On the note of free, the beginning of this podcast from the BEA has Chris Anderson saying some interesting things about free and paid-for content. A word of warning though – the other guys are really boring.

While we’re at it, and at the risk of turning this into a Chris Anderson / Wired love-in, I found this interview (David Weinberger, author of the forthcoming Everything Is Miscellaneous, interviewing Richard Sambrook, Head of Global News at the BBC) rather relevant – in a horseradish kind of way.

Next – and by way of Mr Sambrook’s blog (as is the Second Life piece at the end of this), another comment on free, and the future of media:

Many readers and some journalists would have no difficulty accepting the argument that print and online really are complementary. But the real difficulty exists in the financial realm, where the economics of print and online are about as compatible as Evian and crude oil.

This is because of the web’s great secret – what economists like to describe as a marginal cost of production and distribution that tends to fall to zero.

In the online world, once media owners have written the necessary software code, added some content, and purchased some cheap web hosting, their potential to attract audiences is theoretically limitless.

The financial DNA of newspapers – and most forms of traditional media – is very different. As Pat McGovern, the American who runs both magazines and web sites at computer industry publisher IDG, says: “Without print, paper and postage, profit margins online are about 40 per cent.” Print magazines, McGovern suggests, make margins of up to 15 per cent.

Of course, there’s a catch. The problem with digital media is its tendency to radically shrink a publisher’s revenue base.

In the US, digital media consultant Vin Crosbie has calculated that each printed newspaper reader is worth between $500 and $1,200 a year in terms of reader revenues and advertising cash.

By contrast, Crosbie suggests that the average online newspaper reader is worth perhaps $8 a year.

read the whole piece: Blimey O’Reilly (Press Gazette) – and it’s nothing to do with the O’Reilly Tools Of Change conference. More on that soon.

Next: RIP FOPP. Another tipping point in the coffin of retail (and mixed metaphors). I used to like FOPP -when I started going, to the old Cockburn St store in Edinburgh 14 years ago, it was vinyl heaven, and they had represses of some amazing old deleted albums at silly prices. I used to spend a fortune there. Then something happened: they expanded, and lost that sheen of cool. Redesigned, more piled-high stock, and lots of emo kids hanging about outside. Don’t know why expansion and cool are mutually exclusive, maybe it coincided with the death of vinyl, but it went wrong for me. I heard that a couple of years ago, most of the founding partners left – somewhat acrimoniously, allegedly. And then last night, walking through Earlham Street in Covent Garden, the store was closed, with security guards outside – despite claiming to be open from 10am – 10pm. What a shame.

Might as well get it out of the way. The Long Tail has just won the Loeb prize for best business book of the year. Well done Chris!

Finally, the Edinburgh Book Festival really needs to sort out their ticketing. We (when Screenbase still existed) used to do the site, and the ticketing systems, for them, and never had a problem if ” demand surged far beyond what was expected”. We did the Book, Film , Childrens, and Science Festivals for a while. In fact, the Science Fest still uses the code and sells hundreds of tickets a day, sometimes in the thousands, through the site and the box office. What bothers me about this story is that it must be very embarrassing for both EIBF and their web company, seeing as they seem to trot out the same story – the Glastonbury-like spin that we’re so popular that all our systems crashed – every year. Surely systems total failure (and lots of frustrated punters) is no longer a way of defining popularity – if it ever was?

These things are never really that much fun to read, I know, and are almost offerings to the blog-god to ask forgiveness for being slack, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

Pimpmyspace:
includes how to add RSS incoming.

Colour Generator chooses a palette from a photo you upload;

Booksquare on how to avoid DRM, (and ACAP)

Yochai Benkler on networked communities:

The networked economy is transforming the way we capitalize business and culture. Yochai Benkler, one of the top thinkers on commons-based approaches to managing resources, weaves together several fascinating threads to argue that decentralization and collaboration are shifting the balance of power to the people in the production of knowledge, goods and services.

Which reminded me that Lewis Hyde, author of the Gift, incredibly smart and lovely guy, and who has this week appeared in a series of conversations with Margaret Atwood (who says that the Gift is the only required reading for writers), is writing a book on the commons.

Musically, Pandora tailor makes me radio based on Moodymann and Alice Coltrane; SeeqPod sadly didn’t work when given the same task. And I have no idea how I found this. Although today I found a great record shop on Leith Walk: ElvisShakespeare which also does books and was recommended on the Guardian Blog.

Some nice publishing creativefor the anagram bookshop in amsterdam, and by saatchi for mondadori

Overview of semantic vs table css

LRB on Zidane

Michael Bierut on process:

For over twenty years, I’ve been writing proposals for projects. And almost every one of them has a passage somewhere that begins something like this: “This project will be divided in four phases: Orientation and Analysis, Conceptual Design, Design Development, and Implementation.” All clients want this. Sometimes there are five phases, sometimes six. Sometimes they have different names. But it’s always an attempt to answer a potential client’s unavoidable question: can you describe the process you use to create a design solution that’s right for us?

Businessweek on Jeff Bezos’ new direction (and first of many): leveraging latency in the network.

Oh, and finally, my reading list, recommended from the blogs:

Word of Mouth Marketing

Don’t Make Me Think

Truth, Lies & Advertising and Perfect Pitch.

Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, for instance, has sold more than 4,500 copies of Ann Volkwein’s “Arthur Avenue Cookbook” at $25 each. That book otherwise sold only 8,000 copies nationwide, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales at major book chains, independent bookstores and online retailers, but not at places like Mike’s.

Today’s Guardian picks up on the piece,

What is known as speciality marketing has from modest roots expanded into what is now the fastest growing sector for many publishers, outstripping growth in traditional bookshop outlets and even that on websites such as Amazon.

What is interesting about this, to me, is that this is one of the first steps in the pendulum swinging back from the peak of the single-source outlet. In the light of the megalithic chains selling fast-moving titles, the ability of retailers to specialise – and by specialise, I mean the ability to offer any different number of varying kinds of products around a theme such as food, or design, or music- in one area, and do specialise well.

These specialists ‘curate’ a set of products around this theme, and curate on the grounds of quality and taste alone. In so doing, if they do it well, they become trusted curators by their customers, and have the ability to move certain products through recommendation alone.

One point is that the pendulum swings back towards taste and quality-based retailers, and we see a reaction (mirrored by farmers markets and the like) where customers also want to experience value in their purchases that goes beyond price. But it also provides hope for the publishers who publish under these terms as well, championing production values, design and care rather than the deligthfully-dubbed ‘chavalanche’ of celebrity biogs.

The second point is that this curation can take place anywhere. it works in physical spaces – see Russell’s Analogue in Edinburgh or Valvona & Crolla for that matter – but also online. Of course you need the customers coming to you in the first place, but once you have that, and can recommend critically and effectively, the opportunity begins.

The Wrong Tail. Slate takes a pop at the LT’s theory of everything.

What are the Long Tail’s limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences. When these two conditions are satisfied, a company can radically enlarge its inventory and make money raking in the niche demand. This is the lifeblood of a handful of products and companies, Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, and Google among them, all of which are basically in the business of aggregating content. It doesn’t cost much to add another song to iTunes—having 10,000 songs available costs about the same as having 1 million

Which is what I was trying to say in my previous post: we don’t need a long tail of flour. This isn’t the last we’ll be hearing on this, I’m sure.

One of the things I was railing at Macmillan for was that on their site, a user has to go through a very lengthy subscription process to be able to purchase a book. Not a great idea, IMHO. Well, good old LibraryThing has a blog posting from Abby about much the same on one of their competitors’ sites. She gets so worked up about it she does some research which leads to the following stats.

ccording to Alexa, they are–today–the 6,834th most-visited websites on the entire web, around the highest LibraryThing’s been. The site looks inviting, attractive and usable. It surely took a lot of skill and effort to make.

But look at how many books have been added—230! That’s the worst conversion I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to turn Alexa numbers into raw traffic, but Alexa 6000 is a fire hose. To get 230 books out of that is a disaster of Biblical proportions.

Surely the sign-up page is to blame. It’s an object-lesson in how to wreck a website’s chances.

Why does a book-swapping service need to know my gender? (Is there dating involved?) And my birth date?* And—good grief—my PHONE NUMBER?

Time magazine wonders where the voices of our generation are. At length. Whilst citing lots of them.

I’m not adding anything to the Friendster Patent win. Just noting for my memory.

Deloitte report on digital publishing. “Digital publishing is delivering returns, with leading digital publishers predicting that by 2012 digital activities will contribute up to 40% of revenues. This is according to a report launched today by Deloitte, the business advisory firm, and the UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) in a survey of UK publishers.” PDF

Which leads almost neatly onto the British Library’s senior archive manager about the problems of archiving digitised information.

And when you move into the scientific, technical and medical arena, you’re dealing with databases. So a journal article won’t just be something in print between covers; increasingly it will be something electronic with links through to remote databases. To collect, store and make available that kind of research for future use is very complicated.”

The Guardian covers what’s happening with the Google Print programme. Between that and their blog piece on the Long Tail, which got kind of savaged, and the whole future of books being through promos, I almost have to worry about the Guardian taking its eye off the ball.

At the same time, they have a story on the creeper effect of Audible sales of MP3 versions of books actually making some money for publishers. [Dim and distant: when I was at Cannogate I tried soo hard to get this going with MP3Lit.com. But now every time I go there I get a different landing page... sigh]

Just for laughs. The awful trailer for Londonstani.

Boyd Tonkin goes long tail. And uses the word ‘utopian’.

The economist unveils viral marketing

The times publishes a guide to the bleedin’ obvious for marketing a book about the libertines. Funny that no publisher has yet managed to really ‘do’ MySpace, but as soon as one do they’ll be touted as ground-breaking.

The NYTimes had a piece about the ‘greying of the record store’ – how the kids are staying away from even the hippest record shops which are instead catering to oldies. This is clearly going to happen to books. Although the flip side, in both cases, which the NYT doesn’t talk about, is the fetishisation of vinyl and its saturation of the DJ market, which I think will happen to books (particualrly old or even hardbacks). I think when we do see adoption of eBooks, production values will becoming increasingly valuable. Oh. I’m repeating myself. Sorry.

Wired reviews Google’s new payment system, Checkout.

GOB was very into the idea of this guy’s online book; I trust GOB, but the chapter headings sound so full of jargon that I’d really want to give it a wide berth unless heavily pursuaded otherwise.

Believe it or not, Umberto Eco on why Macs and PCs are like Catholics and Protestants. From 1994. [Link via Coudal].

Dan Franklin (big Dan Franklin, as we call him when we need to differentiate when among Canongaters) on two editors whose like we won’t see again: Tom Maschler and John Blackwell.

eBooks are having a hard time catching on, apparently.

Wow. There’s an amazing new thing called Creative Commons. Thanks NYT.

Holtzbrinck, the company which owns Macmillan, has a blog for its online dept. And, wow, get this, they talk about this creative commons as well. This thing could get really popular.

Another Coudal Link. This time to Walter Murch. The Conversations – his book with Michael Ondaatje, discussing the art of editing and translating words into film, is still one of my favourites.

Infosthetics (!?)

This could be relevant for a whole heap of reasons. The nonist.

And the typophile wiki.

The site is a modest collection of the projects Portobello has produced for cinema, TV and the stage, and includes the Oscar-winning Kolya, Dalziel & Pascoe, Tim Roth’s the War Zone (which was coincidentlly shot by my mate Seamus McGarvey) and the current west end adaptation of Sandor Marai’s Embers, starring Jeremy Irons.

It needs some work (the beginning is a little confusing, unnecessarily about the gender of the narrator; and the themes which develop to draw the narrative to a close feel a little neat and even contrived) but I think this is a strong contender for a prize in 2007.

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spend more time running Leith’s and Canongate, as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he is chairman.