E-books and e-publishing - Samuel Vaknin (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗
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TrendSiters
Digital Content
And Web Technologies
1st EDITION
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Editing and Design:
Lidija Rangelovska
Lidija Rangelovska
A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2002
Not for Sale! Non-commercial edition.
(C) 2002 Copyright Lidija Rangelovska.
All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not
be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission
from:
Lidija Rangelovska - write to:
palma@unet.com.mk or to
vaknin@link.com.mk
Visit the TrendSiters Web Site:
http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb.html
ISBN: 9989-929-23-8
Created by:LIDIJA RANGELOVSKA
REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA
Additional articles about Digital Content on the Web:
http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb.html
Sam Vaknin’s eBookWeb.org articles:
http://ebookweb.org.master.com/texis/master/search/?q=Vaknin
Sam Vaknin’s “InternetContent” Author Archive:
http://www.internetcontent.net/AuthorProfile.asp?AuthorID=14
Essays dedicated to the new media, doing business on the web,
digital content, its creation and distribution, e-publishing,
e-books, digital reference, DRM technology, and other related
issues.
http://samvak.tripod.com/internet.html
Visit Sam Vaknin’s United Press International (UPI) Article
Archive - Click HERE!
This letter constitutes a permission to reprint or mirror any
and all of the materials mentioned or linked to herein subject
to appropriate credit and linkback.
Every article published MUST include the author bio, including
the link to the author’s web site.
AUTHOR BIO:
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism
Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He
is a columnist for Central Europe Review and eBookWeb , a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business
Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central
East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101 .
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the
Government of Macedonia.
Visit Sam’s Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
The Articles (please scroll down to review them):
E-books and e-publishing
The Future of Electronic Publishing
I. The Disintermediation of Content
II. E(merging) Books
III. Invasion of the Amazons
IV. Revolt of the Scholars
V. The Kidnapping of Content
VI. The Miraculous Conversion
VII. The Medium and the Message
VIII. The Idea of Reference
IX. Will Content ever be Profitable?
X. Jamaican OverDrive - LDC’s and LCD’s
XI. An Embarrassment of Riches
XII. The Fall and Fall of p-Zines
XIII. The Internet and the Library
XIV. A Brief History of the Book
XV. The Affair of the Vanishing Content
XVI. Revolt of the Poor - The Demise of Intellectual Property
XVII. The Territorial Web
XVIII. The Incredible Web
XIX. Does Free Content Sell?
XX. Copyright and Free Online Scholarship
XXI. The Second Gutenberg
XXII. The E-book Evangelist
Web Technology and Trends
I. Bright Planet, Deep Web
II. The Seamless Internet
III. The Polyglottal Internet
IV. Deja Googled
V. Maps of Cyberspace
VI. The Universal Interface
VII. Internet Advertising - What Went Wrong?
VIII. The Economics of Spam
IX. Don’t Blink - Interview with Jeffrey Harrow
X. The Case of the Compressed Image
The Internet and the Digital Divide
I. The Internet - A Medium or a Message?
II. The Internet in the Countries in Transition
III. Leapfrogging Transition
IV. The Selfish Net - The Semantic Web
Author: Sam Vaknin
Contact Info: palma@unet.com.mk; vaknin@link.com.mk
E-BOOKS AND E-PUBLISHING
The Future of Electronic Publishing
First published by United Press International (UPI)
By: Sam Vaknin
UNESCO’s somewhat arbitrary definition of “book” is:
““Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages
excluding covers”.
The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change
all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken
place in the last few months. Time Warner’s iPublish
and MightyWords (partly owned by Barnes and Noble) were the
last in a string of resounding failures which cast in doubt
the business model underlying digital content. Everything
seemed to have gone wrong: the dot.coms dot bombed, venture
capital dried up, competing standards fractured an already
fragile marketplace, the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky
and awkward, the software unwieldy, the e-books badly written
or already in the public domain.
Terrified by the inexorable process of disintermediation (the
establishment of direct contact between author and readers,
excluding publishers and bookstores) and by the ease with
which digital content can be replicated - publishers resorted
to draconian copyright protection measures (euphemistically
known as “digital rights management”). This further alienated
the few potential readers left. The opposite model of “viral”
or “buzz” marketing (by encouraging the dissemination of free
copies of the promoted book) was only marginally more
successful.
Moreover, e-publishing’s delivery platform, the Internet, has
been transformed beyond recognition since March 2000.
From an open, somewhat anarchic, web of networked computers -
it has evolved into a territorial, commercial, corporate
extension of “brick and mortar” giants, subject to government
regulation. It is less friendly towards independent (small)
publishers, the backbone of e-publishing. Increasingly, it is
expropriated by publishing and media behemoths. It is treated
as a medium for cross promotion, supply chain management, and
customer relations management. It offers only some minor
synergies with non-cyberspace, real world, franchises and
media properties. The likes of Disney and Bertelsmann have
swung a full circle from considering the Internet to be the
next big thing in New Media delivery - to frantic efforts to
contain the red ink it oozed all over their otherwise
impeccable balance sheets.
But were the now silent pundits right all the same? Is the
future of publishing (and other media industries) inextricably
intertwined with the Internet?
The answer depends on whether an old habit dies hard.
Internet surfers are used to free content. They are very
reluctant to pay for information (with precious few
exceptions, like the “Wall Street Journal“‘s electronic
edition). Moreover, the Internet, with 3 billion pages listed
in the Google search engine (and another 15 billion in
“invisible” databases), provides many free substitutes to
every information product, no matter how superior. Web based
media companies (such as Salon and Britannica.com) have been
experimenting with payment and pricing models. But this is
besides the point. Whether in the form of subscription
(Britannica), pay per view (Questia), pay to print (Fathom),
sample and pay to buy the physical product (RealRead), or
micropayments (Amazon) - the public refuses to cough up.
Moreover, the advertising-subsidized free content Web site has
died together with Web advertising. Geocities - a community of
free hosted, ad-supported, Web sites purchased by Yahoo! - is
now selectively shutting down Web sites (when they exceed a
certain level of traffic) to convince their owners to revert
to a monthly hosting fee model. With Lycos in trouble in
Europe, Tripod may well follow suit shortly. Earlier this
year, Microsoft has shut down ListBot (a host of discussion
lists). Suite101 has stopped paying its editors (content
authors) effective January 15th. About.com fired hundreds of
category editors. With the ugly demise of Themestream, WebSeed
is the only content aggregator which tries to buck the trend
by relying (partly) on advertising revenue.
Paradoxically, e-publishing’s main hope may lie with its
ostensible adversary: the library. Unbelievably, e-publishers
actually tried to limit the access of library patrons to ebooks (i.e., the lending of e-books to multiple patrons). But,
libraries are not only repositories of knowledge and community
centres. They are also dominant promoters of new knowledge
technologies. They are already the largest buyers of e-books.
Together with schools and other educational institutions,
libraries can serve as decisive socialization agents and
introduce generations of pupils, students, and readers to the
possibilities and riches of e-publishing. Government use of ebooks (e.g., by the military) may have the same beneficial
effect.
As standards converge (Adobe’s Portable Document Format and
Microsoft’s MS Reader LIT format are likely to be the
winners), as hardware improves and becomes ubiquitous (within
multi-purpose devices or as standalone higher quality units),
as content becomes more attractive (already many new titles
are published in both print and electronic formats), as more
versatile information taxonomies (like the Digital Object
Identifier) are introduced, as the Internet becomes more
gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan - e-publishing is
likely to recover and flourish.
This renaissance will probably be aided by the gradual decline
of print magazines and by a strengthening movement for free
open source scholarly publishing. The publishing of periodical
content and academic research (including, gradually, peer
reviewed research) may be already shifting to the Web. Non-fiction and textbooks will follow. Alternative models of
pricing are already in evidence (author pays to publish,
author pays to obtain peer review, publisher pays to publish,
buy a physical product and gain access to enhanced online
content, and so on). Web site rating agencies will help to
discriminate between the credible and the incredible.
Publishing is moving - albeit kicking and screaming - online.
The Disintermediation of Content
By: Sam Vaknin
Are content brokers - publishers, distributors, and record
companies - a thing of the past?
In one word: disintermediation
The gradual removal of layers of content brokering and
intermediation - mainly in manufacturing marketing - is the
continuation of a long term trend. Consider music for
instance. Streaming audio on the internet (“soft radio”), or
downloadable MP3 files may render the CD obsolete - but they
were preceded by radio music broadcasts. But the novelty is
that the Internet provides a venue for the marketing of niche
products and reduces the barriers to entry previously imposed
by the need to invest in costly “branding” campaigns and
manufacturing and distribution activities.
This trend is also likely to restore the balance between
artists and the commercial exploiters of their products. The
very definition of “artist” will expand to encompass all
creative people. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to
“brand” oneself and to auction one’s services, ideas,
products, designs, experience, physique, or biography, etc.
directly to end-users and consumers. This is a return to pre-industrial times when artisans ruled the economic scene. Work
stability will suffer and work mobility will increase in a
landscape of shifting allegiances, head hunting, remote
collaboration, and similar labour market trends.
But distributors, publishers, and record companies are not
going to vanish. They are going to metamorphose. This is
because they fulfil a few functions and provide a few services
whose importance is only enhanced by the “free for all”
Internet culture.
Content intermediaries grade content and separate the
qualitative from the ephemeral and the atrocious. The deluge
of self-published and vanity published e-books, music tracks
and art works has generated few masterpieces and a lot of
trash. The absence of judicious filtering has unjustly given a
bad name to whole segments of the industry (e.g., small, or
web-based publishers). Consumers - inundated, disappointed and
exhausted - will pay a premium for content rating services.
Though driven by crass commercial considerations, most
publishers and record companies do apply certain quality
standards routinely and thus are positioned to provide these
rating services reliably.
Content brokers are relationship managers. Consider
distributors: they provide instant access to centralized,
continuously updated, “addressbooks” of clients (stores,
consumers, media, etc.). This reduces the time to market and
increases efficiency. It alters revenue models very
substantially. Content creators can thus concentrate on what
they do best: content creation, and reduce their overhead by
outsourcing the functions of distribution and relationships
management. The existence of central “relationship ledgers”
yields synergies which can be applied to all the clients of
the distributor. The distributor provides a single address
that content resellers converge on and feed off.
Distributors, publishers and record companies also provide
logistical support: warehousing, consolidated sales
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