Certainly one of my big realizations during this conference was how quickly things change in the digital domain. Something that seemed revolutionary and bleeding edge 6 months ago sounds stale or naive today. For instance Sara Lloyd of Manifesto 2.0 fame gave a presentation based on that article and it come across a little bit as resting on your laurels, so the insights from that article had come and gone already.
There were a number of instances like this which prompted Tim Spalding of LibraryThing to say over lunch that he wishes there were a level 2 or some kind of flag that indicated the level of the panel/presentation. I concur.
Tim O'Reilly:
"the best way to predict the future is to invent it" Alan Kay
Tim O'Reilly had a lot of reasons to be excited and at least one of the reasons was the financial collapse. According to Tim difficult times breeds creative solutions, and history bears this out.
Ironically Tim had technical difficulties when starting his presentation which maybe can be used as the metaphor for our times. We are having technical difficulties! But Tim takes these technical difficulties in stride and continues to experiment wildly out in the digital space. In fact Tim is so optimistic that he thinks by 2011 ebooks will be 50% of O'Reilly revenue! That is not a drop in the bucket.
Here are the top reasons that Tim is excited about what is happening:
People are reading a lot
Curation still matters
The rise of Social Media allows you to reflect and amplify - talk about the issues that matter to you.
People are paying for access to information
Content Ubiquity
Out of all of the experimenting that O'Reilly has been doing they have found that:
Safari is their 2nd biggest channel next to Amazon and yet market share is same for print copies
Participation Drives Revenue
* Books from Rough Cuts doubles the sales for finished book in Safari
* Collaborate!
Mobile reading is taking off
* iPhone App outsold print -but print book still the category bestseller
* it is additive - margin is same
* Doubled price to 9.99 and sales dropped by 4x -w went back to lower price
* Googles Algorythmic pricing is exciting
Challenging Notions of Free:
‘MAN, I WANT A COPY OF THIS RESEARCH from "Economics of Free" panel at Tools of Change #toc’ @Doctorow on twitter
A poorly named panel that was really more about piracy and DRM. Both Random House and O'Reilly are experimenting with free content to see if sales are affected when you give away the same book. Mac Slocum from O'Reilly summed it up by saying that piracy is a 'zero sum game'. The short coming of the study was the amount of data and particpants. More research required! However, a rough cuts version of the study is going to be available and not only Cory Doctorow wants it.
Article in the Guardian on Piracy
Lexcycle: Lessons Learned
Presenter: Neelan Choksi COO of lexcycle
"if ebook world had a TigerBeat equivalent: This month's issue would have Neelan Choksi on the cover (and on fold out poster)." @KatMeyer twitter
After introducing himself and the Lexcycle team as a bunch of java geeks Neelan began his presentation by saying that when we look back at ebooks we will see 2008 as the inflection point. Why?
Indicator of mainstream: the holy grail - the Oprah effect: Stanza downloads went through the roof when Oprah mentioned ebooks.
Lexcycle conducted a survey to discover the primary usage of the Stanza reader and found the following:
* In bed 31%
* Commuting on bus/train 29%
* In waiting areas 13% (*parenting note: read to your kid to help prevent them from seeing the candy aisle)
* At home 12%
* At work 5%
* At a bar or cafe 5%
* On an airplane 5%
* 2 write-ins mentioned In the bathroom
Since the launch of the Fictionwise store on Stanza they have found the average selling price of a title is 10.25.
Lessons learned:
* Its all about the people who are reading
* Quality matters: you get noticed when you're the top dog
* Every reader is unique give them lots of options to cutsmize their reading
* every device is unique things that work for one device may not work on another device
* listen to the user they are happy to tell you what you are doing worng
* give your readers a voice
* too much friction in purchase registration - every time you remove friction from the purchase experience sales go up
Publisher Lessons
* calls to action need to be clear and contextual
* KISS
* Hold your technology providers (conversion houses) responsible
* Keep experimenting
* Have a budget for marketing e-books
* Support EPUB
* Support DRM-free
Friday, February 13, 2009
#TOC notes toward more notes
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
#TOC Challenging notions of free
Mac Slocum, Brian O'Leary
- Document and assess prior work
- Address data quality
- Analyze and share
Findings
Not binary: Piracy is not Good or Bad
Measures must evolve: data based on print sales
Book industry does not appear to parallel other media
P2P threat may be overstated
(*I saw this article today on the guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/feb/09/kindle-ipod-books-piracy)
Sample Matrix: 20 variables and many permutations
Random House: An initial look at sales impact
- Free downloads were correllated with but didn't cause sales
- Found that free downloads didn't hurt sales
Mac Slocum: "It's a zero sum game"
If you are concerned about piracy make sure you pay attn. to where it's happening (rapidshare vs torrents)
Avg. results in small sample were 'up'
range of possible outcomes
It looks a little bit like retail sales - the seeds peaking and dropping off.
Surprises in research
number and range of under the radar free exp available for analysis
strong interest among trade pubs
some strongly positive correlations
low volume of p2p incidence
lag time on p2p seeding
Next steps:
Random house:
- Matrix offers 20 possible options and even more permutations
- 16 books covered in this pass but several with only a limited set of data pts
- More promising opportunities to test:
- Young adult
- backlist for series
- Trade nonfiction
Three useful cautions:
- Correlation isn't causality (noisey environments that these exp took place in)
- Larger samples may uncover an existing skew
- what works today may not work as well at some future date
! Rough Cuts research paper coming soon
brian.oleary@magellanmediapartners.com
#TOC Tim O'Reilly
"I have heard an angel speak" reference for Nick Bilton
Reasons to be excited:
Will O'reilly withhold books from the Kindle because of the DRM? They release it in lots of formats
Starts by talking about the financial crises, somethign TED did not do at their conference
The G bible era was not a good time War of the Roses,
Then Constantinople fell
Lament for a passing of the Cathedral (Victor Hugo)
instead society built 'Cathedrals of learning'
- "It's as if we had a supercomputer and billions of pur processors had been offline" Tabarrok, Alex at TED
- Billions of people are dealing with ideas instead of daily bread
- Maps of the internet are increasingly looking like maps of neurons
- Guttenberg did not imagine Jane Austen let alone James Joyce - we cannot imagine where the interntet is going to take us
- 100 million books >500 pages in Google book search. The web has already generated 1 trillion web pages
- Stimulus Watch site popped up a week ago. Put together in a matter of days can drill down to line items
- Phones are everywhere ( this has come up a lot here at TOC =Africans with cell phones)
- Have to Imagine a world where information is everywhere
- Sensors coming into our daily lives changing the way we get information: Pizza and phone example -
People are reading a lot
- Web pages are still a lot of text
- Compete.com for analytics compare Good reads, Shelfari, Librarythings (1million uniques readers on Good Reads)
- Twitterholic shows Stephen Fry as most popular on twitter : he is an author!
- Have to do more for authors than used to
Curation still matters
- Clay Shirky Power Laws weblogs, and Inequaltiy (graph)
- Every new media always has a head and confers status all the way down
- Twitter evangelism from Tim O'Reilly - main reason to get in is to get in the head of new media and bestow status
Using Social Medai
- Reflect and amplify - talk about the issues that matter to you.
People are paying for access to information
- It isn't just advertising
- internet access fees 25.8 billion
- Music 2.3 billion
- Games 1.8 billion
- People are paying for basic cable
Content Ubiquity
- Make your content avalialble wherever your readers are
- DRM is bad
- Share what you learn so we can all get better faster together
Sales ratio of downloadable electronic formats on oreilly.com
- PDF/mobi/epub bundles:
- PDF is biggest chunk
- epub next
- then Mobi
Predicts 2011 will show ebooks as 50% of revenue
Safari is 2nd biggest channel next to Amazon and yet market share is same for print copies
Participation Drives Revenue
- Books from Rough Cuts doubles the sales for finished book in Safari
- Collaborate!
Mobile reading taking off
- iPhone App outsold print -but print book still the category bestseller
- it is additive - margin is same
- Doubled price to 9.99 and sales dropped by 4x -w went back to lower price
- Googles Algorythmic pricing is exciting
"best way to predict the future is to invent it"
#TOC lexcycle lessons learned
Presenter: Neelan Choksi COO of lexcycle
e-books inflection point hit in 2008
IDPF talks about 44 million as the wholesale number but there is a lot of confusion/ignorance regarding the numbers for the whole market
Indicator of mainstream:
The Oprah effect: Stanza downloads went through the roof when Oprah mentioned ebooks
iPhone distinctions
- International reach
- color display
- multi-funtion device
- Built-in wireless
- No external light required
- App Store
Primary Usage (%)
- In bed 31
- Commuting on bus/train 29
- In waiting areas 13 (parenting note: read to your kid to help prevent them from seeing the candy aisle)
- At home 12
- At work 5
- At a bar or cafe 5
- On an airplane 5
- 2 write-ins mentioned In the bathroom
Since launch of Fictionwise store:
Average title price point 10.25
Promotions
- Pan Macmillan Excerpts
first to notice Stanza
- Random House Free Titles
Back list of certain authors
excerpts from forthcoming boks
- Harlequin
4 free minis
Oreilly experiment
The missing Manual = 200 images that render beautifully
Lessons learned:
- Its all about the people who are reading
- Quality matters: you get noticed when you're the top dog
- Every reader is unique give them lots of options to cutsmize their reading
- every device is unique things that work for one device may not work on another device
- listen to the user they are happy to tell you what you are doing worng
- give your readers a voice
too much friction in purchase registration - every tme you remove friction sales go up
Publisher Lessons
- calls to action need to be clear and contextual
- KISS
- Hold yur technology providers conversion houses
- Keep experimenting
- Have a budget for marketing e-books
- Support EPUB
- Support DRM-free
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
#TOC Scott Berkun
How Progess Happens
Presented by Scott Berkun (Berkun Consulting). Talking about change is easy - making change happen in most organizations is ridiculously hard. But there are things we can learn from the history of technology, political revolution and change, and there is a playbook we can reuse to help us avoid easy mistakes and seemingly popular, but actually self-defeating approaches.
* american revolution example: no new tools to bring about change
* there is no change possible until someone stakes their reputation on doing something different.
* You can not make change without power
- Change creates work
- It requires thinking
- we have to talk and listen to each other
- it raises questions we'd prefer to avoid
- it puts us at risk of embarrassment/death
Maslow and heirarchies of needs
Traditions protect against change
Idea Killers (see more at Scott's blog)
- we've tried that before
- we've never done that before
- that's not how we do things here
- how can you justify the costs
- how will this become profitable
- our existing custumers will not like this
suggested reading: Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Thomas Kuhn
-paradigm shift-
Revolution is a bad word
people who are clear about the change they want state what the problem is that they are trying to solve
Power
committees prevent change because they average out decision making = mediocrity
Tactics
- Power
- Persuasion: whose support can you earn
- Intuition: What can you anticipate
Case Study Chester Carlson & XEROX
Playbook for Indivduals:
- Pilot
- show Succcess
- find allies
- ask for more resources(stake reputation)
- repeat
- coup
Entrepreneurship is a similiar process
Playbook for managers
- Palov lives (we do what we're rewarded for
- Hire for change (Age & Psychology)
- Accept some ideas you do not like
- Encourage interesting failures
- Only you can provide cover fire
Question: How do you get the power you need to create the change you want:
unethical book: 48 laws of power
ideally find your allies.
some social insight?
Yesterday I sat in on about four workshops at the Tools of Change conference (#toc). Before I got to the conference I tried to think about what would have most value for me and the industry. Anyway to make a long story short I decided to do the XML track of workshops. Needless to say it was a mistake. The intro workshop turned out to be for people who had never even heard of XML never mind used it in web apps. But I couldn't be rude and just get up and leave. I would hear it out a bit, meanwhile I opened tweetdeck and started following the #toc twitter feed. I was astounded that toc had started to trend fifth and sixth in popularity on twopular.com. What I especially notice was a lot of noise coming out of the Blogging and Social Media workshop. No one was tweeting in the XML workshop. I tweeted how boring the workshop was and someone replied from the Brogan workshop that there were lots of seats there and I should come over. I did.
Here was my realization when I got to that workshop. Chris Brogan was driving the rating on twopular or at least the workshop was. Everyone in this workshop was live blogging and tweeting away. The audience was responding back to Chris as the presentation went on. I had seen this phenomenon with Chris when I did an O'Reilly webinar with him a couple weeks back. At that time I was blown away by the chatter that was going on in the discussion. It was non-stop. I've done a lot of webinars but have never seen anything like it. The amazing thing was Chris was keeping his focus and interacting with those comments at the same time.
Now Chris is not saying anything revolutionary. He is talking about blogging, using twitter, engaging the audience, using the crowd for insight. But this message continues to burn through the publishing world like a bush fire. Forget XML and ebooks, Chris is pushing the envelope to integrate all content and do mashups using the simple tools of social networking. Of course you need the technical frameworks and environments for all of this stuff to work but for it to really work the technology has to become invisible. Technical experts don't really like to make their technology invisible and so I think sometimes they don't "get" what is happening in the social networking world. What is more important to publishing? Standards, XML, ebooks, all of that. But what gets people engaged? Twitter, blogging - the platforms for the individual to broadcast their message, even if that is only retweeting someone.
