People would tend to think that someone who runs a Book publishing company would be well educated, informed and intelligent.

Books aren't dead, but what about the publishing industry?

As usual, preconceptions seem to be wrong.

Unlike your cousins at the music industry you could foresee the changes your industry is currently undergoing and learn from the mistakes others have done before you.

Yet, from my point of view I feel déjà vu.

Your industry, as you know it, will disappear. Now get over it. And get over it quickly. Hey! at least you had 550 years to profit.

The sooner you assume the unavoidable the sooner you can start transforming your companies to adapt to a new reality, a new set of rules and a reading habits revolution that has only just started.

If you start acting stupid and doing things like delaying the availability of titles in electronic format you will only accelerate your fall.

Traditional books will not disappear, much like vinyl records they will, eventually, represent a niche market. If you look at it from an econometric perspective the energy cost of publishing a print book versus an ebook is so huge that the old model has no way to compete.

The question you need to start asking is “what role do we have  in this play now?”. The publishing company that nails the answers will have the upper hand in the time that comes.

Many will argument that there is no place for publishers in the future. It is a very tempting statement, but one I think will not be true. There is a place for a new breed of publishing companies in the new, all-digital, book world. That role will have a few common places with what publishers are used to do but will mostly be a new kind of thing based in 2 very basic premises:

1. Marketing
2. Content curation

Marketing you already do. But you will have to rethink the way you do it. The best-seller ideology will still play a major role (particularly as e-book pricing goes down) but it will be the long tail / low cost / low sales / hyper-niche books that will account for most sales in 10 years. The first publishing company that takes full advantage of the focused targeting capabilities that modern internet marketing has to offer and puts that to the service of selling niche books (in a semi-automated way, may I mention) can make a fortune out of it. Yet, in order to sale niche products you need to own them, which brings us to point #2:

Content curation is becoming increasingly important. Soon everyone will have the ability to write, publish and sell books on their own. That does not mean that all books will be good. Amidst all those books that are not good the next Dan Brown hides. And between the not so bad books will lay a lot of books that can fill gaps in the ever-increasing number of specific taste and interest niches.

Telling what books are good, bad, can sale or not is a task that no machine or software can be assigned to. No matter how complex the semantic algorithms get, how accurate the intelligence virtualization becomes, how many million iterations a neural network may perform humans will always be the right entities to recommend books for humans.

As for piracy: that will always exist, get over it. The one thing you can do is what the brilliant Ian Rogers told the music industry back in 2007: Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses. If your books are more conveniently bought than stolen piracy will unavoidably decline, don’t make the same mistake the music industry did and continues to do: annoy your customers (aka: your-source-of-income). Trust me: it is much better business to pass as smart enablers rather than as greedy idiots.

Yours trully,

A book lover.

There are a lot of things happening in the industry.

There are a lot of things happening in my personal and professional life.

Stay tuned. Ye shall be back.

Thanks to my brother we headed over to Pinamar. Despite being winter we were blessed with springlike weather. I blame global warming.

Agustin had a blast. Luciana had her birthday by the beach.

This time off came as a response to burnout. And to health. My  body was starting to evidence the kind of abuse I was putting it through.

4 days ain’t nearly enough to recover. But it helped to put things in perspective. And they haven’t been in perspective for a while.

Ted Kennedy's Passing on FaceBook

The question is: should one “like” it? I certainly don’t like the fact of loosing Ted to Cancer, but I do like the fact that someone shared it on FaceBook so I could find out.

I just didn’t feel comfortable enough “liking” this.

The logic is overwhelming.

10 years ago, a nice book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was published. It changed everything.

Wait.

That needs rephrasing.

10 years ago, a nice book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was published. Some of us thought it would change everything. (In my case it was the first Marketing book I ever read, back in 2000 -in English and while I studied music and worked for a construction company).

The book, in case you live in a cave, starts with 95 theses. The first one reads:

Markets are conversations.

What a revelation! So obvious. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, the time of “online friends”, now that the blogs raised and died it is apparently so true.

True, but wrong.

(Yes, I love contradictions)

Marketers have invaded spaces where people lurk (it is the means to the end, right?). They have done so ever since the advent of mass media. When radio become popular advertising surged as almost natural. Then came TV.

Of course those types of media inherently go in one direction; so if someone did not like the presence of  publicity there wasn’t much they could do.

Then came the internet.

And something seemed to be different. The advent of the social web brought a promise of a different type of Marketing. One that would listen. One that would talk looking into the customer’s eye. One that would be a conversation, much like Cluetrain proposed.

And then us (marketers) screwed it up. Conversations didn’t quite have the impact we were used to with mass media. We needed more bang for the buck. We wanted more. We started shouting again. We went back from conversation to publicity.

But Marketers are not the only ones to be blamed, the recipients share part of the shame. Both in an active and a passive way.

The public is to blame because it allows their spaces to be invaded by vacuous marketing messaging.  The most bluntly example of this becomes apparent with the usage of client-generated content to power marketing campaigns. This would be more acceptable if consent were not tacit but deliberate, but that is usually not the case. Maybe letting advertisements into our own private spaces is a price too high to pay to use many services.

The audience is also to blame because many have tried to take advantage of the few marketers that actually tried to do things differently, of the couple of crazy dudes that actually tried to talk. When I read news that state that a mommy blogger tried to bribe George Smith (Online Marketer) for a pair of crocs at BlogHer I feel saddened.

Thus when a Marketer  tries to have a conversation this comes out as the result.

Yet that is deserved. Seth Godin’s phrase “all marketers are liars” still applies. Or should I say: Applies today more than ever before.

In the mass media reign days lies were openly displayed and people “bought” them somewhat knowingly. Today things have become more dense, obscure and mangled. Most marketers have a discourse that says that they are part of the conversation, (“hey we even have a corporate blog!”), they find alternative ways to let the customers know about products and services (“we just placed a banner on facebook and MSN!”) and have youth and massive appeal with lower than average investment (“we have this viral video you’ll love”) .

It is all lies. At least on most cases.

Viral videos are pushed to front pages using fake accounts and bots. Advertising, even on the internet, is just that: friggin advertising, not a “new way to deliver the message”. Yes, even if you publish your Ad on a social network, it is still an ad. Most corporate blogs delete anything resembling  negative comments; so much for open conversation. Not to mention the shallowness of the content and the fact that PR firms handle that instead of the actual, flesh and bone employees.

Metrics are inflated on a daily basis. Results are overrated. Everything is false.

Phony Social Network users, fake fans, non-existing facts and figures, pay-per-post. So much for transparency. So much for conversation.

I don’t know about you, but when I talk I don’t shout. Shouting defeats the purpose.

The marketers excuse for such type of behaviors is that, amidst so much noise, if they don’t go above the mean murmur they would pass by inadvertently. If that is the case maybe what you are saying is not that interesting. Screaming about it is not going to make it any more appealing (or true, or conversational).

But then again, coming up with relevant content and doing thinks that can go “viral” just due to  to their own weight and creativity requires thinking, inspiration and hard work. Those things are not readily available.

Thus it is Mediocre (social) Marketers and irresponsible customers who have killed conversation for the rest of us.

Thanks, much appreciated.

Now, lets cut the crap and lets all just say what we are really doing.

It is based on the amazing Job by Nathan R. Yergler and his WP-Licencse Plugin.

What WP-license Reloaded does is allowing per-post licensing. This is particularly helpful for multiple author blogs and sites.

This plugin is on its early stages. For the future I have planned:

• Defaulting licenses (on a per blog and per author basis)
• Bulk Updating licienses (for older posts)
• I18n of the plugin.
• Anything else you might suggest and that I find cool enough to implement.

I’ve always thought that copyright (the traditional one) is a big halt to human and knowledge progress. Now I can lie to myself and think I made some progress by unleashing this plugin to the public.

Feel free to add suggestions in the comments.

Lets start by stating the obvious: that Google, being the gigantic technology player it is, announces that it will launch an OS of its own is big news. It is game changing and no minor treat. That being said…

The always acid Dennis Howlett does quite a decent job in slaughtering the quick and not too well though early posts.

Fake Steve has a valid point on his post about Chrome OS when he states that:

The hacks who are foaming at the mouth about this big threat to Microsoft are the very same halfwits who a couple years back were declaring that the desktop OS was dead, Windows Vista would be the last one ever made, Apple shouldn’t bother making any more versions of OS X, blah blah. Now they’re saying nope, the world does need more operating systems, especially ones like this that are designed to work extra super specially well on computers that are hooked up to the Internet. Whatever that means.

True that. Detractors are now promoters, just because Google is behind it? I mean, come on.

Does the world need another OS? No. But we were never good to spot what was good for us on the first place so lets scrape that question.

What are the implications of Google’s entry on the OS arena? No way to do futurology well enough with the little evidence we have so far. They can:

• Completely screw it with an horrible UX and lack of compatibility for PnP devices, drivers etc.
• Get it moderately right and get a decent (~10%) share of the netbook market.
• Somewhat revolutionize the market and get a 50% share of the netbook market plus a 5% of hacked higher-end PCs.

I think the answer will be something in between point 1 and point 2.

And why is Google doing all of this? Cringley nails it:

So why does Google even bother?
To keep Microsoft on its toes.

Although I don’t share Cringley’s point of view on Eric Schmidt being all paranoid on Microsoft shutting down google entirely I do think Google feels it needs to show Microsoft it can attack where it hurts.

In that it will succeed.

But it will not do achieve much more than that. Chrome OS is not meant for the users, it is meant for Microsoft . That is the very reason why the aim is Netbooks, that is also the reason why they are building upon Linux, they want to invest as little as possible because they don’t really want to achieve anything market-wise but rather “look-what-I-can-do-wise”.

That partly answers why Google decided to build upon Linux and not upon Android. Google has a legitimate interest in the mobile area. It is a growing segment where they have still to prove their worth. Maybe they didn’t want to slaughter the Android brand, maybe Android does not scale all that well to bigger / more complex devices.

And Google has big allies: OEMs. Because we all like alternatives. But I can’t say much about that, after all an OEM is my employer.

So, the potential impacts of Chrome OS are:

• Get Microsoft a little bit more edgy (if they prevent them from pulling another Vista I’ll be eternally grateful).
• Give the users another alternative
• Segment the OS market even more, making life harder for everyone.

But lets get our heads out of our rear ends for a second here. After next year, what can we all expect from the OS market?

I’d love to be in a position where I can say “the OS will become irrelevant, an invisible layer for the end user”. Truth is, it will not work that way. At least not for the foreseeable future. The OS will be relevant for most users as long as it meddles in what people are trying to do. And they do. OS’s create invisible barriers when you try to plug a peripheral and it will work with a certain OS and not with the next one.

OSs screw people’s lives when you try to share a folder and the attempt fails because of incompatibilities between OS 1 and OS 2.

OSs are important for people when they UI’s become part of the OS. Since the OS is such a core part of the user experience it is still relevant.

The operating system enables or prevents people form doing stuff, as long as that statement remains true, the Operating System will remain relevant.

And there are a lot of people who are interested in keeping things working that way. And Microsoft is just one of them. With this new Chrome OS thing Google is functional to that desire.

30 ways to shock yourself by bre pettis (cc: by-NC)

I’m quite tired of Social Media. I’m rather amused by how much we tend to think it does and how little it ends up delivering.

I’ve had enough of watching the promise go in vain. I’ve seen too many examples of agencies and companies tuning Social Media into television. What do I mean? They have made novel (sort of) media into the same old waste. We’ve failed on the promise (premise?) of transparency, we’ve turned too much of it into mere entertainment.

This has pushed me to look elsewhere lately. I’m desperately looking for the next unstained piece of technology that I can help colonize before the evil greedy arrogants unavoidably take over.

Cloud computing? Too dull, too backend. Interesting, but overly niche.

Semantic Web? Well… I like it, yes, but, once again, something only nerds would find interesting.

Mobile? Not my game. By far.

So I default to what I know. And I become a critic. Maybe I will not colonize a new theoretical space but put up a good fight instead. Try to raise the values of authenticity and conversation close to the heart.

Thus I shall denounce every crappy campaign, every false premise, every piece of painted cardboard I come across.

Because Social Media might have been bastardized to near-death, but it ain’t over till its over.

The Challenge shall become darker, more sarcastic and more acid than ever before.

I’m back for good.

I look at the twittverse and it reminds me of what I know of the 60s. Too much flower power, high hopes and interest in changing the world, but little real action and tangible proposals.

Take into account the recent events that had to do with Iran’s election. I’ll grant you that technology played a pretty decent job allowing the world to find out about what was going on at Iran (to some extent).

Yet the problem is when poeple that don’t live in Iran start acting like they could actually have an impact. Like that idea of changing your twitter location to Tehran to confuse Censors.

(dramatic pause)

For intelligence sake! Do people actually think the Iranian government is moronic enough to completely ignore IP location or trace routing technologies. I can picture the Secret Service guy in some government bunker thinking: “Oh, Gee, I’m so confused this guy with a Manhattan IP says he is located in Tehran, what will we do? Lets re-count votes”.

Don’t get me wrong, I know this is all well-intentioned, but it lacks thinking.And it lacks real action.

The impression I get is that most of the twitters actually go to bed at night with the notion that by changing their Twitter Avatars to green and using the #IranElection hashtag the world has become a better place.

That is our 2009 perception of activism: type something in 140 characters, that ought to have an impact, Right? Wrong!

Then of course we get hit by news telling that the US state department asked for a maintenence reschedule so that the Twitts about IRan would keep coming.

“If the US state deparment asks for that then Twitter must be really important! I’ll sleep soundly tonight!”

Sorry, but: Holy Fucking Shit.

We have been amused to idocy. We are so bombarded by information, we have been positively reinforced so much that we actually think we are that important.

Saddest thing about it is that people could actually make a difference in a lot of aspects. But not by twitting, or using hashtags or changing avatars to green, but by actually doing stuff.

Now we also find out that despite what media and new media tries to make the crowd believe Twitter did not play an important role in Iran.

The whole “changes happen one step at a time” thing has rooted so deeply that people actually believe a 140 character message has an impact. Change happens when people take real steps. Not twitted steps or verbal steps. Things happen when people act, not when they hashtag.

I think we need to grow up and grow out of this self-inflicted deceit. We need to go back at thinking at lenght. And by length I mean longer than 140 characters.