03/04/06

March Emissions

Lots of links again. Just been too insanely busy to do anything but drag favicons out of the browser and onto the desktop before having to move on. This week may be slightly easier, so in the hope of fleshing these out, here are the random ones:

1. Draft – note to self – write that article about how to take on amazon.

2. Future of the book on Googlezon This site is just full of articles I must pay more attention to.

3. I’m fed up with mediabistro. But, I got introduced to sepulculture which has a smart guy writing about publishing, the web, and other intrigues.

4. There was a great quote from Bob Gill – founding partner of Fletcher/Forbes/Gill which went on to become Pentagram – which seemed Apt to me what with all the proposals I’ve been writing:

Design is a way of organising something.

You cannot hold design in your hand. It is not a thing. It is a process. A system. A way of thinking.

There is no such things as ‘good design’ or ‘bad design’. The design is good if it does what you want it to do. It’s bad if it doesn’t.

In order to have a design, you need something to organise.

The quote comes from ‘Graphic Design as a second language’.

5. From South by Southwest [SXSW], Medialoper on Librarians versus the Search giants.

The goal for Google and Microsoft (other than making money, and that’s what corporations do) is to build indexes of authoritative works that will provide resources during search. To do this effectively, they need to have a lot of books digitized. This is an expensive and time-consuming process.

[...]

Danielle Tiedt of Microsoft noted that approximately 5% of the world’s information is online. That’s not a lot, and there’s a serious challenge to digitize information before it’s lost. She also noted that given the cost and long-time frame of book digitization, from a corporate perspective, it would be beneficial to point their search engines to another source. There is no other source. Hence the Google and Microsoft initiatives.

[...]

The grassroots-oriented audience members somewhat ceded that other than Project Gutenberg, there is very little in the way of organized digitization efforts for books. Even if more projects are initiated, there remains the fact of limited public money. To date, our culture hasn’t exhibited a commitment toward protecting artistic history. Whether we like it or not, the fact that Google, Microsoft, and their successors need this information to feed hungry search engines means that money and resources are being allotted to book digitization. Even publishers haven’t stepped up with a plan for protecting their own catalogs — and they surely have just as much interest in maximizing investment as the search companies. (my italics).

And I’d quite like to find a podcast of that if possible. Note to self: SXSW podcasts.

6. More from IF on the news of Google announcing it will sell digital access to books (what happened to that, so far), and the response of publishers to the whole digital book thing,

To them, electronic publishing is grit your teeth and wait for the pain. A book is a PDF, some DRM and a prayer. Which is why they’ve reacted so heavy-handedly to Google’s book project. If they lose even a sliver of control, so they are convinced, all hell could break loose.

He goes on to discuss that GoogleZon has missed the point in offering such restricted, un-networked access to digitised books, and suggests that we can’t rely on Google/Amazon to ‘make the right decision for [the book's] future’. Which I think is a little odd taken in the light of the earlier quote. Sure, GoogleZon may be limited, but look at the changes they’re trying to make – to publishers of all people – and it’s understandable.

Perhaps someday soon they’ll ease up a bit and let you download a copy, but that would only be because the hardware we are using at that point will be fitted with a “trusted computing” module, which which will monitor what media you use on your machine and how you use it. At that point, copyright will quite literally be the system. Enforcement will be unnecessary since every potential transgression will be preempted through hardwired code. Surveillance will be complete. Control total. Your rights surrendered simply by logging on.

Which reminds me. Larry Lessig has supported an Open Source DRM. Watch that space with interest. Here’s IF again on Apple Vs. France.

Oh, and Ben at IF is really annoyed at Google. Meanwhile, DRM ‘may endanger lives‘.

7. Stuff Lulu, here’s Lala: file sharing the old school way

Part MySpace, Netflix, eBay and iTunes, La la incorporates pieces of each: Users list online the CDs they both want and have. In the process, they find others who share the same taste in music. Then, when one user requests a CD that another person owns, the owner drops it in the mail in a pre-paid envelope. The receiver is billed $1, plus 49 cents for shipping; the shipper pays nothing.

8. Blogging can be hard work sometimes.

9. The BBC has been in the process of cleaning up in the past year or so. Innovations all over the shop, experiments, accidents and some truly brilliant services. Surely this is what public service broadcasting is all about? Now if only they’d put Worldwide on podcast.

10. The new music model: DIY from Medialoper, after SXSW. All about Clap your hands say yeah, or the Arctic Monkeys (kind of) or any other non-mainstream act. I got a call about a year ago from a guy wanting me to help him publicise a book he’d written which he was in the process of sharing equity in to VC’s. Innovative, maybe, but surely very very very unlikely to succed in publishing, where (passim) innovation is pretty much the enemy.

11. Some holiday reading, thanks to Josh.

Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 78 has been developed by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in collaboration with BSI. This PAS outlines good practice in commissioning websites that are accessible to and usable by disabled people.

It gives recommendations for:
• The management of the process of, and guidance on, upholding existing W3C guidelines and specifications
• Involving disabled people in the development process and using the current software-based compliance testing tools that can assist with this.

It is applicable to all public and private organizations that wish to observe good practice under the existing voluntary guidelines and the relevant legislation on this subject and is intended for use by those responsible for commissioning public-facing websites and web-based services.

12. I like this Australian artist’s work. Reminds me of Spencer Whiting.

13. Back again to speak up for insight into the design process of Paul Rand. God RSS is evil.

14. Aha! A small publisher starts selling books on subscription. Nice.

15. Trying to compile a CD of breaks for Leo. Going through all my vinyl and rediscovering lots of things like Billy Cobham (!), the Boston Breaks and Bionic Booger Breaks. I used to spend weeks of my time with those records. If only Bernard Purdie had been suitably famous, I could have acquired it all and saved myself the fun.

16. Seth Godin’s advice for authors. It’s a pretty fair analysis of the fact that for the most part publishing is very slow, even slower to adopt change, and run in the majority by lifestylers. And the inherent problems of books – I like this one

4. Books cost money and require the user to read them for the idea to spread.
Obvious, sure, but real problems. Real problems because the cost of a book introduces friction to your idea. It makes the idea spread much much more slowly than an online meme because in order for it to spread, someone has to buy it. Add to that the growing (and sad) fact that people hate to read. Too often, people have told me, with pride, that they read three chapters of my book. Just three.

And this one’s good as well,

5. Publishing is like venture capital, not like printing.
Printing your own book is very very easy and not particularly expensive. You can hire professional copyeditors and designers and end up with a book that looks just like one from Random House. That’s easy stuff.

What Random House and others do is invest. They invest cash in an advance. They invest time in creating the book itself and selling it in and they invest more cash in printing books. Like all VCs, they want a big return.

If you need the advance to live on, then publishers serve an essential function. If, on the other hand, you’re like most non-fiction authors and spreading the idea is worth more than the advance, you may not.

Oh, go on then, the rest of it as well,

So, what’s my best advice?

Build an asset. Large numbers of influential people who read your blog or read your emails or watch your TV show or love your restaurant or or or…

Then, put your idea into a format where it will spread fast. That could be an ebook (a free one) or a pamphlet (a cheap one–the Joy of Jello sold millions and millions of copies at a dollar or less).

Then, if your idea catches on, you can sell the souvenir edition. The book. The thing people keep on their shelf or lend out or get from the library. Books are wonderful (I own too many!) but they’re not necessarily the best vessel for spreading your idea.

And the punchline, of course, is that if you do all these things, you won’t need a publisher. And that’s exactly when a publisher will want you! That’s the sort of author publishers do the best with.

17. Andy Warhol’s blog. Now will someone do other famous diarists? Either The Assassin’s Cloak (although I’m a little bored of pitching ideas to Canongate) or any other other poison pen…

18. YouTube. Love it for being there, but can it really last? Does it have a leg to stand on legally? And when it’s a certain size, won’t it just get pulled down? Found a site this weekend, whilst looking for a recording of the Carl Craig on Worldwide mix, which appears to do it all.

19. Zeldman on Gill

Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving. Unless the RFP spells out site goals and user needs in phenomenal detail, you can’t create an appropriate design because you don’t yet know what problems need to be solved. (Even if the RFP spells out goals and needs, it’s unlikely that the people who wrote it know what all their site’s problems are. Most times you need to talk to people who use the site and study how they use it to get a handle on what works and doesn’t. It also helps to interview stakeholders. Doing that at your own expense is risky business at best.

20. In your own time. Wired on What Is Web 2.0?

21. Ottakers will be online by November?

22. The value of imprints to publishers.

23. Divergence is the new convergence.

24. The BBC on ebooks.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Design, Future of the book, Podcasts, Publishing.

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