The decision to discontinue a popular conference was not one we made lightly. But after TOC 2013, we realized that a conference was no longer the best vehicle for us to contribute to publishing’s forward movement. When we first announced TOC, I said:

“Publishing isn’t about putting ink on paper, and moving blocks of said paper through warehouses to readers. It’s about knowledge dissemination, learning, entertainment, codification of subject authority — the real jobs that authors and publishers do for readers… Our goal is to bring together people who are pushing the boundaries of publishing and those who want to learn from them, and to provide a table of contents (TOC), so to speak, on what modern publishers need to know.”

Seven years on, “digital publishing” is well on its way to simply being “publishing,” and options for both publishers and readers continue to evolve and expand. Publishers are significantly more change-hardy than they were in 2006. And there are plenty of other events that are helping publishers keep up with new technology offerings in the space.

This doesn’t mean that O’Reilly is no longer committed to pushing forward the reinvention of the publishing industry. But we’re shifting the focus of our publishing tools group from hosting the conversation about publishing technology to bringing our own tools to market.

We’ve been developers of publishing technology since the days we first started publishing. In the “scratch your own itch” spirit of the open source movement, we co-created DocBook in the early ’90s, published the first commercial web magazine, GNN (initially developed as a demo to help bookstores grok the Internet!) in 1993, and launched Safari Books Online in 2000. And we’ve used the internal production toolchain we built over the years to create a digital distribution business that now provides DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats not only from O’Reilly but also from Microsoft Press, Wiley, Elsevier, No Starch, and many other technical publishers.

For the past few years, we’ve been focusing on development of a platform code-named Atlas, and bringing that to fruition is central to our future plans. Atlas is a tool for collaborative writing (currently being used by authors of about two-thirds of the books in our pipeline), one-touch publishing in all formats (including print-on-demand), and an interactive online reading platform that takes full advantage of the digital realm. We believe it takes a big step towards fulfilling the promise of digital publishing. You’ll be hearing much more about Atlas in the coming months.

You can continue to follow our thoughts about publishing on the O’Reilly Radar and on the Safari tech blog.

TOC was a great ride, and we’ll miss many things about that annual gathering of the future-positive publishing community. Ideas and connections from TOC will continue to inform our work and, we hope, yours. I especially want to thank TOC program chairs Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert for the passion, creativity, and commitment they brought to their work. I wish them well, and am confident that they’ll continue to help shape the publishing industry’s future.

Mobile retail access is a vital part of an overarching brand experience as point-of-purchase becomes less of a physical retail space, and more of a window of opportunity within the customer’s experience. Apple put a foot on the first rung of that ladder for itself, when in 2005 it started rolling out its now customary mobile payment system that turned every store employee into roaming checkouts in brightly coloured t-shirts, ready to tap your shoulder just when you’re certain life simply will not do without this gadget; a few swipes later it’s yours. Since 2011, their easy pay app allows every customer with an iPhone to check themselves out. With flourishing mobile access to digital retail platforms and the payment methods to go along with it, instant gratification for consumption desires is now a reality. The whole world is set to become even more of a retail space. Commercial focus rests on removing retail pain points from the digital scan of opportunity, and initiating first contact.

To that end, Starbucks released a $10 for $5 deal, available as a tie-in to its mobile payment and loyalty scheme, onto Groupon a few weeks ago. Although Starbucks – through extensive in-store PR and word-of-mouth of their ventures into mobile payment in partnership with Square (and its inevitable hiccups) – already had a solid mobile customer base, if there’s one thing the green siren does well, it’s expansion, be it in cup size, commercial spaces or customer numbers. The offer promptly crashed the Groupon servers, which speaks for the potential mass appeal of mobile retail.

Bricks-and-mortar stores pivoting around realisations of a lifestyle or experience have been around for a while. The National Geographic Store, with its ostensive educational mission is a prime example of this; Starbucks itself has cultivated an infinitely reproducible concept of coffee shop cosiness through wifi and overstuffed chairs for the past decade and a half; and Apple certainly sells identical experiences in customer service at its store. All those established concepts successfully turned consumption into an experience. Digital retail is now exploring how experiences can be turned into consumption.

Digital access to lifestyle platforms like blogs and fan communities has underpinned the development of the cultural long tail, and in its wake, the ecommerce of cultural goods such as books, films and music is now well established, both in hard copies and increasingly in instantly accessible digital formats.

The idea of retail tie-ins to go along with cultural experience is an intriguing access route to customers because, for the most part, online retail browsing still lacks the recreational appeal and thrill of exploration inherent in a regular downtown shopping afternoon. In the absence of the experience of a “real life” store, digital retail spaces must develop their own environments – or cleverly appropriate existing domains.

The BBC’s Good Food website is currently expanding its retail links, now offering near seamless access to Tesco’s online shop and delivery service via a layover window. The transition is so fluid, there’s hardly time for reason to catch up with an intrepid hostess to remind her that she likely cannot pull off chocolate soufflés for six. This is a hefty scoop for Tesco, as Good Food is an established and trusted name in home cooking and lifestyle, and from within an environment of user-recommended recipes and educational content on, for instance, how to stop soufflés from collapsing into puddles of sadness, the grocery giant’s stock pretty much sells itself.

Good Food’s retail links are not available for mobile access, yet. But as soon as they are, I am sure I will be plotting completely unattainable menus from the relative comfort of my bus commute.

Prolific social and cultural platforms online create their own powerful demand for relevant lifestyle accessories. All the ecommerce companies need to do is show up like an ice cream van outside a lido.

Observe Goodreads: Amazon has recently acquired the social cataloguing network for an undisclosed sum. With the acquisition, Amazon is closing a gap in its data collection: information on how readers talk about books. They already have intimate knowledge of what individual users buy, and, through Kindle, access to information on how quickly a book is read, where the reader pauses and where one might even abandon a text. The value of this new data for fine tuning retail stocks as well as Amazon’s own publishing ventures is immeasurable. But, as Dan Barker points out over on The Bookseller blog, there had previously been a lack of quality community discussion. There will be little surprise if the visual hierarchy of Goodreads’ retail links shift, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. As traditional broad segmentation of consumers is rendered almost dysfunctional in a digital marketplace of long tail interests and hyper-individualist customers, Amazon is looking not to buy out the market stalls, but to eavesdrop on the local chatter.

The process of mutual absorption between cultural and commercial capital is well underway. Only last week Twitter released its #music app, combining real time information on the most talked about artists and social sharing with access to the iTunes store, Spotify and Rdio. And the readers’ community Small Demons is looking to catalogue and cross-reference anything one can purchase or experience ever mentioned in any given book – foods, films, locations, fashion. Retail links to media goods are already available, helping us stock up our iTunes account accordingly as we read High Fidelity, for instance. The lifestyle data road is being paved by consumers, and expansion into other markets will surely come.

This article originally appeared on the Brand Perfect site. It’s republished with permission.

Publishing, even in its unique position of having catalogues of books and journals detailing the dangers as well as the solutions of climate change, seems impervious to what it produces. As to why, we can ignore that question for now. The world can’t wait for our soul searching. But simply stated, how we produce all books has been separated from what we produce. Therefore we’re not prepared to take our own advice.

Now we are in a situation that must be addressed if we as an industry and a planet will survive. In order to reduce our carbon footprint, part of the solution to this global crisis, we are in a most enviable position to do that and not next year but now.

Ebook production on a much larger scale as well as a massive cutback in the production of bound books will make a huge difference in our collective carbon footprint. The production and distribution of ebooks has so many positive benefits for the planet while also greatly reducing costs. Just a cursory listing of these benefits: decrease in removal of old forest growth, decrease in fuel consumption for transport, and decrease in land and water used in the storage and creation of physical books. Start there and begin to look at this picture in terms of dollars as well as taking that leap into the new technologies we now possess and/or are creating for ebooks and this challenge proves most exciting.

As we all know, ebooks are allowing for faster, cheaper production but also a cheaper way to reprint, update, and correct all material published. It allows for cheaper storage and sharing and is being improved upon daily. Yes, as with all change there is resistance and new problems that need our attention.

But we must turn our attention instead to investing in alternative sources of energy. Websites can be run off servers that are solar- and wind-powered. There’s no wait time needed for this transfer from fossil fuel-produced electricity to wind and solar power. Large wind farms and solar plants already exist. While these changes in energy consumption may seem trivial in terms of finances, they are stupendous in terms of our need to drastically reduce our carbon footprints.

I don’t know why the publishing industry resembles a doctor who won’t take her own advice. It seems like such a foolish waste of our human capital, along with the planet’s. Hanging onto the past by denying the present is a terrible business model. We have all the means necessary to correct this if we plan on remaining in a sustainable future.

Every so often one actually grabs my attention. Ironically, the latest one is called Earned Attention. I first watched the video embedded below and was curious to learn more about it. Here’s a quote from the video foreword that really resonated with me:

Attention is the ultimate currency. It is the ultimate scarce resource. It is the only commodity that matters.

How true. And even more so in the publishing world these days. We’re all talking about discovery and rising about all the noise. If you can truly earn the attention of your target audience you’re clearly doing something right, and “earn” is the key word here.

Here’s another quote from the end of the video below:

A book that you never actually finish.

I’ll bet that’s a turn-off to a lot of people. Most of us just want to read a book from start to finish and be done with it. Every so often though you want the book to be a part of an ongoing stream of information. That’s how I view Earned Attention. It’s one of those products that should continue feeding your brain with more insight, long after you read the last word of the printed book.

I’m looking forward to digging into this one. My only disappointment is that the accompanying apps are for iOS only. As an Android convert I’ve decided this is the worst six-word sentence I’ve ever read:

Available for iOS (Android coming soon)

I see that sentence far too frequently. I guess I’ll have to dig out that first-gen iPad of mine and see if I can use the app there.

This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 site. It’s republished with permission.

The more people use social media, the bigger a desire to be followed, liked, and shared. We live in an age where online popularity has the ridiculous ability to control major business decisions or determine someone’s career. Yet, there’s never been a time when big numbers can be inflated so easily and deceptively. For example:

1. According to the New York Times, people can buy fake followers on Twitter for $18 per 1,000. I’ve also seen shady businesses on Ebay offer fake Facebook followers for a similar price range.
2. Facebook claims to offer an effective advertising medium, yet their average click-through rate is .0005 (5 in 10,000) In addition, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 4 out of 5 Facebook users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site. In addition, researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that less than 1% of fans of the 200 biggest brands on Facebook actually engaged.
3. A guy claiming to have 50,000 Twitter followers bragged that he could use his influence to generate a bunch of sales for my new book. I put him to the test, let him send out his “tweets,” but never received a single order related to his audience. (For some time-wasting fun, check out http://fakers.statuspeople.com/ to help analyze how many legitimate Twitter followers someone actually has. 59% of Barack Obama’s followers are fake.)
4. According to ConstantContact, the average open rate for email newsletters is only around 19%. So, an author who claims to have 5,000 newsletter subscribers is probably reaching around 1,000 readers.
5. My own experience with the ShareThis WordPress plug-in for bloggers revealed that anyone can easily run up the share counter that’s displayed without actually sharing the information from a blog post with anyone. The counter may display “100” shares, but there’s no way to verify an actual number.
6. I’ve seen some bloggers (I don’t mean to bash, so they’ll remain nameless) promote an artificial number on their blog that combines all of their different social media followers and subscribers into one large number, which is designed to make you think their platform is bigger than it really is.

When the human ego merges with social media, there seems to be no limit to the level of nonsense that people will create. Numbers that are supposed to mean so much can actually mean very little.

As my statistics professor warned, be careful about putting too much faith in numbers. Just because someone displays 10,000 Twitter followers or Facebook friends doesn’t mean their sphere of influence is at that level. In an age where numbers are easily manipulated, we’re better off focusing on the only numbers that really matter, which is how many books sold, how many new readers added, and how many dollars deposited into the bank.

I’m drawn to LinkedIn now more than ever before. The rate of connection requests I’ve been receiving there has also been accelerating over the past few months. Maybe it’s due to all the uncertainty of the publishing industry but I think there’s more to it than anxious job seekers.

There are all sorts of terrific publishing groups on LinkedIn where opinions are shared and discussed. A good example is our TOC LinkedIn group; check out the stats here. We’re rapidly approaching 20K members. If you’re not a member you’re missing a great deal of terrific industry banter.

You may have heard of LinkedIn’s recent acquisition of Pulse. Although Pulse isn’t my favorite news platform it’s probably in my top five. It’s the combination of LinkedIn and Pulse that intrigues me though.

LinkedIn has always been a great place to network with others in your industry. Adding a dedicated content service like Pulse is smart and I believe it’s just the first step in LinkedIn’s goal of becoming a publisher. Well, I’m not sure they’d consider “publisher” as one of their future roles but that’s basically where they’re heading.

Lifelong learning is important today and it’s only going to be more important tomorrow. We’ve all had to adapt and grow professionally more than our parents had to. Our children will be asked to grow and adapt more than we’ve had to. As LinkedIn becomes the Google of job and career search you can bet they want users to spend as much time on the site as possible. What better way to do so than to offer a variety of self-improvement and professional development content for all those lifelong learners? Looking for an entry-level accounting job? Here’s content explaining the 10 most under-appreciated features of Excel. Want to become a better salesperson? Here’s a piece on how to close the deal. You get the idea.

Just as Google recently bought Frommer’s to feed travel content into their search engine I fully expect LinkedIn to sign more deals to acquire rights to job training, career development, professional certification, etc., content. Some of the material will be written exclusively for LinkedIn but a lot could be redeployed from books.

So although they won’t publish books, just like Google isn’t publishing Frommer’s books, look for LinkedIn to add more and more content to their service. And if you’re a publisher (or author) with a rich set of career and professional development content you should consider reaching out to LinkedIn to see if your content might be a good fit on their platform.

This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 site. It’s republished with permission.

It was a long day, packed with panel debates and keynotes, with discussion topics ranging from ebook strategies in large- and medium-sized houses as well as newly-launched ventures, to author/publisher relationships to big data analysis in publishing, to lessons learned from the music industry. Yet in every detail the focus was (for once) not on some English language case studies but on the local German market.

The result was a thorough, and often controversial, portrait of the now strongly expanding ebook market in Germany as it had not been painted anywhere else so far or in so much depth. While Aufbau’s Tom Erben proudly acknowledged they “earn really good money on ebooks now”, on some products representing up to 50 percent of a title’s revenues, and around 15 percent on average for new releases, he nevertheless believes strongly that in its core the culture of publishing, the work with authors and content will hardly change.

Joerg Pfuhl, former CEO of Random House, and now a board member of Edel publishing and a consultant, completely disagreed as he spoke on how widely digital is about to change everything in the industry, echoing Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn, who in his keynote address underlined that the transition of ebooks was just beginning and will take the time-span of a generation.

The conference also brought together top executives from the traditional publishing industry with a fair number of new innovators, like Nikola Richter, an author of both nonfiction and poetry. After having done a few book with “old” publishing houses, Richter is about to launch her own publishing company, Mikrotext, in cooperation with Holtzbrink’s epubli self-publishing portal. Richter is busy producing her first titles, including an essay on digital by German media and literature legend Rolf Hochhuth, alongside new pieces of short fiction by young authors, while marketing, promoting, blogging, and engaging in social media; despite all those activities she is still finding time to create a new collection of poems, printed simply on paper.

More detailed numbers from the event can be found here and in a few days a selection of  the presentations will be available at the conference website here. Although most of the documents are in German any of the popular online free translation sites can convert them to your native language.

The conference was a joint initiative by the German trade magazine buchreport with Tools of Change, and in partnership with the German Publishers Forum. The program was curated jointly with the TOC team and moderated by Ruediger Wischenbart.

In a recent edition of Scientific American, Ferris Jabr took a look at how technology is affecting the way we read and the differences between reading on screens and reading on paper. Jabr says that though many studies have been conducted across many fields since the 1980s, the matter of digital versus paper is far from settled. Still, he notes, there is compelling “evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports” that shows a notable difference in the tactile experience of reading on screens versus paper that leads to navigational difficulties when reading lengthy texts, which may in turn have negative effects on comprehension. There’s also evidence, he says, that reading on screens may be more taxing on our mental resources, making retention a bit more difficult.

Jabr delves into the science behind how our brains process written language and highlights a physical issue with reading on screens:

“Although e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create pagination — sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and illustrations — the screen only displays a single virtual page: it is there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead.”

Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office told Jabr, “The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized. … I don’t think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book.”

Jabr takes an in-depth look at several studies that explore the implications of interfering with intuitive navigation of text and inhibiting people from “mapping the journey in their minds.” Though he notes that some types of writing, such as online news articles, web comics, tap essays and data journalism projects, benefit from or even require the digital screen, he concludes that “[w]hen it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage.” You can read his full feature piece at Scientific American.

In related news, The Guardian’s Alison Flood took a look at ebook anxieties arising from the digital revolution. She explores questions emerging in the digital era, from whether or not an ebook can be sold “used” to repercussions of authors being able to endlessly update their work post publication to the fact that page numbers — if they even exist — differ from device to device.

Robert Darnton, scholar, author and Harvard University librarian, called the situation “grave,” pointing out to Flood that “[i]f you’re citing a digital version of a book, often you can’t cite the pages.” He also said that though documents have historically been “slippery,” noting there’s no definitive text of King Lear, the fact that authors can easily make changes to published works means “you take a problem like that, multiply it by 1,000, and that is the world we are in.” You can read Flood’s full piece at The Guardian.

Sunlight Foundation unveils Churnalism US

The Sunlight Foundation unveiled a new Churnalism US tool this week that helps uncover plagiarism of press releases — where instead of writing original copy, a reporter simply revises a press release, or in some cases publishes it verbatim. Rebecca Rosen reports at The Atlantic that the tool “will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you’ll get a notification of a detected ‘churn’ and you’ll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side.” She says it will also compare Wikipedia articles against corporate press releases.

Jonathan Gitlin reports at ArsTechnica that the Sunlight Foundation created its database of press releases “from clearing houses like EurekAlert and MarketWire as well as from RSS feeds that capture PR from Fortune 500 companies, important non-profits and think tanks, trade organizations, Congressional offices, and also Wikipedia.” He explains that users have several options to execute a search: enter a URL, copy and paste blocks of text, or use a browser extension. He notes that the tool not only will will identify straight copying of text, but can also “highlight cases where quotes have been selectively edited or used without context.”

You can learn more about the Churnalism tool and how it works in following video:

Building a cookbook in the digital age

In a feature piece at Medium, Chef John Sundstrom detailed his experience writing his recently published cookbook, Lark — Cooking Against the Grain. He teamed up with former chef and now programmer and web developer Jared Stoneberg, and the two decided to take control of the content creation and formed their own production company to produce the book in print and app formats. Sundstrom explains why they opted for the dual media approach:

“Producing both formats simultaneously was an approach we hadn’t seen before. It allows users to enjoy the tactile pleasures of the print book while making their menu plans in comfort, and then, when ready, to bring their tablets with them to the market, check off their shopping lists as they go, and share the results with friends and family.”

The pair gathered a team of 10 people from a variety of disciplines to cover their bases, including: a photographer, videographer, book and graphic designer, app designer, programmers, recipe co-writer and social media manager. Observing that the traditional publishing model prevented the opportunity to involve a cookbook’s potential audience during its creation and development, Sundstrom and Stoneberg chose to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the book to optimize audience engagement from creation through publication.

The group met their funding goal in 10 days and concluded that from beginning to end, they produced the cookbook and its app twice as fast as they could have using the traditional publishing model. You can read Sundstrom’s complete account at Medium.

Tip us off

News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along.

Related:

• The ebook evolution
• What Cookbook Publishers Can Learn from the Music Industry
• A war story, a Kindle Single, and hope for long-form journalism
• Dominant form of journalism foretold by Reynolds Journalism Institute
• More Publishing Week in Review coverage

In ‘Good to Great’, Collins and his research team discovered that the great companies didn’t ask what product or which strategy first. They instead asked who. Who do we need on our (company) bus for a successful business journey? Company owners Hewlett and Packard, for instance, consciously built their future by hiring outstanding people even before they knew what they’d be making or what direction they’d be driving. Whenever they found these people they hired them even without a specific job in mind. Hewlett Packard became one of the great American success stories and outperformed the stock market by many times. They were one of many cases that emphasized having the right people is the most important element for an organization to achieve greatness.

So that begs the question who are the right people? More specifically, who are the right people for the publishing industry if it is to thrive in a marketplace disrupted by the digital revolution? I’ve had a lot of conversations of late about what constitutes the right person and have tried to document the most well-considered and proven profiles for success.

Several times I’ve heard from hiring managers that someone with a willingness to experiment is important. These days, for marketing programs, that means more than just plying social media. Understanding and employing tools with acronyms like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and PPC (Pay Per Click) are needed to make up a comprehensive strategy to exploit new opportunities in mobile devices and other digital channels.

Thinking quantitatively has been another common theme in conversation. Content specialists that rely on more data as opposed to anecdotal evidence to justify new products are in demand. Not a few people have said that they prefer to recruit outside of the normal publishing talent pool for people who think in numbers. Indeed, I’ve had to expand my reach beyond the industry to identify talent that suits clients’ newest needs. This goes for positions like Technical Project Manager, Software Developer, and Digital Product Analyst, to name a few.

Given the discoveries in ‘Good to Great’ one can project for publishing that an entrepreneurial mindset with content expertise and digital know-how should be the target for recruitment efforts. Easy, right? Not exactly. And not cheap if you’re targeting these people from other industries. But certain publishers have recruited younger prospects with some skills that can be trained up. The new hires enter a publishing industry in the midst of experimenting with new business models so adaptability has to be one of their personal attributes. But they should also be excited at the prospect of re-imagining a venerable industry. Jim Collins posits that when you have these kinds of people the question of motivating and management largely goes away since they are by definition self-motivated.

Importing technical skills is essential but I think it’s important to note that the case studies in ‘Good to Great’ showed that technology by itself didn’t drive success. For example, the mandate to put at least one robot on assembly lines at GM failed to staunch the loss of market share to Japanese car makers in the 80′s. By contrast the great companies applied carefully selected technology to accelerate their growth strategy already in progress. So even though technical skills are important, core personality traits are even more important according to the research in ‘Good to Great’.

So, if personal attributes combined with creative and digital skills define the right people for publishing, how do we find them? Some have tried an impersonal automated approach to locate these special people. Take a minute for a little thought experiment to see if this approach sounds right in vetting people with the proper personal make up. Some of my hiring clients have definitively said that this method misses some desirable prospects. Some companies do personalize their recruiting by tasking their executives with it but is this an efficient use of their time and skills? It takes time… lots of time to tap the best prospects. To do it right one has to identify candidates whether or not they’re applying to ads or putting themselves out on job sites. But having the right people for your bus is vital so shouldn’t the method to land them be as thorough and efficient as possible?

This post originally appeared on Michael Foy’s Publishing Search blog. It’s republished with permission.

I grabbed that image from the search results for “Windows 8″ on our website this morning. If you click on the English title you’ll see this screen:

You can either buy the English language version from here or click the Deutsch link in the bottom right corner and this edition is displayed:

We’re in the process of adding more German titles to our online catalog and you can expect to see other languages added in the future as well.

Why is this significant? As I’ve said before, I believe every publisher needs to build a direct channel so they aren’t overly dependent on other retailers. I’m not suggesting a direct channel replaces other retail channels but it’s a very important extension that helps publishers establish a relationship with their customers, learn from the data generated and create even better products in the future. By adding other languages to the assortment we’re making it easier for anyone around the globe to find the O’Reilly content they want on one site. And, of course, it’s all being delivered with the multi-format (EPUB, mobi & PDF), DRM-free approach pioneered by O’Reilly.

This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 site. It’s republished with permission.