Kabul Market 1973

I've noted before the PND family visited Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1970s and this image is from Kabul.  My recollections are very hazy about this trip and most of my memories had been forgotten until I found these slides in the family archive.  Along this road were many small stores and shops many of which were selling carpets.  I recall that the merchants would place new carpets on the sidewalks to wear them in and they then washed and draped them over the wall to dry them.  I've always thought that odd but then I am sure they know what they were doing.  I hope the same is true of that guy on the roof.

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Amazon's Fan Fiction Play

From the Hardy Boys to Mad Men, fan fiction may have been the growth market within the publishing industry that no one knows about.  Fans are by nature the most ardent supporters of character narratives whether they be text or image based and some fairly large online communities have developed around specific shows, characters and franchises.  Over the years, traditional print publishers have dabbled in the market and video and television have accommodated fan fiction into some of their offerings but today's announcement from Amazon is a new twist (I think).

Amazon has now launch their fan fiction site in the Kindle store.  Amazon doesn't own any content but they've circumvented this issue by establishing licensing agreements with content owners so that fans can publish their fiction within an established "world".  It is a really interesting model and given the extent of the Amazon reach one could assume revenue from these fan "worlds" may generate impressive 'found cash'.

More from the Amazon press release:

Kindle Worlds is a new publishing model that allows any writer to publish authorized stories inspired by popular Worlds and make them available for readers to purchase in the Kindle Store, and earn up to a 35% royalty while doing so. Kindle Worlds stories will typically be priced between $0.99 and $3.99 and will be exclusive to Kindle. To learn more and get started writing, visit kindleworlds.amazon.com.
Here’s what authors and licensors are saying about Kindle Worlds:

• “It’s actually a gift to be able to take someone else’s creation and see whether you can take it in a new direction. Watch every show; read every comic book. Honor the canon and honor the fans. There is a reason these stories have become so popular. And don’t feel restricted by the universe that has already been created. It reminds me a bit of writing a haiku or a sonnet. There are rules that must be followed, but within those rules, you can go anywhere. Your imagination is the only limit.” —Carolyn Nash, writer in Archer & Armstrong
• “I believe Kindle Worlds has the potential to increase writership in much the same way the introduction of the Kindle expanded readership. I am thrilled for the Silo Saga to be a part of this program. It’s a natural fit because for the past year, talented authors have been exploring Silos of their own creation, and I look forward to reading more and to crafting some Worlds stories of my own.” —Hugh Howey, World Licensor for the Silo Saga
• “I was intrigued by the opportunity to create something that absolutely had to fall inside a canon that someone else came up with. In one way, it was very freeing to do so. Because the universe itself exists, with all the richness of an already established background and history, I could get right into the meat of the story without having to explain everything to the readers. I did try to make it understandable and enjoyable to a newcomer to the world, however. But there’s a lot I worked to add that will hopefully tickle the fancy of the fans.” —L.J. McDonald, writer in The Vampire Diaries
• “It was great fun to play ‘What if?’ and come up with scenarios that had ties to things that have happened on Vampire Diaries but which took things in a different direction or introduced new characters that could fit into the world of Mystic Falls. There’s probably not a writer fangirl alive who hasn’t fantasized about being able to write at least one episode of her favorite show, and I’m no different. While these stories aren’t show episodes, it’s still pretty darn cool to be able to write them with the idea of fellow fans reading them.” —Trish Milburn, writer in The Vampire Diaries

The Kindle Worlds Store is now open with over 50 commissioned stories including:

• “Pretty Little Liars: Stained” by Barbra Annino
• “The Vampire Diaries: The Arrival” by Lauren Barnholdt & Aaron Gorvine
• “Shadowman: Salvation Sally” by Tom King
• “The Foreworld Saga: The Qian” by Aric Davis
• “X-O Manowar: Noughts and Crosses” by Stuart Moore

I expect publishers and other content producers will pay close attention to this experiment.  Licensing has always been a part of many new title, tv or movie marketing and promotion campaigns and I could see this opportunity becoming very important within product development at many content companies.

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Collaboration: McGrawHill and the IET in Publishing Partnership

Interesting bit of news came my way this week when I read that McGraw-Hill Professional had entered into a publishing partnership with The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).  No doubt you'll have heard of McGraw-Hill but the IET is a member organization with more than 150,000 members located in over 120 countries.  According to the terms of the agreement, the two companies will partner to create engineering content for professionals and students covering every aspect of electrical and electronic engineering.   Content created in this partnership will be available on McGraw-Hill's AccessEngineering platform although there is no word whether the content will also be available on the IET content platform.  From their press release:

"We are very pleased to partner with The IET. This new agreement fits perfectly with our publishing strategy, which is designed to foster technological innovation. It is the next step in growing McGraw-Hill Professional's more than 100 year relationship with the international engineering community," said Steve Chapman, Publisher of Science & Technology at McGraw-Hill Professional.

Daniel Smith, IET's Head of Academic Publishing, said: "We are always looking for opportunities to extend our reach into the engineering community and are delighted to be partnering with McGraw-Hill Professional to develop new content to complement our ongoing publishing program in this area. Developing quality engineering content which accelerates both research and innovation is a major pillar of the IET's knowledge strategy, helping to bring essential engineering intelligence to a wider audience."

As the press release makes clear, this deal looks like a brand extension deal for the IET where McGraw-Hill will be overseeing the publishing services for all the print and electronic titles and will benefit from the strong brand affiliation that IET carries with engineering professionals.  Naturally, IET will benefit from the broader exposure that working with MGH Professional will bring them particularly into the traditional global retail channels that perhaps IET may not have ready access to.  Making IET branded content available on a wider basis looks like a smart play for this organization.

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MediaWeek (V7, N25): A great presentation, What does social mean for Journalism? + More

Chris Anderson the curator of the TED talks writes about killer presentations (HBR):

We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that work best to engage people. When I think about compelling presentations, I think about taking an audience on a journey. A successful talk is a little miracle—people see the world differently afterward.
If you frame the talk as a journey, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and where to end. To find the right place to start, consider what people in the audience already know about your subject—and how much they care about it. If you assume they have more knowledge or interest than they do, or if you start using jargon or get too technical, you’ll lose them. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of very quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should, too.

From the Columbia Journalism Review: Streams of Consciousness:  Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?

However, studies show that several emerging shifts—from print and broadcast television to digital news, from computers to mobile devices, and from homepage browsing to social-media filtration—are all widespread among millennials.
How does it change the value of journalism to strip away the context that a credible publication provides? A reader who comes through a social-media side door is given no sense of a story’s relative importance. A blog post on the latest fad diet that would never have made it onto the front page, or even into print at all, can go viral and attract far more readers than the latest news from Syria. Readers who no longer page through a newspaper or sit through the evening news are bound to miss some information they might not click on but could benefit from knowing nonetheless.
To get a sense of these evolving patterns of news consumption, and their implications, I interviewed some two dozen young journalists (mostly editors of new digital publications), as well as social-media directors, digital-media executives, academics, and researchers.
I found four overlapping, and mutually reinforcing, trends:

• Proliferation of news sources, formats, and new technologies for media consumption
• Participation by consumers in the dissemination and creation of news, through social-media sharing, commenting, blogging, and the posting online of photos, audio, and video
• Personalization of one’s streams of news via email, mobile apps, and social media
• Source promiscuity Rather than having strong relationships with a handful of media brands, young people graze among a vast array of news outlets.

Both of the above are long so I will leave it at that for this week.

From twitter this week:
News: Katie Price Is To Release Her Fifth Autobiography Independent”. Four more to go?
Apple sells 800k TV shows and 350k movies a day. That's nuts. Techcrunch
Profiting from a market at the price of zero Brian's Blog
Is Anyone In Charge At Nook Media? MikeCane

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Chicken Slaughter Hong Kong 1972

Looks a little like an impressionist painting but clearly due to low light.  This guy is carrying in a load of live chickens tied by their ankles into the central Hong Kong market.  Friday night chicken and chips is a standard in the PND household (all international locations by the way) but we prefer to pick up our chicken at the super market.  PND moms once told me that during the war they raised chickens in their back yard and she remembers the abrupt endings.  She will have been too young to have been the executioner however. 

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Breaking up the Monolith – The Modular Future of Scholarly Publishing

This post was also on the Publishing Technology blog yesterday.  Join them

Scholarly and academic publishing has always been a linear business, even though the activities and mission of these businesses (and associations) has often been quite diverse. As traditional publishers, they may have published journals, textbooks and monographs yet, as the internet imposed itself on their businesses many of them became more adventurous and added archives, electronic versions of new content and even commissioning dedicated online content.

Many scholarly and academic publishers today have highly varied revenue streams, but remain heavily siloed businesses. The fact that their journal, book publishing and online businesses grew up at different times in different ways means the content these publishers generated is stored and distributed across different platforms and databases and is subject to different processes and business models.

As a business operating in this type of environment, they are likely to be held back in several ways:-

1. The operations of the business are not optimized and reduce efficiency and flexibility which are critical elements in an internet dependent publishing environment.
2. It can make it very difficult for users and customers to locate the content they need in the format they want when they want it.
3. It makes the task of adding new streams of content that could be sources of additional revenue (eg conference proceedings, statistics, images and videos) a matter of adding a new platform – thus increasing the complexity of the business yet again

As significant challenge scholarly publishers face over the coming years lies in dis-aggregating content to enable their staff and their customers to search across the totality of the content and materials they produce. Many scholarly publishers still expect their users to search by content-type rather than subject, so if a user was looking for content related to ‘contract law’, for example, she would need to run searches across the publisher’s books database, then journals and so on. Not only is this a frustrating situation for users – especially for a generation of digital natives who are used to everything being indexed by Google – but it also represents a potential lost revenue opportunity for scholarly publishers. It is true that different content types need to maintain their differences, but by compartmentalizing that content to the point that users can’t find what they need, then, publishers are limiting their revenue potential.

Interpreting the interests your customers have in the varieties of content and materials that you produce is also benefited by providing complete and easy access to your content. Where content is hard to located and find it follows that interpreting what the user is interested in is also negatively impacted. Either users simply give up looking or consolidating user traffic across various silos is impossible for the publisher both of which reduce your understanding of what material is most likely to appeal to your user community. Reducing the guess work in determining upcoming titles and articles for example would naturally improve your profit and /or better support your mission.

So how are we to overcome the constraints of these formats, while retaining the integrity of unique assets? We explored this topic at SSP recently in the panel discussion I moderated, Rethinking and Remixing Content. The answer lies in format-independent technology that breaks down content into the most basic fragments that can be searched, browsed, repackaged and sold in any number of ways. Instead of thinking of digital publishing as putting monolithic content on the web, these technologies break down the monoliths of books/textbooks/journals into digital components – eg chapters, summaries, tests, supplemental material – that can be more easily searched.

Treating these ‘monoliths’ almost as part-works will involve a shift in emphasis for scholarly publishers, but will also multiply their opportunities to make sales. The latest platforms are built around data stories and flexible ecommerce solutions that make it much easier for content to be bundled, cross-sold and recommended via ‘users who read this also read’ suggestions. The flexible architecture offered by such platforms can even enable publishers to create professional networks to showcase relevant content from across their list, or subject specific landing pages. These custom landing pages need to be flexible and can be built around a critical mass of content across a single discipline drawing from journal articles, book chapters, reports and ancillary materials—or even type of user such as students, practitioners, or nationality. These pages wouldn’t just have search and usability benefits either: they can increase opportunities for content discovery, help nurture reader communities and ultimately benefit sales.

Drawing other functions into these platforms, such as enabling comment features or the ability to share or recommend content via social media could also help scholarly publishers solve the knotty problem of assessing the impact that their content has in ‘the real world’.

A number of scholarly publishers have already begun publishing in this more granular, searchable way, establishing models of best practice for the industry.

Brill

Brill is one example of an academic publisher that is driving greater value from its institutional subscribers by rolling out a Print on Demand (POD) model for content. This service, which is integrated with Lightning Source and will launch soon will be offered as a benefit to institutional subscribers. It will permit subscribing universities’ students to purchase a POD version of the book at a lower rate than the normal print version. Brill is the first site to offer Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) as a business model for libraries. It have been running PDA as a pilot for about a year and are now rolling it out more widely.

ICE

The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) was among the first professional and society publishers to catalogue its content in such a way as to make the various articles, chapters, books, conference proceedings that it offers subscribers searchable via a single database.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)

Another example of a forward-thinking professional publisher, The Institute of Engineering Technology (IET) has rolled out a new online publishing system for its content which ranges across journal, article, ebook, chapter and conference proceedings categories. As part of this process it has introduced a four level taxonomy for its content which enables users to narrow down their searches more effectively, and to run a single search across all content categories.

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Challenges to the University Press

From the Chicago Tribune:

Publishers had barely caught their breath at the loss of those two sizable revenue streams when the e-book tsunami hit. By 2008, large publishers had made major investments toward digital conversion.

Many new titles now appear in print and e-book formats, but smaller presses still struggle to go digital, a move demanded by the market. Apart from the University of Chicago Press, where digital sales are expected to yield 16 percent in revenue this year, all other presses remain well below 10 percent, with Harvard at 6 percent.

Morris Philipson, the esteemed director of the University of Chicago Press from 1967 to 2000, coined a classic characterization of university publishing. Philipson, who died in 2011, once said, "If I were in this business as a business, I wouldn't be in this business."

It's love of books, not profit maximization, that motivates university publishers and editors. "The caliber of the books we publish gives me the greatest satisfaction," says Harvard's Sisler. "It's all about the books. We don't publish ephemera."

Given the challenges, directors have succeeded in keeping bankruptcy at bay. Collectively, presses even managed to post a 10 percent sales growth over the past decade, Armato said.

Shifting conditions have forced directors to be more nimble and innovative. Peter Berkery, the association's new executive director who formerly was with Oxford University Press, describes today's directors as "130 scrappy entrepreneurs."

The University of Chicago Press, the nation's largest academic press, runs in the black, a rare distinction owing to profitable journals and a distribution division for other publishers. Garrett Kiely, press director, says its 400 yearly titles and 50 journals generate $40 million in revenue.

Across the industry, academic presses have crafted a host of new strategies to meet the changing landscape of books. To replace lost monograph and journal sales, presses now rely on more paperbound and e-book offerings, an increased emphasis on reprinting all or some of their backlist (Harvard's backlist accounts for two-thirds of its sales) and doubling or tripling prices on more specialized, hardbound editions.

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