E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (essential reading .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:

[email protected] or to

[email protected]

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: [email protected]; [email protected]

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