But it’s over now, right? Amazon have said it was an error, they’re fixing it, it’s dropped from the top 10 trending topics on Twitter - get over it already. Right?

Wrong. Dear Author give a very good analysis of why Amazon’s explanation is none at all. Pandagon also explain why it doesn’t add up. And Patrick at Vroman’s Bookstore writes about the dangers of an Amazon monopoly on bookselling this highlights.

Given the media blackout at Amazon Towers, there are still a lot of unanswered, troubling questions. (For future reference, Amazon, here is some useful advice from Colin Roswell on dealing with a social media crisis.)

So, Team Amazon, here are your starters for ten, no conferring:

1. What happened? Was this a) Policy b) Glitch or c) Error?
2. Why were some titles de-ranked back in February?
3. If this rogue ‘adult’ ranking affected “books in a number of broad categories“, why were LGBT ones very specifically stripped of their rankings while we could still find Playboy Centrefolds etc?
4. Do you now realize that ‘Gay & Lesbian’ does not equal ‘adult material’? Some of these books are very tedious, and not at all sexy.
5. Since sales are restricted to over-18s anyway, who are you protecting?
6. Why did Lady Chatterley go MIA? Has she now safely returned to the potting shed?
7. Why is our only news source a drip-feed of anonymous insiders? Do you have a PR department?
8. Do you remember when Margaret Atwood and others boycotted The Dubai Festival in February, because one gay book was banned? Does this make the UAE more liberal than Amazon?
9. How could you be so beastly to our very own Stephen Fry? Do you not like QI?
10. Why do you need a secret cloaking device anyway? Are you Romulan?

I’m sure there are other questions I’ve overlooked. If you have more questions to put to Amazon, please do add them in the comments below. Meanwhile - stay vigilant!

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“Why don’t they just burn the books? They’d be better off and it’s very visual on television.”

I still can’t quite believe that lovely, liberal Seattle-based Amazon would go in for the sort of virtual book burning we have seen at the weekend - even if they are more like Wal-Mart these days. Despite what at least one author was told, this seems less like deliberate policy, and more like corporate f***wittery on a grand scale. But the outcome and the appearance is the same: de-ranked books, and mass censorship of gay and lesbian literature by ‘Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.’

This is why we could do with a full statement about what happened. So far it looks like they are backtracking from a policy decision - which may or may not be the case:

11 Apr 09  - Policy

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

12 Apr 09 - Glitch

A “glitch” has occurred in our sales ranking feature that is in the process of being fixed. There is no new policy regarding “adult” titles.

13 Apr 09 - Error

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Well, at least they’re fixing it. But it’s not a full explanation of what happened. It doesn’t explain Lady Chatterley going missing in action. It doesn’t explain Craig Seymour being de-ranked in February. And it doesn’t explain the ‘accident’ that caused it.

I really don’t expect a personal reply to my letter to Jeff - he’s a busy man. But a full statement from the Amazon PR department would at least quell the rumours and conspiracy theories. Yesterday, these included a meta-troll theory, a hacker claiming responsibility for causing the mess (he didn’t), and a French translation error.

Given that this firestorm started on Twitter, you might think it would make sense for Amazon to address the issue there - especially since they have their own Twitter account. Jeff Rutherford offers some helpful suggestions on how they might have done this. But the most enlightening tweet we received from Amazon yesterday was:

Amazon Daily: Cooking by Kindlelight http://bit.ly/FHVp9

You can’t find this tweet any more, because, interestingly, their Ministry of Truth appear to have suspended this RSS-generated feed today, and deleted tweets back to April 10th, before the crisis.

Really not the way to win back our trust, Amazon. By trying to maintain control, you overlook the fact that you have already lost control - you may have noticed that we’re already talking about you.

And what started on Twitter has now made the mainstream media. Here’s an item from last night’s Channel 4 News in the UK:

This is not a conspiracy. It’s just bad judgement and disastrous PR management. The most insightful comment I read yesterday was from Patrick at Making Light:

None of which means that anyone shouldn’t be mad at Amazon, or that Amazon shouldn’t be embarrassed. Rather, it means that this is how the world works. A great deal of racism, homophobia, etc., happens not because anyone particularly wants to be racist or homophobic, but because the ground has been tilted that way by arrangements made long ago and if you’re not constantly on the lookout it’s easiest to roll downhill.

Yes, Amazon should have been more aware of the likely repercussions of this, but mistakes happen, things go awry, and people are usually quite forgiving if you own up and put it right (promoting the de-ranked titles on their front page for a few days might do it). Amazon’s apparent disengagement from the problem could be more damaging to them in the long run.

Social media works because it’s about openness, authenticity, and building trust with people. Not because those are attributes of social media itself - but because those are now our values in the wider culture. Social media just provides the tools to tap into that online. It’s telling that Amazon hasn’t really engaged with social media so far, despite being one of the first companies to offer customer ranking and review features.

For a big organization, social media strategy is often simply about listening in to online conversations about your brand, engaging with and influencing those conversations, and responding appropriately. You can do this by typing your brand name into any number of search engines, including http://search.twitter.com. If you discover a social media backlash, you address it.

Amazon may have the technology, but social media is only partly about technology. The culture is far more important. By not responding quickly through the social media channels that raised awareness of the problem in the first place, amazonfail has turned into a PRfail.

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I don’t know if you use Twitter, but you might be aware of something called #amazonfail, currently the most talked-about topic among the network of 5m+ users. This is an online expression of dismay at Amazon’s new and apparently discriminatory censorship policy.

If the version circulating on the Internet is correct, your new policy of excluding ‘adult’ material from Amazon searches by removing their sales ranking runs as follows:

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”

The idea of protecting us from ‘adult’ material seems unnecessary, when your own Conditions of Use (USA / UK) restrict Amazon purchases to adults. But my concern - and that of the many people tweeting with the #amazonfail tag - is how you define ‘adult material’.

In my country, a few years before you were born, a book was published following a notorious obscenity trial. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor asked if it was the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read”. Publication went ahead, 32 years after the book was written, and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” has since become regarded as a classic work of English literature.

Overnight, you appear to have overturned that hard-won decision and reclassified it as filth that we should be protected from.

Worse still, D.H. Lawrence notwithstanding, your definition of ‘adult material’ appears mainly to apply to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender books. Non-explicit LGBT literature, history and biography is censored, while explicit hetero books are not. No longer can we find Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges are not the Only Fruit” or Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” by sales rank. But we may still find “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds” and Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls”, a graphic novel in every sense. Even our National Treasure, Stephen Fry, appears to have had his autobiography de-ranked, while it it all too easy to find Jackie Collins.

You can see many more examples of this curious inconsistency listed on the online petition that many of us are currently signing, and on this handy list.

This looks very much like blatant homophobia. Would you care to share your selection criteria with us? Or have you simply gone through your Gay & Lesbian section with a red pen?

This approach to what is deemed obscene and what is not takes publishing on a backward step that makes you seem as out of touch with modern social norms as Mervyn Griffith-Jones. As Kassia Krozier points out, we can freely find “Mein Kampf”, books on training fighting dogs, and other offensive material. But the works of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence appear not to be the kind of books you would wish us to read.

Well, you have your wish. We will not buy them - from Amazon at least. As well as signing the online petition, joining the Facebook Group and redefining “Amazon rank“, we shall boycott Amazon until this policy is reversed. Other online retailers are available, other highstreet chains - maybe we shall even support our local independent bookshop.

I hope this is a mistake that will be quickly corrected, and not a conscious policy of discrimination. I look forward to a public response to the many blog posts and tweets on the subject that have been written this weekend.

Jon Reed, Publishing Talk

Related posts:

• Kasia Krozier: Open Letter to Amazon Regarding Recent Policy Changes
• Mark R. Probst: Amazon Follies
• SmartBitches: Amazon Rank [how to Googlebomb]
  
• Edward Champion: Amazonfail: A Call to Boycott Amazon
• news-journalonline.com: AmazonFail: A Twitter Movement in Action
• Jezebel: Why is Amazon Removing the Sales Ranks from Gay, Lesbian Books?
• Mashable: Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings
• Dear Author: Amazon Censors Its Rankings & Search Results to Protect Us Against GLBT Books
• LA Times: Amazon de-ranks so-called adult books, including National Book Award winner
• Booklorn: Amazon accused of manipulating site content (again): Searches and rankings this time
• The Purple Patch: Amazonfail: epic corporate fail day is Easter, apparently
• net.effect: #Amazonfail and the politics of anti-corporate cyberactivism

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But how do you build a fanbase? As with many social media tools, useful content and patience are required. But also more joined-up thinking: are you linking to your Facebook page from your website/blog/Twitter page/etc? The easier it is for people to find you on other social media sites the better. Use a ’social media cloud’ on your main website or blog, like the one in the sidebar of Publishing Talk, linking to us in various other places.

A recent article on Mashable - a blog that I urge you all to read - proposes 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page, and has some useful case studies and principles to bear in mind:

1. Network with other platforms
2. Create a resource
3. Create contestst that include participation
4. Empower pre-existing pages
5. Target the proper demographic

The article concludes with the following good advice:

Creating a Facebook fan page is simple, but getting it to work well takes time, dedication, and some planning. Don’t expect to create a page and then have a huge following instantaneously. Build good content, make it easy to share, and let people know about it, and over-time the community will grow.

Read the full article…

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Many of you clearly are tweeting already, since we currently have around 2,300 followers of @publishingtalk and 1,300 followers of @publishingjobs. For those who haven’t yet dipped a toe in the collective stream of consciousness that is the Twitterverse, it seems a bit of a mad idea. What IS it exactly?

If you use Facebook, you’ll be familiar with status updates. That’s really all Twitter is - the status update bit of Facebook. You can say what you’re doing in 140 characters or less - the same length as a text message. In fact, you can update your status (or ‘tweet’) from wherever you are by sending a text. People ‘follow’ you on Twitter (as opposed to becoming a ‘friend’ on Facebook or MySpace), and you can follow people who interest you. You can also easily unfollow people, and only make your tweets visible to people who you pre-approve if you wish. You can see all the updates from people you follow in a timeline, as they happen. You can do this on Twitter itself - but about half of users rarely visit the site, instead using a desktop widget - a little window that sits on your desktop and allows you to see a running ticker of your friends’ updates. Several are available. I use Twitterific on my Mac.

The ‘Latest New Thing’

But why has this 3-year old platform taken off in the last few months? I blame Jonathan Ross. Forrester figures estimated 4-5m Twitterers in November 2008, a year in which user numbers multiplied fivefold. But since @wossy (156,886 followers) went into Twitter overload during his 3-month suspension from the BBC, and got all his celeb mates to join in, it has exploded further - helped by the press interest this has generated. The celeb leading the pack, however, with the most followers is @stephenfry (323,351), who famously got stuck in a lift and posted a picture of his predicament to twitpic.

It’s understandable why, in today’s celebrity culture, this influx of the famous has led to a scramble for Twitter: Twitterers suddenly have a direct connection with celebs. It’s not even one step removed - you can have a conversation with many of these people, should you wish. Yes, some accounts are managed by their PRs. But you’d be surprised how many really are tweeting themselves. Many more, I suspect, than maintain their own Facebook pages. I follow quite a few of them myself - particularly comics, such as @alancarr, who tend to post wonderfully witty tweets.

It’s not all laughs though. The news of the Hudson River plane crash first broke on Twitter, when one of the rescuers took a picture and uploaded it to twitpic.

Ways to use Twitter

So how do you use Twitter as an author or publisher? You can use it in the traditional way, to post updates about what you’re doing. For me, Twitter is useful as a news service to keep me current. It’s one of those things that becomes more or less useful depending on who you choose to follow. I follow a lot of social media people, who often tweet from conferences they’re attending, or links to interesting new social media tools or news. I also follow a number of publisher’s Twitter accounts, which keeps me up to date on interesting things they might be doing with social media. Some publishers use it as a news release service to tell followers about latest publications. I think that’s an acceptable use for Twitter (unlike a blog). I also follow my friends - it’s just an efficient way to keep in touch with business, professional and personal news.

Tweets are most useful when they include a relevant link to something useful or interesting. NB they are NOT useful when you end every tweet, on any subject, with a link back to the homepage of your blog or website. People expect your links to be relevant to your tweet. Links are often automatically reduced to a tinyurl, so the source isn’t always apparent. Asking people to visit your site, whether or not it has been updated since your last tweet, and whether or not it is relevant to your tweet, is just crying wolf.

When it comes to tweeting myself, I have several accounts. My personal one, @jonreed, is about whatever I’m up to. It also integrates with Facebook, so that my Twitter updates become my Facebook status updates.

But I confess I use @publishingtalk mostly as an automatic news feed for this blog. Some people think this isn’t a great way to use Twitter. I think it’s fine, since I follow many such Twitter accounts, such as @thedigitalist, and find them a useful news service. I do sometimes add extra updates to it - but most are automatically generated. Whenever a new post publishes, it automatically tweets to @publishingtalk with a link back to the original post. That’s probably how some of you came to read this post. Any comments on blog posts also get tweeted automatically. And job ads from @publishingjobs are automatically re-tweeted to @publishingtalk.

Anyone can do this, by associating your blog with your Twitter account with a free service called twitterfeed. I’ve done very little to promote @publishingtalk, apart from a link on this blog. Most people will have come across it with a keyword search for ‘publishing’ on Twitter. That’s the beauty of social media - provide useful content, make it findable, and you will build an audience. You too can do this. It’s quick, it’s free, it’s effective.

There are other ways authors can make use of Twitter, including Twitter novels - something that some have experimented with, with varying degrees of success. But the most compelling Twitter fiction I’ve come across recently is a couple of spoof accounts: @juliememeson and @jeremypacman. I urge you to have a look, and enjoy their joyous Who Moved My Blackberryness. Are they looking for a book deal? I don’t know, but they’re having a lot of fun.

Your online support group

Writing can be an isolating experience. Any form of social media can provide a virtual watercooler, and workplace social interaction otherwise missing from your office. If you follow other writers, you can also ask your online community for help and advice - and people seem very willing to help out on Twitter. I offer advice where I can, but I also ask for it. Sometimes I ask for geek help such as “do you know of a WordPress plugin that does X?”. But I, too, am writing a book, and recently asked for suggestions for somewhere to get away for a week to focus on some writing. I had a brilliant suggestion from a fellow writer within hours.

Twitter jargon - the only three things you need to know

There’s a whole lexicon of shorthand that has evolved to help you make the most of your 140 characters or less. You’ll soon catch on to the grammar once you start following people. But here are the thee most useful:

@ creates a hyperlink to another Twitterer. When you mention a fellow Twitterer in your tweet, use @ and their Twitter name, such as @jonreed and it becomes a link to their Twitter page. If you start a tweet with, say,  @jonreed, it is considered a reply to that person - albeit one that is seen publicly. Replies don’t get fed into Facebook updates, but they may into other services such as FriendFeed. If you want to message someone privately, there is a ‘direct message’ (DM) function.

RT means ‘re-tweet’. If you want to pass on a tweet, for example the one that will be generated from this post, you would start your tweet “RT @publishingtalk:” and then repeat the tweet. Another way of doing this, particularly for passing on links, is to tweet something and end with “(via @publishingtalk)”, or whoever the original link is from, assuming you want to give them credit for it.

# is a hashtag, used to group tweets together by topic. This causes much confusion, and is something people are asking me about a lot at the moment. It’s actually quite simple. Let Mari Smith explain it all for you in this little video:

So there you have it. When Stephen Fry was stuck in a lift, he was stuck with 100,000 people following his every frustration on Twitter. The hashtag #frylift helped people find the conversation. #hudsoncrash helped people follow the news in real time, updated by a mass of Twitterers as the details were pieced together.

Hashtags work well for conferences. #toc was used for Tools of Change in New York recently. If any of you are going to the London Book Fair in a few weeks, and tweeting from seminars on your laptops, Blackberries and iPhones, include a hashtag to help others follow you. This might be #londonbookfair. Maybe #libf. There’s no correct tag, you don’t register it anywhere - you just make it up. But the most popular one will evolve, and maybe even become a ‘trending topic’ on the Twitter Search page.

Now you know all about Twitter, have a go. The best way to learn about any form of social media is to use it. Good luck - and see you in the Twitterverse soon!

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The Kindle 2 is the next generation of Amazon’s wireless e-book reading device, and it started shipping yesterday. If you’re in the USA, that is. Amazon have confirmed that it will launch internationally - we just don’t know when. The device does work outside the US - but the wireless network it uses isn’t compatible with European telecoms.

Despite that, is this, finally, the iPod moment we all keep talking about? Many observers see this as yet another incremental step, rather than a tipping point - largely because the price tag (still $359) keeps it out of the mainstream. But take-up of the Sony Reader in Europe, plus the reading of e-books on the iPhone, seem to indicate a gathering of momentum at least. My money is on the iPhone proving to be the iPod moment - but we shall see.

The other trend to keep an eye on this year is the impact the Kindle will have on self-publishing. I know several authors who are ‘writing for the Kindle’ - self-publishing e-books specifically for the Amazon device. The Kindle is just another tool that facilitates the increasing move to authors doing it themselves. Self-publishing remains my key trend for 2009.

While many traditional publishers panic about keeping up with the tech, or how to price their e-books, the real revolution is happening over there, just out of sight - and could have a more profound impact on the publishing business than simply the format people choose to read books in.

An recent article in Computer World sums it up well:

The book publishing industry is one of the most backward, musty, obsolete businesses in our economy. While every other kind of information moves at the speed of light, the process of publishing a book is like something from the Middle Ages.

For authors, it can take months to even find a literary agent willing to represent their work. Then the agent takes months to find a publisher. Then it takes ages for the publishing company to get the book out there.

People are already circumventing all this by self-publishing. The self-publishing industry is the only area of paper-book publishing that’s thriving right now. Soon enough, a huge number of authors are finally going to get fed up with the publishing industry and just self-publish electronically. They’ll hire their own freelance editors, and do the marketing themselves. The publication of a finished manuscript will take minutes, rather than months.

Should publishers be worried by this? We all know that, by the time you’ve finished eating that cookie, you’ll remember that you don’t believe in all this publishing revolution stuff anyway, and go back to your paper peddling day job. And you can cheer yourself up with this video.

This is what we all really want to see: Jon Stewart interviewing Jeff Bezos, promoting the Kindle’s USP of one-handed reading. Visionary disruptive innovator or chuckling maniac? You be the judge.

Related articles

• Tips on How to Write an Amazon Kindle Book (kindlereaderreview.com)
• Stephen King Helps Amazon Launch New Kindle (Guardian, 9 Feb 09)
• The Revenge of Amazon.com’s ‘Chuckling Maniac’ (gawker.com)
• Doing the Math on a Amazon Kindle (puhala.com)
• Elgan: Here comes the e-book revolution (Computer World, 7 Feb 09)
• Kindle and eBook Formats (loo.me)

See also

• Joe Wikert’s Kindleville blog

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1. download the slides from your favourite presentations
2. watch Chris Brogan’s presentation on Blogging and Social Media.

Enjoy!

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The London School of Journalism is showing just how Second Life can be used to enhance online learning with a series of free lectures which are proving extremely popular. Unusual though it may look to anyone who hasn’t tried teaching or learning in the virtual world, SL offers advantages over other distance learning methods that make it feel more like a face-to-face environment. Lecturers can deliver their talk to students from around the world and receive immediate feedback and questions from their audience. The level of interactivity is somehow helped by the fact that each participant appears as an avatar, giving the impression of all being in the same room.

Although the lecturers use voice, the students can type their questions into chat so that they can be dealt with in an organised way. The LSJ’s own students go online to attend the lectures, and promotion across SL also draws in new interest from aspiring and practising writers, journalists and educators. More than 100 universities and colleges are on SL, although many haven’t managed to make full use of this platform yet, and the LSJ are showing how it can be used to best advantage while raising international awareness of their presence.

Although the LSJ hasn’t yet started giving workshops on SL I’ve also attended and organised workshops and discussion groups myself and the experience of sitting round a virtual table talking with a group is remarkably similar to a real life meeting. The possibilities for education on SL are undoubtedly going to make it increasingly appealing as a way of attracting students who want to learn online. The lectures and classes have so far mainly been free on SL, and I’m sure this will continue, but there is also the possibility of using private-access land and buildings which only allow students on fee-paying courses to attend. Over the coming year I believe more colleges and individual tutors will use this to add virtual workshops and lectures for their registered students, making education one of the main activities likely to have most success on SL. As education and publishing are so closely linked it’s worth building up a strong network of contacts and collaborating, especially as SL is relatively inexpensive and the pioneers will find it easiest to be noticed.

The LSJ arrived in SL last summer and established a presence quickly by talking with the organisers of main groups in writing and education and linking into already established networks rather than trying to go it alone. An extra bonus on SL is that events can be filmed and broadcast to a much larger audience, and these lectures have been videoed by Geo Meek. Here’s an extract:

You can find more on the LSJ YouTube Channel and Blip TV. I’ve been to the lectures and found them invaluable, taught to the kind of high standard expected from the LSJ and with questions of similar standard from the audience.

I heard that the LSJ have been so pleased with the way the lectures are going that they’re moving more of their distance learning on to SL to take advantage of the high level of interactivity with students. So I caught up with Titan Thorne, who organises the LSJ’s virtual presence, to ask about their experiences and future plans:

Adele: Is it right that you’re planning to move your online lectures to SL?

Titan: We are certainly hoping to move a great deal of our lectures to the SL format, however, not everything is SL compatible.

Adele: Did you have online lectures before and did you use other methods?

Titan: We used a very simple text box format on one of our websites which students would log into. The lecturer would type out his lecture, and the students would then interact with questions.

Adele: What do you feel are the advantages of using SL for online lectures? I remember your lecturer Andrew Knight enjoying the interactivity with students.

Titan: As you can imagine, our old system was not able to provide the same interactivity that SL can. The fact that the lecturer now speaks using SL voice is far more interesting and easy to listen to. Both students and lecturers alike agree with this!

Adele: Have you been surprised by the standard of ability shown by SL users who come to the lectures - many people think they’ll just find game players there?

Titan: I think SL can fall under an ‘online game’ type category rather too easily. So when I first came to SL I was definitely surprised to see how big online education was - with various open lectures/poetry and short story readings/literary competitions etc (the list could go on forever!). A year later, though, and I can still easily find the high standard of writers that I think many of us have become used to.

Adele: Could you explain the discounts offered to SL users who register for your courses and do you know yet if SL has helped you attract international students?

Titan: We are offering a 10% discount to any SL users who sign up on one of our distance learning courses. We have certainly attracted many people to our lectures, but it is too early to tell if people are keen to sign up – we’re only on our 3rd lecture at present. Hopefully in a few months time we might see some interested faces!

Adele: Do you intend to use SL for your courses in other ways?

Titan: We hope to hold tutorial classes in SL for our current LSJ Students. This will, as mentioned previously, increase interactivity between teacher and student with both of them using SL voice.

Adele: What do you think helped the LSJ make such a successful entrance into SL and make users so aware of your presence quickly, bearing in mind that many organisations have tried and failed?

Titan: Without sounding too much like a Hollywood movie – teamwork! By this I mean we have tried to get as many people from the LSJ into SL as possible. Most of our lecturers and administrators have got SL accounts which they try to use as much as possible. With everyone on board it was easy to start transferring our students across to SL, and with that, the lectures came too. As far as the SL side is concerned, a strong list of affiliates groups helped us to quickly establish ourselves. If anyone is thinking of setting up an educational group in SL, I would recommend working alongside the pre-established groups, and not against them! Each group brings its own ‘students’ and you can help each other grow by finding other events and groups that your students will be interested in. We are currently compiling a ‘Second Life recommendation list’ for our students which will point them in the direction of other useful people and places to visit.

Adele: How do you help students make the most of SL and find sims useful and safe for them, while avoiding the types of areas criticised recently in the press?

Titan: I think the best method is to talk to as many SL educational enthusiasts as possible, and try as much out as you can! Exploration is key in the SL world, and anything I find that I think is useful, I recommend!

For further information on the LSJ visit www.lsj.org and to explore their island in SL you’ll need to register for free at http://secondlife.com and go to http://slurl.com/secondlife/LSJ%20Student%20Union/23/117/32

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Welcome back, dear reader, and a belated Happy New Year! Are you optimistic about this year? The news is so full of economic doom and gloom these days, I’d understand if you were feeling a bit mis. January was a long, dark month. Then today saw the start of the heaviest snowfall in the UK for 20 years. This is also the traditional season for a staff cull and restructure among some publishers. Those left may find their salaries as frozen as their fingers, their workload increased and their budgets squeezed.

The recession was declared a reality in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve seen a few high street shops close, including Woolworths, parent company of wholesalers Bertrams and EUK, causing a bit of a distribution flap at the end of last year.

But is it true, as Publisher’s Weekly predicted last month, that 2009 will be “the worst year for publishing in decades”? I think that’s a little bleak. Easy for me to say as an industry outsider, you might think. I’m not saying it won’t be tough. But I think there are opportunities for publishing this year. It’s just that I might mean something different than you when I say ‘publishing’…

What I think is in trouble is the traditional business model of print publishing by media corporations: bad times. But publishing is changing radically, and for those prepared to embrace the new realities, technologies and opportunities: good times.

Publishing doesn’t just mean shifting product. It doesn’t mean churning out ever-increasing volumes of paper products (including all those marketing leaflets and catalogues) when it’s clear that people do not access information in remotely the same way they did even a few years ago. People’s attention is shifting away from print and on to digital media.

Anyone who writes a blog, records a podcast, uploads a website, films a YouTube video - or uploads an ebook, a video or some music to Lulu, Yudu or Createspace - is also a publisher. When I press the ‘publish’ button on this post - I have just published something.

An article in Time Magazine a couple of weeks ago sums it up well:

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world–i.e., zero and nothing–printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic.

One of the interesting side-effects of the problems with EUK/Bertrams was that many publishers and booksellers were able to get around distribution problems by dealing with each other direct. The value of a distribution business is in its relationships. If we can manage without the middle-man and form our own relationships, do we still need large wholesale distributors?

Part of the value of a publishing business is in its production capabilities and marketing channels. If authors can cut out the middle-man, self-publish and develop relationships with their readers direct using free online marketing tools - do we still need publishers..? This is the year when ‘vanity publishing’ will stop being a dirty word. Publishing will, finally, become disintermediated.

Publishing will still be around, but it will change into something you may not recognise. The possibility of publishing increasingly becoming an activity done by authors rather than (or as well as) publishers is a very real one.

So will publishing as we know it become a service industry and provide production and marketing services to authors? Will it become a rights business? Will its value be in editorial judgment, gatekeeping and filtering? In providing a brand identity? What IS publishing? The Association of Online Publishers define it as “original, branded, quality content.” But how will that content be delivered in the future? Who will decide the quality, and who will brand it? Does the average reader really care who the publisher is?

Are we finally reaching a tipping point in the industry, as happend in the music industry a few years back? It seems very up in the air at the moment. But these are the questions to think about in the coming months. Meanwhile, wrap up warm - and don’t have disintermediation nightmares.

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Make sure you unplug from the Internet for a couple of days at least - OK? For those who can’t get enough social media, and will be eating Twitter bird on Thursday, check out the 12 Days of Social Media Christmas.

Look out for more shiny social media goodness from us in 2009.

All good wishes,

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