#TOC notes toward more notes

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

Posted via web from Tim's posterous