriorated. The shift is not designed to save money, but to make better use of the money being spent on the press. [good stuff in comments too]

Writing Technical Documentation with Sphinx, Paver, and Cog.

I knew in the back of my mind that Doug Hellman had a sphinx workflow for his blog posts. Now, how did I not notice how close it was to my needs? Includes lots of tasty tips for tweaking output etc

"Writing Technical Documentation with Sphinx, Paver, and Cog I've been working on the Python Module of the Week series since March of 2007. During the course of the project, my article style and tool chain have both evolved. I now have a fairly smooth production process in place, so the mechanics of producing a new post don't get in the way of the actual research and writing. Most of the tools are open source, so I thought I would describe the process I go through and how the tools work together."

So why didn’t they choose HTML5 and build a custom viewer application around WebKit?

I just downloaded the Wired iPad application, and like most iPad applications (and most magazines for that matter), I found myself bored with it within the first 20 minutes. I’m sure the content is engaging, I’m sure the articles are worth reading – but I am stumped as to why I would chose this over the physical magazine itself, or their website for that matter. In fact, for reasons I’ll get into below, I’m starting to believe that the physical magazine’s “interface” is vastly superior to it’s iPad cousin. However, what strikes me most about the Wired app is how amazingly similar it is to a multimedia CD-ROM from the 1990’s. This is not a compliment and actually turns out to be a fairly large problem… 1990’s Here We Come … Again

at you can’t do application specific

A really good take on how iPad is not really delivering "Value" with their iPad magazines..

Sciyo is a free service that allows scientists to publish their works and connect with other authors. Works published on Sciyo are made available for free to visitors. Visitors can download works as PDFs. There are currently 211 free books on Sciyo. The category of books that is probably of most interest to readers of this blog is Technology and Education. In the future videos will also be available on Sciyo.

Creating Your own eBook

I’ve blogged before about my dissatisfaction with news sources (eg, 1, 2), and earlier in the year I realised that one of the major problems online was delivery of text-based news. There was no online news source that I could browse and read as easily as I could a print newspaper. I identified three main issues that a better online news-reading solution should address: Friction Readability Finishability

Interesting article on the design of a modern day web newspaper.

This meant, for me, ditching any kind of conventional news website front page, or contents page. No lists of headlines, no decisions about which article to visit. Unusually, perhaps uniquely, for a news website the front page is a single story. Ideally this is the most important news of the day, although sometimes it’s the newspaper’s “other” front page item — it’s based on the order of articles here. Having a single story on the front page is terrible if a site wants to maximise page views and advertising etc. You might see that one article, think it’s boring, and go elsewhere. But that’s not my concern. I’m trying to make a site that makes it easy to read a newspaper, not support an entire company.

I’ve made a new thing, Today’s Guardian, a website that features today’s edition of the Guardian (or the Observer on Sundays). Hopefully it’s as easy to browse through today’s newspaper as it would be with the print edition. It’s made using the Guardian’s Content API. Read on for the thoughts behind it…

Today’s Guardian

A book crowdsourced in one week may 21-28 2010

@snipeyhead Tynt, "It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit." http://bit.ly/9dsFbP - If Apture avoids stories like this, should do ok. – Ben Shive (BenSS) http://twitter.com/BenSS/statuses/17430682535

Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs. What happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text

I found Wired Science doing this bullshit just now, when saving a bookmark to an article there. Very disappointing, guys.

Tynt is a service that automatically forces a link reference into your clipboard when you copy text from web sites using them. Worth blocking.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs. What happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text.

of where to find and how to edit your hosts file on Mac OS X or Window

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

So you want to be an epublisher.

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

STILL NEED TO READ

"She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, 'I am not a brand' ... Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation."

Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation. They think the message only goes one way—out. Things must be shouted. Things must be thrust in your face. Things must be sold.

The Internet is about conversation, not about branding or selling.

RT @peteashton The most important thing you will read about Social Media this week: http://bit.ly/ckRInQ – Andrew Dubber (dubber) http://twitter.com/dubber/statuses/16814698958

Author on social media.

The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone.

anti-branding manifesto

// I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to *commodify* everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird. // i cry with laughter and i love her ♥♥♥

Ace post on how the BBC were using data to build their World Cup site.

BBC World Cup 2010 dynamic semantic publishing Post categories: World Cup, linked data, metadata, semantic, semantic web, web publishing

Looks like a great writeup on funding / designing a book for indie publishing.

RT @TopsyRT: Kickstartup: Successful fundraising with Kickstarter http://bit.ly/d2YSS9

Meticulously outlined (and beautifully designed!) article on how to best use Kickstarter to fund your indie projects. Really outstanding.

Way to go...

bring beautiful, well-considered things into the world.

Fantastic post about book publishing using Kickstarter. It rocks!