“If the magazines published two or three years from now aren’t different, we’re in trouble. The current magazine model won’t take us into the next five years, let alone the next 100 years.”
“…being unburdened by print allowed the team at Infoworld the opportunity to focus on the changing needs of their customers and to develop online, event and mobile products.”
“Yes, print is a burden. It’s expensive to produce for it. It’s expensive to manufacture. It’s expensive to deliver. It limits your space. It limits your timing. It’s stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each user. It comes with no ability to click for more. It has no search. It can’t be forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. It usually brings unions. And you really should recycle it. Wow, when you think about it, print sucks.
So what was the theme? Print is a burden. Unfortunately, saying “print is a burden” implies that there are other options out there that are not burdens. Frankly, the web is a burden. Traveling to events IDG puts on is a burden. Trying to synch my phone and computer is a burden. As Scott Karp displayed in a post yesterday, trying to discover which among 2,000 different news stories on the same topic is a burden.
Despite my love (and I use the word love very deliberately) of the magazine medium, I have never been burdened by thinking print is a hammer and every communications or marketing challenge is a nail.
Granted, my company has published magazines since the day it opened 16 years ago. But even back then, we also created lots of “interactive multimedia” (published on CD-ROM). And in those pre-web days, we also managed “forums” on CompuServe. As a custom media creator, I’ve never felt “burdened” by any medium that helps build strong relationships between our clients (associations and companies) and their members or customers. If smoke signals would help forge and sustain those relationships, we’d be all over it.
Those who know me — even through this blog — know I personally agree with Jeff Jarvis on his somewhat satirical indictment of print. I’m about as paper-free as someone can get in their personal and business practices, but I’m no print vegan (did I just create a new buzzterm?). As Jeff is writing a book and writes for newspapers and magazines, it’s not like he’s a print vegan either. But my print aversion is neither “environmental” (as I always say , if paper is the cause of global warming, someone needs to share that inconvenient truth with this guy) nor based on any belief that print is inherently bad. What I find a burden is poorly designed, written and produced print. What I find a burden is the clutter and confusion print and paper often add to my already cluttered life.
Bottomline: Print is not the burden. My time is the burden. If you publish a beautiful magazine with articles that really matter to me — that instruct, inform or celebrate something I feel strongly about, it is no burden on me. If you help me get to the information and insight I need to live a fuller life or conduct business in a more flexible and productive way, your blogging and tweeting and bookmarking does not burden me. Useless, redundant, meaningless, re-shuffled drivel is the burden. It can be delivered via print or on a weblog or a mobile device. Crap is a burden no matter what the medium used to deliver it.
After a weekend of avoiding endless posts by bloggers pointing to the NY Times story on how blogging can kill you, it was nice to learn* that while it may kill you, blogging can also help you land a book deal.
Congratulations to Hugh MacLeod on the news that he has signed a contract with Portfolio Books (a Penguin imprint) to develop into a book his popular “manifesto,” How To Be Creative. Also, this proves another point about the power of Free. One of the ways Penguin knows Hugh’s book will be a success is the popularity of an earlier PDF version available for free.
As Hugh does on his cartoons drawn on the back of business cards (he can boil big thoughts down into small gems), here’s his key to being creative: “Work Hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Be nice. Be polite.”
And here’s a great side benefit from that advice: It will also help keep blogging from killing you.
*Actually, I learned this last month, but was sworn to secrecy.
I believe I’ve mentioned on this blog before my fascination with Phillip Moffitt. Moffitt, along with Chris Whittle, started a company in the mid-1970s that is no longer around, but the alumni of that company are all over the magazine publishing world — some in very senior business and editorial roles. (Some even read this blog from time-to-time.) When they were business partners, Moffitt and Whittle were perhaps best known for their purchase of Esquire magazine in 1979. In addition to being its CEO, Moffitt served as editor of Esquire for the next few years. I read the magazine fairly closely during his years as editor. Certainly, no one (except, perhaps ad sales people) would call that era the golden age of Esquire (far from it). But for me, it could not have been more compelling. I was around the magazine’s target age and demographic. I was intrigued by Moffitt (and to a lesser degree, Whittle, who I once described on this blog as being to publishing what Tucker was to the automobile) who were six-or-seven years older than me and from Tennessee and were trail-blazing some publishing and marketing trends I thought were both radical and smart — and, indeed they were. Today, those ideas have played-out in all sorts of amazing ways — including some side paths that I have journeyed down myself.
I’ve never met Moffitt, but I recall that in the mid-80s, he wrote an Esquire essay — I believe it was around the time he turned 40 — that was a penetrating, self-reflective piece that pretty much confessed that he believed there was way more to life than what he was experiencing — so much for fame and success and trail-blazing. I would have dismissed the essay as new-age babbling or mid-life crisis (or both) had Moffitt not soon-there-after cashed-out his holdings and, well, here’s an article from today’s San Francisco Chronicle, that picks up his story there.
Quote:
“At the pinnacle of his success as chief executive and editor in chief of Esquire magazine, Phillip Moffitt walked away from it all - the glamour, the accolades, the punishing schedule - and chose instead to wake up each morning and breathe, to explore the mysteries he had always intuited. “I was drawn to a sense that there was a greater meaning to life than getting ahead. It felt intuitively, intrinsically to me as is true for most people, that in the midst of all we know - science - there is a relatedness that’s possible, a mystery; it’s always drawn me.” It was 1987, and Moffitt had no real plan. Married for part of this time, he spent the next several years living in various meditation centers “in rooms so small that [he] could often reach out and touch both walls,” according to his new book.
Over the years, I’ve spoken with many people in the magazine publishing world who worked with Moffitt, some who’ve stayed in contact with him. (They always tell me that most people ask them about Whittle.) They’ve shared with me glimpses of what he’s been doing over the past 20 or so years. Now, he’s written a book on that topic. It comes out in a week or so, and while the topic is outside my typical reading box — "Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering" — I’ve ordered a copy. If it brings me joy and meaning — or some insights into Moffitt — I’ll review it here.
As usual, Chris Anderson is a voice of reason when he answers a question that implies magazines will be replaced in a decade or so by something digital that is distributed via a new device. Will it happen in a decade? he is asked. “No,” says Chris, “Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”
I’ll go further: magazines (like Chris, I won’t extend the following prediction to newspapers) will never be “replaced” by any digital device, especially the device hypothesized in the article:
“…you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.
The problem with this future-scape is this: The technology/delivery channel being described is not a magazine. It may use the metaphors associated with a print magazine, but it’s not a magazine. It’s another media platform. It’s another distribution channel. And frankly, whenever the device being described breaks the $200 barrier, the last thing people will be doing with it is flipping through a souped-up PDF of Vanity Fair.
Moreover, the media platform being described in the scenario is more likely to replace whatever you’re reading this blog post with than replace the print magazine format.
You see, the device being described is already here — it’s just not the right size yet. For years, I’ve been writing about the device I now call the iPod Touch Book (or Rumor #3). Last year, I even comp’d up an illustration of what it would look like.
The device could be widely available 1-3 years from now. Indeed, today’s announcement about a new Intel chip could have a direct bearing on this new device.
So why won’t this incredible device replace magazines? Well, if you have this device that will provide you access to all the video, audio and digital content there is, will you be using it to flip through a souped up PDF? There’s an easy answer to this question that anyone who has used the Internet can answer: No. You’ll be using it to do the kinds of things you do with your computer. You’ll access all the content published by magazine companies in the form you’re now accessing it via the device you’re using to read this.
When it comes to magazines, you’ll be reading them on paper.
Addendum for those who aren’t familiar with this blog:
As I’m sure there are some who will stumble onto this post and who will be convinced I’m out of my mind, I’ll restate several things that are known by those who read this blog with some regularity (all 12 of you): I own an iPhone and use it all day, everyday. I’m fairly comfortable with my understanding of the incredible potential with that device. I own a Kindle and download and read about 2-3 eBooks a month using it, so I’m fairly comfortable with my understanding of that device. Indeed, I’m a huge fan of the potential of eBook readers — especially if Apple creates the iPod Touch Book.
However, my enthusiasm for such devices does not overwhelm my understanding of the history of media, technology and user adoption. As I’ve said every time I head into one of these magazine apologist rants, the magazine format is not a business model. Business models that depend on magazines — newsstand distributed mass-consumer magazines, for example, or transaction-oriented trade magazines — could one day slide into a Smithsonian Exhibit. However, magazines that support a business model (university development, for example) will likely grow as online strategies strengthen the communities who will want to expand their story-telling to print.
I also refuse to accept the notion that advertisers will leave magazines — or broadcast TV, for that matter. Why? Well, for one thing, the world’s best brand spends only a fraction of its advertising budget online: the majority goes to TV and, wow, magazines, along with a healthy chunk of outdoor spending. If you want to follow the leading brand (that’s what marketers do), you’ll hesitate before shifting all your advertising dollars online — even if it’s distributed on devices created by the world’s best brand.
Later: As often happens, when I write things during flights and that are responding to something that causes me to rant, I write in a way that confuses even me — when I read it later. My point is not to dismiss the appropriateness of digital magazines in certain circumstances. And if you enjoy reading or publishing digital magazines, I am not suggesting you’re wrong — as mentioned, I am currently working on projects that have digital publications as a component and I enjoy reading books on my Kindle. In these rants, I’m merely emphasizing my belief that the roles of print magazines and so-called “digital magazines” are not the same — and that digital magazines may grow in importance and acceptance, but they will not replace print magazines as a medium, even if certain titles “convert” some or all of their circulation to digital products. My second, and perhaps more passionate argument is focused on those who believe the highest and best usage of hand held digital devices is replicating a physical product. My argument is this (and has always been this): New technology enables new experiences and new media — rarely (if ever) is new technology’s ultimate use in replicating old media.
A belated shout-out congratulations to my friend (and fellow business-to-business media veteran) Matt McAlister who’s leaving Yahoo! to join the Guardian, as in, he and his family are moving from San Francisco to London.
Sometimes, great things are going on in your own backyard and you don’t even know about it. Except now I do know about it. For the next couple of days, college student journalists, advisers and faculty members from around the country will be in Nashville to participate in a workshop on using new media tools: audio, video, advanced multimedia, advanced online storytelling. It is being hosted by the Center for Innovation in College Media that is headquartered on the campus of Vanderbilt.
I am very glad such a program has been created to support university journalism programs that are encouraging their students to view themselves as reporters, story-tellers, truth-sharers, analysts — who do not have to limit themselves to words and photos on paper and traditional broadcasting.
A bonus for me: The program is headquartered a few blocks from my office.
I’ll be dropping in and out of today and tomorrow’s workshops and will be posting notes, photos — perhaps some innovative new media — later today.
Later: First, let me send out some major props to Paul Conley, my friend and fellow business media blogger who has been hammering on the topic of j-schools and new media for years. Paul wasn’t actually here at the workshop, but I thought about him so much during the time I was there, that I felt the need to give him a shout-out — Paul, you would have been happy.
The best way I can describe what this workshop is — and a way some of you can replicate it regionally or locally — is to describe it as a Podcamp specifically for college journalists. However, it was highly structured and organized and a little more “officially run” than a true podcamp, the essence of what was covered and how the information flowed was podcamp-like. This workshop — and the incredible new facilities at Vanderbilt where it is being held — may be a little bit more formal than a podcamp, but the idea of using a college facility for a weekend podcamp for student journalists, is an idea that I’m sure someone else must be already doing — if not, why not?
While I’ve met lots of professors and educators through this blog and get a steady stream of email from college students, I haven’t really been on top of this specific topic — college journalism and new media. However, last fall I visiting the City University of New York’s journalism facilities in mid-town where Jeff Jarvis’ interactive journalism program is, and then, today sitting in a half-day with the students and faculty from 40 or so colleges attending this workshop, I can affirm that the evangelism of people like Jeff and Paul and several people I’m now learning about like Bryan Murley at Eastern Illinois University and Ralph Raseth at Ole Miss and an entire community of educators who are very aware of what is taking place — and are now wanting to lead, rather than follow (or worse, merely watch) the parade. I’ll be blogging on this topic more, I’m sure.
Cory Doctorow is reporting that Bertelsmann’s “Random House Audio has announced that it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers.” Already, it sells DRM-free audiobooks through emusic.com. From that experience, Random House Audio has learned that not treating its customers like criminals is a good thing. One would hope such a move by the largest book publisher in the world would lead other publishers to recognize (as I blogged in January) how ridiculous it is to encrypt downloaded versions of audiobooks while the same audiobooks on CDs are not encrypted (i.e., you can go to a public library with your laptop and load up DRM-free audiobooks for free, but you can’t buy the same thing online). As I said then, for the same reason Amazon.com doesn’t sell music downloads that have DRM, it should pressure publishers to allow it to sell DRM-free audiobooks on its new acquisition, Audible.com.
Oh, yeah, and then it should do the same with eBooks for the Kindle.
“…marries the standard text to glossy magazine-style design. Full-color pages are illustrated with a striking combination of news and dramatized photographs: a homeless child wrapped in a sweater on the streets of Bogotá, Colombia, illustrates the book of Job; a man who drowned trying to enter Europe, for Deuteronomy; and models posing in stylized scenes convey joy or despair. Bible passages are pulled out as captions. The publishers wanted to draw new readers by getting rid of what they called “the old heavy book.”
Of course, this makes no sense, for we all know by now: Print is Dead.
Really, why would anyone want a coffee-table Bible when they could read it on their iPhone or Kindle? (Note for those not familiar with my running-commentary on the absurdity of the notion that print is dead - I don’t really believe that digital media is going to die in the next decade or so.)
If the idea of a Bible designed in a magazine format sounds vaguely familiar, it may be that you’re remembering one published in Nashville — one I blogged about five years ago called Revolve, a New Testament for teenage girls designed in the format of a fashion magazine. A couple of years later, a similar one was published for teenage boys — but I can’t find my post to verify my recollection that its design was based on Maxim. (Alright, alright - another joke.)
The video embedded to the left is an amusing “angry man” rant (reminds me a bit of Loren Feldman) in which an actor playing the part of a printer (or maybe it’s a printer who should go into acting [later: see comments to learn who he is]) let’s loose on all the $#x0ons?s who are down on print these days. It’s even funnier knowing that it was produced and posted on YouTube by the Canadian printing company, Pazazz. There are lots of “bleeps” in it, and, again, you’ll want to turn down the volume.
Thanks for the link goes to one of my favorite magazine publishing gadflies, Bo Sacks, who thinks it’s “the best, the funniest, the most poignant video of the printing business that I have ever seen or thought I might see.”
There are a lot of good things David Carr discovered during some recent vacation time. He re-thought the power of media created for ones personal joy. He spent some quality time with family and discovered some fun things one can do with photography that, in the past, would have been impossible without high priced equipment.
But then, Carr slumps into viewing his fun time through the prism that many media pundits do when they discover a new toy: If one medium is ascending, it must be at the expense of another medium. There is some need pundits have to always see the emergence of new media as a zero-sum-game in which all other media stand-still and ultimately die off — which is the premise of the joke in the post immediately preceeding this. Perhaps in college, these pundits skipped Marshall Mcluhan’s warnings against doing this.
Here’s how Carr expresses his notion that if one medium (in his case, personal media like organizing photography), increases, then another one decreases.:
“Is it any wonder that last year had the fewest number of new magazine start-ups in 16 years, according to Samir Husni, a professor at the University of Mississippi who keeps track of such things? Or that publicly traded newspaper companies have lost $23 billion in value in the last four years, according to Alan D. Mutter, a former newsman and currently a managing partner at Tapit Partners?
So, for clarification purposes: Having the means to organize photography and hang out more with ones family and friends in ways that involve media is NOT the reason newspapers and magazines took a hit last year.
Look, I think what David Carr did was great. I do it myself. I’m in the business of creating niche and narrow media and I’m a near zealot in evangelizing the importance of personal media created by and for the few. But the notion that this is what’s killing big media companies is ludicrous. Big media companies are contracting because they are just now understanding what’s taking place and haven’t convinced investors they know how to embrace the tools and approaches Carr outlines.
Chances are, when their employees take off time and start playing with new technology, they will.
I doubt this Simpsons bootleg clip will remain on YouTube for long (it should be on Hulu.com if you have access there), but it’s a rather amusing few seconds:
Later: Sure enough, it was removed from YouTube and now is on Hulu.com, so I’ve changed the clip out below — it looks lots better and is sponsored by Krusty Burger. (Sidenote: A cool feature on Hulu.com is that while I’ve isolated the clip I’m referring to in the embedded video below, you can also watch the entire episode — with limited ads by Krusty Burger — by scrolling back):
Positive #8: Kindle’s ‘experimental’ browser
is so bad, it’s good.
I’ve had an Amazon Kindle for over a week. (Sidenote: I purchased it afterthey started saying it wouldn’t be available until after Christmas). There are some things I like about it — and some obvious and well-documented things about it that make it, frankly, inconceivably bad.
I was waiting until next week to review it, but when I read on TechCrunch that Kindles are going for $1,500 on eBay (geez, people, don’t be crazy), I thought I should go ahead an post what I’ve discovered after reading a couple of eBooks on a Kindle and messing around with most of the features. (Private message to Aaron Pressman re: eBay: You win.)
Here are some things I like about the Kindle:
1. I like the concept even more, now that I’ve tried it: I can read books on a little rectangular chunk of plastic and the print is very clear and paper-like. And I can carry around a dozen or so books (up to 200, in theory) in my briefcase. Bring on the flying car, and I’ve got everything I’ve ever dreamed of.
2. It has lots of the customer-friendly things I like about Amazon: Since I’ve been a heavy-duty customer of Amazon for a decade, the service already knows what books to recommend to me.
3. The books cost about $10: That’s for current best-sellers that cost $25 or so in hardbook. I’m buying books I’d never purchase in hardback (also, no way am I going to be seen in public reading a David Baldacci novel). I have no doubt (I learned this from the iTunes Store) that I will end up spending more on books in the long run. Frankly, there are lots of hardbacks I’d never purchase that I’ll download with no second thought. This is the true magic of the eBook concept and what will make the concept succeed — however, that’s a concept bigger than just the Kindle.
4. Think it, buy it, anywhere (if you’re not in Montana): The EVDO wireless connection is incredibly fast when it comes to downloading books. (However, there are some spots where it doesn’t work, I’ve read.) This aspect of the Kindle is truly phenomenal. Indeed, if anything about the device is radically disruptive, it’s the way in which cellular technology is being used in a device that is not a mobile phone.
5. I can read it even if I can’t find my glasses: I’m farsighted so I appreciate the way in which the type can be enlarged so that I can read easily.
6. The e-mail a document to Kindle feature: The way in which you can email documents to your Kindle (a way to get documents onto the device if you don’t have it hooked to your computer) is very creative. (You send the document as an email attachment for 10¢ a document.)
7. The Amazon Digital Libary: They get an A+ for this feature: When you purchase an eBook from Amazon, a record of the purchase is kept in your Amazon account’s digital library so that you can download it again. (Long-time readers of this blog may know why I’m a fan of Amazon’s approach in this department.)
8. The funky web browser is so bad, it’s good: The web browser is labeled “experimental,” but I find it entertaining to see websites striped of most graphics and advertising — reminds me of 1995. A text-heavy site like Wikipedia (or, say, SmallBusiness.com) actually “work” on the Kindle. Most traditional sites (except, perhaps, those that a optimized for mobile devices) lose lots in the translation.
Here are some things I don’t like about the Kindle:
1. The design of the hardware is off-the-charts bad: To be honest, I really wanted to be able to say that I thought Robert Scoble and others had gone over-board with their piling-on, kick-sand-in-the-face-of-the-dorky-kid observations of how crudely designed the usability aspects of the device are. But if anything, they’ve been nice. Every bad thing that’s been said about the buttons and the way one can carelessly click something and end up god-knows-where is absolutely true. There’s a button labeled “back,” for instance that I still am confused with after 10 days of using it. Using the Kindle has made me appreciate something I’ve never — and I mean never — appreciated before despite spending most of my adult life using computers all day, every day: The Cursor. The little blinking cursor — and I’m not talking about the arrow that shows up when you move a mouse around, but that blinking horizontal line that predates the mouse. That someone could design a digital device with a text display that has no cursor is bold, indeed. It’s also crazy.
2. Anything other than a book — as in a book that is primarily words on paper — displayed on the Kindle is awful: When they say you can purchase Time magazine on the Kindle, it’s the articles — the text only. This is a device that’s good for displaying text and illustrations that lack grays. I’m thinking Wall Street Journal before they went to color where every illustration was that pointalistic style — that might work on a Kindle. In other words, digimagazine fans, this is not your platform.
3. The book selection is puny: Wait, you say. I’m sure the Kindle may have access to more eBooks than any other source, but last Sunday, I was sitting with an author who has had a book on the New York Times Bestseller list that still sells thousands of copies each year as the title is used in college and high school courses. I was going to purchase the book to show the author how it’s done, except it wasn’t available. So we looked up other books by authors we know who have mid-list (back-list) books that continue to have book-club and assigned-reading sales, and, zilch, we came up empty. In other words, the title list for the Kindle is front-end loaded with books one will only find along the short-tail. I’m sure (?) this will rapidly change (a similar problem plagued the early iTunes Store) as publishers jump on the Kindle wagon — especially if the device is going to be marketed to college students. But for now, don’t expect to find those obscure titles you may think will be available.
4. Yet another proprietary format: I guess we’ll have to go through a decade or so of the whole DRM thing that has plagued the music industry. Lots of other folks have written about this, so I’ll just skip it for now and say, I can share print books with my kids or colleagues, but I can’t share Kindle books. Big conceptual flaw in the whole “future of books” thing.
Summary: Amazon is a great online retailer. Bezo’s desire to solve the eBook dilemma is valiant and the Kindle is a step in the right direction. But Kindle 1.0 should be purchased only by individuals who have a taste for 1970s Yugoslovian design and who will buy just about any gadget that comes along. I hope, however, that Amazon and others keep pushing the concept forward. I hope they actually listen to some of the bad reviews and bring in real designers to create the next generation of the device. I’m more convinced than ever, however, that if Apple were to offer an iPod Touch in a size similar to the display area of the Kindle — and, perhaps, support the Kindle format — it would revolutionize the eBook concept. As it is now, the Kindle won’t.
Here are some quick points I’ll throw into this thread:
1. Many business books are themselves ads: Do I need to explain this? For many consultants, professional-speakers, celebrity pundits, etc., having a by-line on a book is a required prerequisite for “club” membership. Often, these books play some part in the revenue stream of the individual, but many times they are, at best, loss-leaders. Some book publishers have even gotten into the “booking” business to participate in the lucrative revenue streams associated with publishing — but that aren’t about selling books. Indeed, one of the most creative-marketing author-marketer-speakers I am aware of, Seth Godin (to use an example of someone who is familiar to lots of bloggers) often gives away eBooks because he knows they enhance his “brand” and will help generate revenue in other ways. While he can — and does — sell books in conventional ways (very successfully, as some of the books he has given away digitally have simultaneously become bestsellers in print), he demonstrates that books can also be ads (or, in his case, brand-building marketing tools).
2. The Whittle Larger Agenda Series: Thanks to the New York Times new “free-the-archives” policy, I can magically point back to some of their stories from the late 80s and early 90s about Chris Whittle’s success at single-sponsor advertising-supported books. The books were about 100 pages long — I have a few sitting in a library at home — and were sponsored by FedEx and others. They were distributed to about 150,000 “business leaders” and were written by such luminaries as John Kenneth Galbraith, David Halberstam, George Gilder, Edward Jay Epstein, Richard Holbrooke, Daniel Seligman, William Greider, Robert Waterman and James Atlas.
Before concluding the concept was not successful — as in, if it was successful, how come it’s no longer around? — I’ll point out that a lot of the ideas Whittle had in the late 80s and 90s were extremely successful — he just didn’t sustain that success because he was always onto the next great idea. The success of his ideas, however, is evident today by the explosion in custom publishing over the past two decades. It can also be seen in the number of Whittle alumni who are still having an impact in publishing and media. In other words, Whittle is to publishing what Tucker was to the automobile. (Obscure sidenote: Personally, however, I was always more a fan of Phillip Moffitt.)
3. Ads are ubiquitous, so why not in books?: When ads are in bathrooms, in the buckets used to place items when you are checking through airport security, in restaurant menus and before, after and during movies, why are books sacred? (Personally, I hate being bombarded by all this spam and will gladly pay a premium to keep from seeing it — but, alas, I seem to be in a minority.)
Later:4. The book is a publishing format, not a business model: Upon reflection (i.e., driving into the office), this reminds me of a recent discussion in which the future of magazines and magazine business models was being debated (among friends) in which I noted the magazine format can fit into lots of different business models. The same goes for the printed book or eBook format, as well.
This post from Tim O’Reilly is required reading for those who are professionally (or otherwise) interested in understanding the economics of eBooks. Unlike a lot of the current screaming across the table that’s taking place between eBook enthusiasts and those who yawn at them or point out their obvious short-comings, O’Reilly takes a reasoned, rational, insider’s look at both the opportunities and limitations of the business of digital books. Obviously (to many who read this blog, at least) O’Reilly has unique insight into the topic. He’s written on the topic of business-models of digital book distribution since 1995 and, according to his post, the re-seller of digitally-published books, Safari, is now O’Reilly’s third largest customer behind Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. (I’d like to ask him a clarifying question regarding that fact by wondering aloud where Ingram Book Co. would fall on that list — I’m surprised they aren’t #3.)
Again, O’Rielly’s post is about as crystal clear as it gets, straight from the CEO of a publishing company that caters to tech-professionals and tech-enthusiasts, an audience of gizmo early-adopters — and from someone who can only benefit from a wide-scale adoption of eBooks. Despite such apparent self-interest, he recommends to publishers — and would-be publishers — to stay realistic.
Money quote:
“My advice to publishers and authors is this: figure out what it costs to produce what you sell, estimate what kind of volume you’ll be able to achieve using the best available data, and then set your prices at a level that will deliver a reasonable profit from your efforts. Sound familiar? That’s what you do in business today. Don’t expect any suspension of the law of gravity. Leave that to the subprime folks, who followed on the heels of the dotcommers in coming up with new math that ultimately didn’t make any sense.
Then again, there are some ways to make money because of eBooks rather by from eBooks, but that’s another topic for another day.
Today, CNet’s News.com reports that Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (so that’s what PDF stands for) so that “publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.”
1. In the works, there’s a way to embed “contextually relevant” ads from Yahoo! in a PDF document.
2. Google has a just been granted a patent to do something that sounds — in theory, at least — very similar, and can even be construed to mean that the ads will not only be relevant to editorial context, but can also be relevant to the person receiving the document.
3. While PDFs are perhaps best known by consumers as something they view with a computer, the graphics and printing industries now use a version of the format called PDF/X-1a as a “standard file format specifically designed for the blind exchange of final print-ready pages.” In other words, magazine publishers and printers use a professional form of PDFs to print nearly everything these days.
4. PDFs are eBooks that can be read in eBook readers like the Kindle or the iRex iLiad.
5. Google (while its patent implies there’s something more than just collecting content and mashing-up something to a PDF file, nonetheless, has a pretty impressive model for doing just that with the Google Book Search reader. For example, look at the top, right corner of this public domain version of Edith Wharton’s novel, Summer. See that little link that says “Download PDF 6.1 M?” If you click it, Google will convert the book you can read online into a PDF with which you can print to paper or e-mail to your Kindle or (with a bit of work) some giant printer can throw it on a web press.
6. Despite people like me believing PDFs were on their way out a decade ago, apparently, they are digital cockroaches that will survive in one form or another forever — for both online and offline media.
Observations, opinions,
and occasionally news on
magazines, new media,
marketing and life from Rex Hammock, founder & CEO of the custom media firm, Hammock Inc.
Early this morning, there seemed to be a theme emerging in my RSS newsreader. Here are a few items that showed up:
After a weekend of avoiding endless posts by bloggers pointing to the NY Times story on how 
I believe I’ve mentioned on this blog before my fascination with Phillip Moffitt. Moffitt, along with Chris Whittle, started a company in the mid-1970s that is no longer around, but the alumni of that company are all over the magazine publishing world — some in very senior business and editorial roles. (Some even read this blog from time-to-time.) When they were business partners, Moffitt and Whittle were perhaps best known for their purchase of Esquire magazine in 1979. In addition to being its CEO, Moffitt served as editor of Esquire for the next few years. I read the magazine fairly closely during his years as editor. Certainly, no one (except, perhaps ad sales people) would call that era the golden age of Esquire (far from it). But for me, it could not have been more compelling. I was around the magazine’s target age and demographic. I was intrigued by Moffitt (and to a lesser degree, Whittle, who I 
Check out this 
Today, CNet’s News.com 
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