Life as a beta geek

This is the first in a series of posts with my notes from 2008 Tools of Change conference, including presentations from Stephen Abram, Bill Burger, Douglas Rushkoff, Seth Godin and Ben Vershbow. The italicised passages are the descriptions of each segment from the programme, to provide some context. Any errors of transcription are, naturally, entirely my own.

Information 3.0: Will Publishers Matter?

Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix

Information 3.0 is all about the social web and how it’s changing the reading and information acquisition habits of everyone, from Boomers to Millennials. What role will publishers play in this new world? Buckle your seat belt as Stephen Abrams takes you on a whirlwind tour of trends, analysis and innovations that will either sweep your business aside or take it to new levels.

• Content isn’t king; context is.
• Information is a noun; inform is a verb.
• Publishers should look at where readers are, and how to integrate with that experience.
• The phone is already the dominant device (outside North America).
• Millennials are different to boomers: this behavioral change includes being platform agnostic. Research shows that they even read in different ways (heat maps), which has a bearing on how information is presented.
• We’re moving into an article-level economy — e.g. Google tagging down to chapter level.
• Some formats will die — journals, non-fiction.
• Social trumps everything — recommendations are infinitely important. How well connected are publishers to recommendation providers?
• If you’re still trying to create a destination site, you’re screwing up.
• Get over trying to figure out which web 2.0 services will be pre-eminent — they’ll all evolve/die.
• Publishers can either be involved in inventing the future, or just let it happen to us.

Copyright in a New Light

Bill Burger, Copyright Clearance Center

Emerging technologies, new business models and changing social expectations are bringing new focus to old debates around copyright. They are challenging assumptions about who controls content. And they are shifting the balance of power between content creators and distributors. How can publishers turn these forces to their advantage? What questions should they ask as we look to the future?

• Copyright is a balance between social, economic and political factors.
• There has been an explosion in the amount of content.
• The pace of technological and business development has been extraordinary.
• Content and software are now inextricably linked.
• Creative commons is the vehicle for participatory media.
• There is a clash of cultures between participatory media and rightsholder groups.
• Pre-Gutenberg, the act of copying was more valuable than the content.
• Post-Gutenberg, the content is more valuable than the act of production.
• In the digital age, users are valuing the tools as highly as the content.
• Increasingly, content will be personalised and free.
• Collaborative publishing will become the norm.
• Documents become dynamic, living objects.
• To stay relevant, publishers need to learn how to leverage existing tools, as most aren’t the sort of business which can create one.

Whose Story is This, Anyway?

Douglas Rushkoff

New media is a challenge to anyone and everyone who ever used the word “author”. Interactive technologies are biased against sole authorship, leaning heavily instead towards collaboration. But then what happens to the authority of the author — much less the “copyright” holder?

• Content isn’t king.
• Context isn’t king.
• Contact is king.
• Mass media reduces contact between people and replaces it with contact between person and product.
• The web is remedial help for a society that had forgotten how to socialise.
• Consumers want interpersonal, rather than interactive media, which is why the CD-ROM failed.
• People create quality content for currency — however, this currency is social, which is often diametrically opposed to physical currency.
• Content is just an excuse to interact.

A Conversation with Tim O’Reilly and Kathy Sierra

In this one-on-one interview, pre-recorded exclusively for the 2008 O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, Kathy Sierra and Tim O’Reilly discuss innovations in the publishing landscape from an author’s perspective. They also touch on the principles of how Sierra successfully “creates passionate users” and how this energizes and increases her audience.

• How can positive experience (e.g. social interaction) be replicated in a book?
• Kathy Sierra: need to reverse-engineer passion — what are its elements?
• People enjoy something more when they’re good at it — the “I rule” experience.
• Tim O’Reilly: How does one do this with non-didactic publishing?
• Kathy Sierra: Community creates a positive experience. Anything that fully engages creates happiness and satisfaction, and there is nothing where people are passionate where there is not in turn a community.
• Tim O’Reilly: So every book is a self help book.
• Kathy Sierra: Emotional content important to drive interest — without it, the brain flatlines.
• Does the book make the user feel like a hero?
• Heroism involves struggle — dumbing down doesn’t create a heroic story arc for the user.
• If no-one hates your product, it’s likely to be mediocre.
• Passion doesn’t come from using a tool or mastering a skill, but from the result of applying it.
• The killer app is reducing guilt and fear — the “I suck” experience.

10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books

Seth Godin

Seth Godin, noted author, speaker and entrepreneur, decribes how he has used new media, new marketing and new thinking to simultaneously annoy his publishers and create ten bestselling books in a row.

• Don’t wait for the people running the organisation to make change — it won’t happen if you do.
• Godin’s success has come from varying the formula for each of his books — including emailed excerpts and e-books, which created demand for the physical book — which can then be priced at a premium.
• Godin varies the form factor of the books. Purple Cow was produced as a milk carton — which made the book a discursive, social object. It was also sold in packs of twelve (at $5 each), to encourage people to spend the $40 and then give away eleven copies.
• Godin’s rules:
• The physical book is nothing more than a souvenir — there’s nothing in printed form that the reader can’t find faster and cheaper online.
• Permission is the only asset.
• Conversations are marketing.
• The opportunity isn’t Oprah — it’s a million smaller Oprahs.
• Words have to be matched to readers, not readers to words.
• Blogs work, as ideas spread. If the concept of a book won’t spread, don’t publish it.
• It isn’t about selling books — if the idea works, the book will sell itself.
• My friend and colleague Kelly Leonard queried whether blogs work as well for publisher brands as for authors. Godin believes that general interest publisher blogs are irrelevant — though it’s different, and easier, in the special interest space.
  The emphasis for publishers should be on empowering authors to blog — which does mean accepting that the author owns the permission, not the publisher.
• Queried from the floor on email versus blogging, Godin stated that he sees blogs as a means of talking to fans and strangers, whereas permission email addresses only fans, and is less good at encouraging responses. He sees feed subscriptions as the win of the future.

Books as Conversations

Ben Vershbow, Institute for the Future of the Book

Historically, scribbling in parge margins has been a solitary practice — one reader, one book — with annotated copies sometimes shared. If the book is digital, however, and resides on a network, new possibilities begin to open up.

• Reading and writing today is a multidirectional conversation: networked, interpersonal and in close to real time.
• Documents are no longer objects, but social spaces.
• Writing is about process rather than product and flow rather than version.
• Radical proximity between writer and reader is the new paradigm.
• Vershbow discussed some of his projects and demonstrated Comment Press, the Wordpress theme for social texts developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book
• Query from the floor on the legal aspects of publishing something which community members may begin to feel proprietary about. Vershbow felt this was a major issue which needs to be addressed by terms of reference.
• Opportunities for new publishing include leveraging the wisdom of the crowd, building an audience, making e-books stickier and driving print sales.
• The web has lots of good content, but bad signal to noise ratio.
• Filtering, building infrastructure and developing communities are a lot of work, but represent a role for publishers.