Books will NOT die. They will live. But, the book publishing industry and it’s economy will be so radically changed that there won’t be any real resemblance between the current book publishing economy and the one in the future.

There will be new type of companies. Though not exactly the same, the new companies will be sort of similar to services like Blurb, Lulu, CreateSpace and a couple more. Those new companies will serve as the publishing platform to authors. Before talking about the new platform let me tell you something about the present book publishing industry.

You come up with unique content, meet publishing houses and if they’re interested, enters into an agreement where you’ll be paid either a lump sum amount or periodic royalty dividends. The agreement will be dealing with the rights of your work. You may sell all rights to the publisher, or for a certain period or reserve the right with yourself. It depends on other clauses in the agreement.

Back to the future. The new companies, which serves as the platform for authors will be working in a somewhat similar way. The author will enter into a contract with the company of his choice (similar to the type of agreements, we’ve got now) and provides the company, a digital master copy. From there, people could either download the electronic version (*points at* Amazon Kindle and similar things) or order prints. This is where something more interesting kicks in – there could be multiple versions of the same book. Like age-group based illustrations and quality of the language used. There will be multiple covers from which you can select the one of your liking when you order a print.

The essence is – right now, ‘books’ means ‘printed material’ whereas in the future ‘printed’ will be just another version of a literary creation called ‘book’.

Going a little technical. Undoubtedly, there will be a lot of companies doing basically the same thing. But this should not cause inconvenience to readers. This is where yet another type of companies will rise. The aggregators. Every publishing company will be having an API (somethat that enables development of external tools that can access and modify the main database) which will be used by the aggregators to provide a one-stop access to books published by all publishers.

This means, there will be both publishing companies and selling outlets. Also there could be giant companies doing both these actions. Thus, in whole, we see that the basics of publishing,marketing and economy doesn’t change (at the basic level) but the nature of it evolves to something more open and better. Something that will be loved by the new humanity – the Web.

What is Micropayment platform ?

Micropayments are very low (hopefully reasonable) prices that will be paid for things small in volume. Like paying for a newspaper. It doesn’t cost much. What Google is said to be developing is, a platform (similar to the payment gateways, in a way) based on Google Checkout – an online shopping option by them, almost similar to Paypal.

Why is this interesting ?

Because the subject of “future business models” is something that’s actively discussed and talked about. There are some who believe everything on web will be totally free forever. Not really. The web will be totally free and open forever. But that needn’t mean everything on web will be free. There will be lot of content for which you’ve got to pay for, and a lot more content that’s totally free. That’s it. That’s what Google means when it says “‘Open’ need not mean free”.

Back to micropayments.

Many things on the web, newspaper sites for example, are free because, as of now, it’s very inconvenient to charge (due to associated processes,fees and such) for single editions/copies (micropayments). What Google is said to be developing is something that’ll solve this problem. Their platform is expected to make it feasible for publishers/enterprises to charge very low prices for their content.

Yes, it’s kind of like the iTunes store and App store. Low prices. But this time, it’s open to people as a platform, rather than a proprietary technology, like Apple does it now.

Sum it up

It all comes down to this. Google is developing something new, that’ll extremely help not much people other than the already failing newspaper industry. In 6-8 years, Newspapers won’t be anywhere near what they are now. They will turn out to be, uhmm, just another type of paper ?!

P.S. There will be no type of paid content on the Internet, for which there aren’t free alternatives.

Thumbnail image by SqueakyMarmot

But what made me write about him is not only that, but the way he presents himself. He lives at DustinCurtis.com which is a simple HTML page with some personal info and links to his best articles. Yes, articles – that’s what I am talking about. No, not just about the content but the way he does it.

Every single article has got an unique design, which is so much in rythm with the content. You expect a designer of his kind to have a portfolio page. But Dustin Curtis haven’t got one. It’s better to say, he doesn’t need one. Every single article of him stands testimony for his awesome sense and skill. He creates his portfolio with the stuff he writes and designs for himself, rather than throwing up a list of stuff he made for ‘clients’.

Totally check out DustinCurtis.com, there are some really great pieces of art there.
Isn’t this a great way of doing things ? Yes, it is. Don’t you think.

The all new homepage
(full size screenshot opens on click)

The X Factors

• The only Indian news web site with a usable User Interface (UI) and a great User Experience (UX)
• Very smooth on eyes. Great readability
• Sensible AD placements
• They’ve got the AD thing right. No fiddling around hurting the content. ADs are placed in such a way that the UX isn’t damaged. It never gets in the way of reading.
  Also note that, there is NO AD at all on the single post page (except the sidebar ADs). That’s a bold move, Hats off.
• They haven’t broken any news item into multiple pages (as many corporate websites do, so as to increase the Page Views). Everything ends in a single page.
• Slideshows – What’s more notable than the beautiful slideshows are the way they’re done. The slideshow plays in a single page with smooth transitions. Again, this is a bold move as many of the corporate websites, as mentioned above, uses slide shows as a method to exponentially increase their page views by putting each slide in a separate page.
• Social sharing options. Recent posts widget. Most Popular/Most commented widgets. Related topics and news along side every post.
• …yes, there is so much to talk about.

Why does all these matter ?

Because this could be seen as the start of some sort of a trend among Indian web sites, where the users aren’t under-rated and factors like User Experience and User Engagement are given the importance they deserve.Designing quality designs require truck loads of inspiration and these awesome designs will go a long way in that direction.

We’ve got ClearTrip as a great example for sensible web design, and now we have The Hindu. The list is all set to roll down, and it’ll be just a matter of time – Indian web sites going the real web way (including those of the Govt. of India).

Note that the new design of The Hindu is in beta and the whole thing is in the redesign phase. They’re in the process of porting their archives to their new design, which understandably, takes much time. The wait will make it sweeter, if not sweetest.

(BTW, if you’ve got some great Indian web sites with awesome design as those mentioned here, tell everyone of them in the comments. Let the trend catch up.)

My requirements just didn’t fall entirely under one category and that’s a big reason why it took a bit long in the research phase! I needed a  pretty much powerful processor – Core2Duo to be specific – and enough memory to complement it. I wanted the screen to be at least 15″ in size. And in order to stand eligible for the free Windows7 upgrade program, I needed at least Vista Home Premium to be factory-installed on it. Above all, I was on a limited budget. And there was this one, Aspire 5738G offering all these plus many features more (including a dedicated nVidia 512MB GPU). There wasn’t any reason at all, to keep me away from buying it. I got it for Rs.42,500 (including tax of 4%) which on batteries with power saver mode enabled, lasts for around 5 hours on minimal use and 3.5-4 hours on normal use and 2.5-3 hours with WiFi on; which is pretty great considering it’s performance.

The thing about product reviews

One thing that I learned about the (user-contributed) product reviews and opinions is that, always take them with a pinch of salt. Some people tend to talk about a product or post a review, when it malfunctions or doesn’t work the way they expected it to. Remember that while there is this guy who is disappointed with the particular product, there are hundred others who is satisfied and are happily using the same product.

Read (user-contributed) comments and reviews only to shortlist 3-5 products. Do not base your final decision on them. And  it’s advised to read the reviews at CNET,  TrustedReviews (UK targeted), PCWorld and such corporate reviewers. In this context, Test Freaks deserves a special mention. It’s a review aggregator. You specify a product and you get to see reviews and comments on it, pulled from all over the web. But what makes it really stand out is that they’ve got expert ratings and reviews too, apart from user reviews.

And one question I’ve been asked much is, how is it possible for a company, to offer something at a much lower price than another company’s product with similar specs. I think it’s the brand value that plays the big part there. For instance, HP has got a higher brand value than Acer and costs more with similar specifications. Also factors like place of assembling influence the price.

And hey, a bonus tip: HP is giving away 25 packages, each package containing a Hp dv6 entertainment notebook, a HP Mini, an awesome backpack and Syncables software to keep the note and net books in sync. A friend of mine, @binoyxjwon a HP Mini the last time HP did a giveaway. Give them a try. You never know what’s the next awesome thing gonna happen to you.

If you aren’t familiar with “Creative Commons (CC)”, here is what it is (quoted from the official website).

Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration.

That is, unlike the mostly used copyright license, “All rights reserved”, which strictly restrict the use of works licensed under it, CreativeCommons allows the content to be licensed in a variety of ways so that it will benefit more people in more ways. There are four basic CC licenses:

• Attribution: You are free to re-use the specified content, provided you give due credits (as set-forth by the creator)
• Share Alike:  If you re-use some CC licensed work, you should license the new work under the same license as that of the original work
• Non Commercial: You may use the content freely (attribution not necessary), but ONLY for non commercial purposes
• No Derivative Works: You are asked to use the work/content as is, and not to modify or derive from it

You can license your work under any of these four or their combinations (like Attribution – Non commercial – Share Alike which is the license I use for this post and all other posts of mine on this blog)

Why CC should go mainstream

It could be said without a doubt that there is a huge volume of proprietary scientific and technical information going under-utilized just because the licenses prevent them to be re-used or to derive from them. If CC and such open-rights are used to license these data, much more development could happen. Don’t you think ?

Why not yet?

Because where CC license stands legally is still not clear. Thus, it is understandable that people refuse to license the results of their hard work under CC and see those get adapted or published without any credit.

I’m trying to learn more about this. If you know more about Creative Commons and any other open-rights and the legalities, it would be great of you could share it in comments or write a post on it.

What the contest was: The contest ran for five days with one different question for each day. Anyone who answered all 5 questions correct, stood a chance to win, chosen by the random-ness.

Most of the competitions/contests on web are limited to particular websites. You go there, enter your name in comments or blog/tweet about it, and a randomly chosen winner gets the prize. Even though ‘Search for N’ have got the random-factor too, the way the contest was conducted is interesting. They (Nokia), came out and struck up agreements with popular and widely read tech bloggers/forums and hosted the contest at these places. Now, this is very smart. Doing so, Nokia got to present their new flagship product (which is really awesome, by the way) to a very targeted yet huge audience. And the most interesting part is that, they probably didn’t have to shell out much for this campaign (if at all they did).

This was a real example of a sensible win-win situation. Nokia won. The hosts won. And the participants won too. If they had decided to host this contest on their own, instead of inviting web authors as hosts, they would’ve spent thousands of money on online AD campaigns and email marketing, none of them returning anything near to what they’ve got by the cool and innovative campaign they did.

Which one would be better ? A newspaper being made to promote a new product, or full-page ads in the most read newspapers?

Nokia ported the same to web – the new social medium.
You see, the basics are the same. It’s just that the medium evolves.

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom. Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class.

The article continue, talking about the experiment and results, including a reply from the teacher herself. Down there, RWW have pointed out a strong limitation of twitter i.e. the short life span of a tweet. As of now, twitter search returns only those tweets that are younger than two months. This is something that should be taken very seriously if twitter search is to be developed into something definitive. With twitter developing to be something like what electricity is now for us (said by Jack Dorsey, co founder at Twitter), the potential it carries is huge; as twitter search is the real time search of people’s opinion, advice and thoughts.

I was just thinking, what if there was an option to preserve tweets even after two months. Like, selecting a unique hashtag for your tweets that should be archived and paying a reasonable sum to twitter for this. As simple as that.

Apart from archiving tweets for a longer time, it gets twitter some revenue. I don’t usually engage in ‘what could be a possible revenue model for twitter’ discussions, as almost all the suggestions that arise stand against the fundamental aspect of twitter – Simplicity, and also I believe the people at twitter are capable of keeping up. But this one, about paying twitter to keep tweets longer does nothing to hamper the sweet simplicity of twitter, I believe.

Google Wave

This one is the latest (or is it the Bing?). Google Wave is far far higher than the tag line ‘just another web app’. It is aimed at transforming the web. It is “what if email and IM was invented today”. Techcrunch says:

“Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.”

Developed by two brothers at Google, “Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff.”

This ’set of tough questions’ is, from where, the two brothers at Google developed Wave.

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

No one can say more about Wave than Google & TechCrunch! Here’s the official post from Google and here is the  Techcrunch post. You’ll know it’s REAL BIG. Below is the full video on Google Wave, uploaded by TechCrunch.

Bing

Code-named “kumo”, this one from Microsoft was unveiled just one day back. It will become available over the next few days, and be fully launched by June 3. While it’s generally regarded as another search-engine, it seems that “it is designed to be “more of a decision engine”. Read the following excerpts.

“Each search result page is customized according to what type of search you do (health, travel, shopping, news, sports). The algorithms determine not only the order of results on the page, but the layout of the page itself, concluding what sections appear. These sections can include anything from guided refinements and a list of related searches in the left-hand pane to images, videos, and local results.
Bing tries to alleviate problem by offering up different experiences depending on the search. It also acts more like a destination site for certain searches. Travel and product searches bring in comparison pricing, reviews, images, and more. Hulu videos can be played within the video search results. Bing pulls in data from other Web services when it can so that you often don’t have to leave to get the information you want.”

Read more about Bing and see the screenshots at TC.

Wolfram Alpha

Chronologically, it was Wolfram Alpha the first to create waves, coming up with charts, graphs, tables and statistics for your search queries. The following excerpts are real interesting.

“In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn’t simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.” – Nova Spivack in his really long and explanatory post about WolframAlpha at TC.

Take this screenshot tour of WolframAlpha and go, play with it to really understand what it’s all about. And yes, this looks big.

Google Squared

“As the sheer volume of stuff on the Web keeps growing, keyword search keeps getting closer to its breaking point. Adding structure to the Web is one way to make sense of all that data, and Google is starting the tackle the problem with a Google Labs project called Google Squared.
Google Squared extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet.” (Source: TC)

Though not entirely similar to WA, Google Squared is more or less analogous to WA by displaying searh results in a structured and organised manner. But, as of now, it isn’t capable (better to say, Google is developing) of realtime computational power as WA boasts off. Still, this one is from Google and is to be watched for sure.

Here’s an exclusive video of Google Squared from TechCrunch.

Conclusion

It is crystal clear that things are progressing very fast and neat. With the rate at which information is created and the rate at which it is transformed into knowledge, all these developments are timely and needed. I presume, we’re nearing the point where, web will play a perfect and important role in everyday life. Let the party begin!

Yes. You can gift your kid with a real story book, with your child and his/her friends as the characters. IAndMyStory puts it this way: “Imagine a book where your child becomes the star of the story, making reading enjoyable. The story comes to life with the child’s name, age, hometown, family, friends and uncles & aunts all being part of the adventure”. I was nothing short of surprised to see this.

The catalogue is short, understandable as they’re just launched. Writers and illustrators are invited to join them. Affiliate dealerships are encouraged too.

The books are priced at an average of Rs. 380 per copy which seems very reasonable, if not low for what’s offered. The service is primarily focussed on India but they take international orders too.  A comprehensive list of supported payment options including International/Domestic Credit/Debit cards, netbanking facilities of 10+ Indian Banks and other options like ItzCash and Mobile payments, makes it more accessible.

This is a perfect gift for children anytime. Congratulations to the ones who conceived and created iAndMyStory – they’ve done something that stands out and makes sense.

Discovered with a tweet by @manuscrypts linking to a review at StartupDunia. Image courtesy: Carf