Paying for content online moves closer with Google FastFlip

Everyday there are steps made towards people paying for content online which they might have expected to get for free in the past. This is a good thing so that we keep the ability to read well researched articles and information.

The Daily Telegraph is also moving towards paid-for online content through its ‘e-paper‘ program.

Google launches Fast Flip news website – Telegraph http://ow.ly/pzyP

Is XML heaven or hell?

XML - Heaven or Hell?

Last week was eye-opening in several ways. I attended two conferences in London. The second one I attended was about online PR and reputation management. If you ever wonder or care about what people are saying about you, your company, your brand or your products, and how that affects the future of them all, then the lessons from this seminar are something about which you should learn.

On Wednesday, I went to the ‘StartWithXML‘ conference which might sound like a tedious affair but it was quite the contrary. This three letter acronym (XML) signifies how the publishing industry is changing from a printed world which has, to a large degree, an attitude of “We publish and sell books” to a digital publishing world whose attitude is “We are distributors of information”.

To quickly explain the benefits of XML, if a publisher starts the book publishing process when they receive a manuscript from an author in Microsoft Word or as an XML document, the ability for the publisher to efficiently turn that into not just a printed book but other products like an eBook, or an online reference tool (if it is guide, for example), is greatly increased. Not only that, the publisher can make the book searchable so that potential customers can find it and read about it in more detail before they buy it.

The benefits of starting the publishing process with a book in XML format are not only good for the publisher, they are good for the customers and the authors. Customers will buy more products and authors will get more royalties.

Most of the large publishing houses are fully aware of the benefits of XML to their businesses. They are in the process of getting their production teams skilled in XML and digital publishing. But it’s the smaller publishers that really need XML. By starting their publishing process with their manuscripts in XML, they can become extremely efficient and competitive in a crowded market.

For example, Snowbooks is a “feisty” publisher made up of three people. They produce all of their books using XML which are held on a database. Each book has all of the information about the title held in XML as well as the book in digital format so that, literally, at the click of a button, they can produce 48-page catalogues about their lists, feed their web site and make versions of each book in different formats. Anyone who has ever tried to put together a catalogue in a conventional way will know that it can take weeks and weeks to do this.

So, if you are in publishing and in production and you don’t know about XML, then you might be thinking it sounds like hell. But, if you do know about XML and its benefits then you could be about to secure your job. You role may well move from the production team into the IT team but, as they say, “if you don’t like change, then see how you feel about irrelevance”.

For more details from the StartwithXML conference, you can see the slide decks used by the speakers here.

The Eleven Axioms of 21st Century Publishing

Publishers are changing to become 21st Century information distributors

This is an interesting post by Kate Eltham about how publishers might need to evolve their ways of thinking about their industry in 21st Century. For example, publishers will need to think of themselves as “information engines, not producers of objects“.

Kate also links to another interesting blog called ‘Book Oven’ from which the axioms derive.

The Eleven Axioms of 21st Century Publishing – Electric Alphabet http://ow.ly/kxDh

Will people pay for content online?

Spotify has thousands of new subscribers per month but fewer paying subscribers.

You would think not based upon all of the online companies, such as YouTube and Spotify, who seem to be heading towards a business built on burning money rather than making it. Rupert Murdoch is trying to change his business which is also in the middle of seeing ‘printed pounds’ turn into ‘digital pennies’ in many of his publications. He wants to charge for people for online publications. Any why not?

This is an interesting article about the huge debate which is happening now in the publishing world.

Is free content really the iron law of the internet? – Telegraph http://ow.ly/kihI

Digital skills in a changing publishing industry are increasingly scarce

Digital skills gap in publishing is critical

This is an interesting article in The Bookseller which highlights the skills gap challenge within the publishing industry. The understanding within experienced, middle management about the possibilities and strategies on how to use digital technology are weak and the creative skills to turn that into fresh, effective and tactical realities are often not there because higher paying sectors make publishing less attractive to enter.

Digital skills gap now ‘critical’ for publishers | theBookseller.com http://ow.ly/k2nA

Will speaking on BBC Radio Lincolnshire about cloud computing and online job seeking

Download now or listen on posterous

Will speaking on BBC Radio – 10-08-09.mp3 (12397 KB)

Posted via email from Digi-business.co.uk

Here is the latest recording with the BBC where William Wright (@mrwilliam) and I talk about security issues, paid for content, cloud computing and how large businesses are using services like LinkedIn to recruit people for specific jobs.

Print on Demand, Self Publishing and Digital Stitching

Download now or listen on posterous

Will speaking on BBC Radio – self publishing and photo stitching.mp3 (11897 KB)

Posted via email from Digi-business.co.uk

Print on Demand is not a new initiative. It has been around for a number of years. But recent news that more new titles are being printed through Print on Demand (PoD) than through traditional printing methods shows how the PoD industry has come of age. It allows out of print books to become available again. It allows authors of new books to publish them themselves without risk and for custom books to be printed quickly to respond to demand.

Digital photography is prolific and free software enables people to create panoramas and 3-D worlds easily by stitching their photographs together quickly and easily.

Will was recently on BBC Radio Lincolnshire with William Wright talking about these technologies. To listen to the show, you can play or download the podcast by clicking the link above.

Books are Terminated in California

Arnie wants books digitised in schools

Recent news from California about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger seeking to move all of the States school textbooks from printed versions to digital versions to save $350 million  came as no surprise this week. The State has practical reasons behind it. Namely, a $24.3 billion debt in their finances.

It then comes as no surprise to hear that Amazon will launch its new ebook device, the Kindle DX, this year which has a bigger screen and is aimed at the academic market which needs more ‘space’ on the screen to accommodate the richer nature of school text books than novels. That’s good timing.

There are people who doubt whether there will be demand for ebooks, as illustrated in today’s article in The Bookseller, when novelist, Nick Hornby, voiced his opinion that people only buy books for reading on summer holidays. Hornby made sense but this is only one part of the market, of course.

Publishers continue to see the rise in sales of their digital products, such as ebooks and audiobooks. They are not yet in double digits as a percentage but they are growing and at a pace. Schwarzenegger’s announcement depressed Pearson’s share price and when 42% of the publisher’s sales come from the education market, it’s time for them to stop sucking the cash cow dry and switch to digital.

There are concerns over the price of some of the ebook reading devices, but when you consider that an academic textbook can cost between £40 and £55, and a reader device costs £300 to £400, local education authorities will soon be better off by providing digital versions of books, even if they are downloaded onto existing laptops or PC’s.

People Will Pay for Content Online

 

Publishers fail to give readers good experiences

Publishers fear that people will not pay for content online. People are so used to reading newspapers online for free, for example, that the expectation is that they will never pay for anything that is published online. The Wall Street Journal is a major exception to the rule.

But, listening to Ben Edwards from Economist.com at the ‘ePublishing Innovation Forum 2009‘ in London this week, he thinks that is not the case. His view is that people will pay for content content online and that “publishers have failed to build experiences which people willing to pay for”. Fair point.

The New York Times has recently launched a desktop version of its online newspaper which is accessed through a free download. You get the front page news for free. Any news you want to see beyond the front page have to be paid for through a weekly subscription. Their revenues from digital business has grown every year as a percentage of their business from 4% in 2004 to 12% in 2008.

Julian Shambles of The Telegraph Group, recently explained at the ePublishing Innovation Forum in London, that simply transferring headlines that work on a printed newspaper simply don’t work for online versions. The infamous anti-Europe headline from ‘The Sun’ “Up Yours, Delors!” has no meaning on the web. 

Why is that? It’s because people find news on the web differently. They use  a search engine to find news and when they look for ‘euro-sceptic’ related news, they probably use that phrase in their search, and not the headline which grabs people’s attention to the newspaper on a stand. 

Shambles went on to say their recent success in growing their audience and viewers online was part of a whole mix of digital re-thinking which included ensuring that their journalists were trained and familiarised with ‘search engine optimisation’ so that they wrote their articles with the thought on how to make them as friendly and searchable to Google as possible. Furthermore, news has started to be published online first rather than how it used to be with their web version being an after thought.

The emerging model in the world of digital publishing which appears to be gaining some success takes advantage of the fact that an online or digital version of a publication costs very little to produce compared to the paper version of it. So, publishers can afford to give away a lot of access for free with a small minority paying for richer versions of the publication upon which the publisher can make a profit. This is called ‘freemium‘. (I did hear one comment at the Forum say “..there is a bit too much ‘free’ in my experience, and not enough ‘mium’ in it“.

So, the fact is that people will pay for content online as long as they feel as though it is a good experience. We are overloaded with information from every imaginable source now, but there is precious little knowledge available. We are not prepared to pay for magazines or publications which are little more than advertising hoardings for recruitment companies with a few pages of poorly written articles. We will pay for knowledge, experience and insight. But has that not always been the case?

Meaningful Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is about meaning

Who would be Gordon Brown after the last few days in British politics? He might be thinking about how he would like to be making decisions which will have a dramatic and positive impact upon the electorate’s lives rather than worrying about the less than spotless behaviour of some of his MP’s and their expenses.

It would be interesting to have dinner with him this weekend. You would doubt that he would be in a position to be very cheerful. Except that he has invited Tim Berners-Lee to dinner this weekend at Chequers, where it is likely that he is going to be talking about the future of the world wide web.

What is the future of the web? Many people may know about what is called ‘web 2.0′ which has seen the web moving from a one-way conversation in its early days to a two-way conversation which enabled us to contribute to the web. Web 2.0 has seen the massive growth of services like Facebook and Twitter where we can self-publish.

Despite the amazing ability for everyone to publish their thoughts, to find information through Google or to publish their videos for the world to see, we are starting to stretch the current web structure to its limits. For instance, searching on Google limits your query to the search engine finding words which you typed into the search box which will bring up relevant web sites which have those words in them.

But the words (or keywords) which Google found in the web site might not actually bring up a web page which is useful to you. The words in it might not be related to your query and, therefore, your search results are meaningless because the search engine looks for words and not for the meaning of the words. e.g. If you type in the sentence “The sky has the colour blue” Google will look for web sites with those words in them but it may not connect the words together to seek the meaning of that sentence.

This is one the most important aspects of where the web will go in the next few months and years. Web 3.0 is about meaning. When you type a question into a search engine such as “Why is my left foot larger than my right foot?” search engines will be able to understand the question and not just search for the words in a web page. The search results will bring up web sites which answer the question and which also make suggestions on what you can do about it if it is a problem, rather than bringing up a load of web pages just about feet. 

This is called the ‘semantic web’. And this is what Tim Berners-Lee, Dame Wendy Hall and their colleagues have been developing for a long time. The UK Government will soon require that all of their published information to be described with something called ‘RDF’ (Resource Description Framework) so that all their data and information will be linked and so we will be able to find meaningful information more easily than we can today. 

So, cheer up, Gordon Brown. The freedom of information which has opened up a few weeks of trouble for you will seem insignificant to what you and Tim will be discussing this weekend. You will be making the first steps to making the web that we know now, which is about masses of information, into a connected world of knowledge and meaning.