Simon & Schuster and Hachette have said they'll be delaying the launch of some future e-books until after the hardcovers have been on sale for a while. It's a desperate move to hang on to the old ways of publishing, before e-reader use explodes.
Simon & Schuster's plans involve a four month delay of 35 big titles it'll be launching early in 2010, sandwiching release of the electronic copy between the hardcover launch and softcover editions. Hachette's plans aren't known in as much detail, but are apparently pretty similar. Essentially these moves are placing the electronic editions at a lower importance inside the publishing companies than the hardcover ink-and-paper ones...but as we know, electronic editions are pretty much guaranteed to be the future of books. So what the heck are S&S and Hachette messing around for?
S&S's titles include Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence and Don DeLillo's Point Omega--the full list of 35 represents the publisher's near-future treasure trove of books that are expected to sell well, and those that cost lots to print or are already ordered in huge print runs. And it's for exactly this reason that S&S is delaying the e-editions--the company is trying its hardest to protect its existing investment. That's because they're afraid that e-editions will cannibalize the hardcover sales, and actually sell for less money per unit anyway, thanks to moves by Amazon and others to sell the e-books for relatively cheap prices--say, $9.99 versus $20 for a hardcover.
Carolyn Reidy, Simon & Schuster's CEO explained the move amazingly frankly: With new e-readers coming, "and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible." David Young, chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, cloaked his reasoning in a paper-thin, faux-compassionate excuse: "I can't sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices. It's about the future of the business." How ever will struggling authors like poor Karl Rove make a living?
Any authors with enough power to fuel publishers' embargo probably aren't running to the mailbox to look for their next royalty checks, and making their books friendly to the e-literate masses likely won't cost them a dime. This is protectionism--a trick to force the market to behave how S&S, for example, is used to it behaving--before the march of progress forces the publisher's hand and makes it accept a totally new business model.
And that sounds ill thought-out. Because it's going to irritate the legions of new e-reader owners who'll be ready to hunt for promising e-books after the holiday. And in the bigger picture, it presents S&S and Hachette as desperately backwards-thinking--assuming they keep the policy running. And with the digital content markets booming for music, video and books as the technology races ahead, that could turn out to be a very bad thing--instead of looking backwards, the key to ensuring your future is to move quickly and smartly, adapting to maximize the potential of new business. Am I wrong? Tell me in the comments.
Square--that plastic gizmo that plugs into your iPhone and reads magnetic stripes--may, or may not, revolutionize the credit-card system. Inventor Jack Dorsey has, however, removed one big barrier to success: He wants to give it away.
Dorsey was speaking to CNBC journalists at the Le Web conference in Paris when he plainly responded "We're going to try to give these away for free" in response to a question about pricing.
It'll involve some business model juggling, of course, as Dorsey went on to note: "we're trying to get costs down significantly." Considering that the hardware must consist at least of the plastic housing, the magnetic reader, and some basic electronics to amplify the reader signal and send it in to the iPhone--bits that are all cheap--it should be possible for Dorsey to achieve his goal.
The point of this move is to make the whole thing more attractive to potential users by lowering the barriers to adopting it as their main electronic payments system. Free is, of course, an attractive word. It also seems that the costs of running Square will be very low or free, which sweetens the deal too. And for Dorsey, free is clearly something of a watchword: As co-inventor of Twitter, he must have played a big role in deciding Twitter would be an open system that's so far unencumbered by advertising.
There's just one snag, and it's the same one I noted before, only worse now: In Europe, we mainly use chip-and-PIN cards for credit and debit banking. The magnetic stripe is fast on its way out, and may even be banned. If Square is to make any headway over the other side of the Atlantic, it'll have to have chip-reading and decoding/encoding electronics inside, which will seriously mess with Dorsey's plans to give the hardware away for free.
Well, it's been recentlyspeculated, and now it's true: Five big names in ink-and-paper magazine and newspaper publishing have ganged up in a joint venture. It's aim, despite grandiose PR? Outsmart Apple, and side-step Amazon.
The companies concerned are Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. Their joint venture, currently unnamed, is designed to "develop open standards for a new digital storefront and related technology that will allow consumers to enjoy their favorite media content on portable digital devices." Or at least that's how the press release puts it.
The four key goals that go with this mission are to:
Be ready to publish digital content on "full-color devices" in a manner that makes them beautiful and recognizable
Work across multiple devices, OSs and screens
Put together a common online store for buying publications, and accessible on any device
Work with advertisers to craft attractive digital-form adverts, more advanced than print ones can be
It all sounds very very sensible for an industry that's facing an impending crunch caused by the very technology these guys are now trying to embrace.
But here's the real meaning of this: It's a kind of "It's not me, it's you" thing. These guys have been caught napping by the digital online and on-gadget publishing revolution, and for years they've resisted it and complained it's stealing their business instead of smartly and swiftly adapting to maximize the revolution as it happened. Now, with the Amazon Kindle already shaking up the e-book market, and with Apple's amazing (if still mythical) iTablet on the near horizon, the big five are panicking that control of their business may be stolen away from them, in exactly the way Apple forced a revolution in the cell phone and music business. This is a pre-emptive strike.
Forming a e-magazine Voltron with the intention of defining a common format and selling the texts through your own store therefore sounds neat. But effectively the team is trying to carry out business as usual, with a simple substitution of pixels for ink, and its strategy assumes so many things about the future that may be purely wrong, it's hard to see what it's trying to achieve. Let's break out a number of these points for you shall we?
The public wants to consume digital magazines and newspapers in the same way as paper ones. Given the inversion in the digital music industry, where the album has disappeared and single-track sales are the habit of the day, this may not be realistic. We're all used to real-time Web pages now.
The public will pay for digital magazines. Would you pay for a simple reconstruction of, say, Time in digital form with whizzy dynamic content, versus a Web-page? Even assuming you'd be happy to pay for a digi-mag, wouldn't you expect to pay less for it given what you may perceive as hugely reduced production costs? Given that these publishers will have to learn cutting edge new-tech skills, and disregard some issues that print involved (ink color and quality for one) this change is going to be a personnel nightmare: Staff will have to be hired, fired and retrained...which is going to be expensive. Perceived value and price charged may not add up.
Apple will just take this lying down. Given that the iTablet, when it arrives, is pretty likely to sew up the digital tablet market (following the iPhone's footsteps) Apple's vested interest in securing content for the device is huge. And since the iTunes/iPhone ecosystem is tightly controlled, we can assume the iTablet one will be too: Publishers will have to come to Apple, not the other way around, if they want to get content on the gizmo.
The press release is weirdly U.S.-centric, noting potential smartphone and e-reader sales in the States. When are these chaps going to learn that digital tech really knows no boundaries? More iPhones are sold outside the U.S. than inside it, and English is a de-facto global language. Publishing your own e-magazine or e-newspaper on a global scale is infinitely easier than dealing with physical publication issues, and you ignore this fact at your peril.
There are other holes in the JV's plans, but I think these are the startling ones. What's your take? Are Hearst and gang getting this all wrong right form the get-go?
All you doubting Thomases can shut up now: Lifecasting/social net Twitter really does work as a marketing tool, as confirmed by PC retail leviathan Dell.
Dell started Tweeting about two years ago, when the system was pretty new. They don't get into how exactly they traced sales directly back to Tweets, but they're committed to the correlation. So given what they say are $6.5 million in Twitter-driven sales, the company's yearly return from Tweets is around $3.25 million. Dell also notes that its follower list has risen 23% in the last three months alone--which will likely correspond to a hefty skew in the number of PC units sold this year. Dell's Tweets also reach followers in 12 countries, and sales are happening in places that might be a surprise: $800,000 in sales over the last eight months alone came from Brazil.
But with Dell's turnover ticking upwards of $61 billion dollars in 2008, isn't this figure just an insignificant drop in Dell's ocean? Yes, if you're talking pure dead numbers. But according to Manish Mehta, VP of Dell Online, Dell apparently sees Twitter as a "very vibrant channel" partly due to its aggressive growth and partly due to the potential global reach, on a per-second basis, of a single Tweet.
And Mehta's point is made with good reason: How little did it cost Dell to send out those Tweets? It's got 100 employees Twittering in total, over 35 different Dell user identities. We can imagine that these guys are busily involved in Dell's greater PR effort, so they don't spend 40 hours a week Twittering. Imagining they spend 20% of their time writing Tweets, and factoring in a bit of basic math about wages etc, we can guess it cost Dell about $500,000 in man-hours per year to address its Twitter audience (and man-hours are about the only cost associated with using Twitter). That equates to a 1,300% return on investment when you look at the sales the effort has generated--a staggering figure. Assuming Twitter's popularity continues to rise dramatically, and knowing Dell's costs of Tweeting aren't going to rise as fast, that number is only likely to get better and better.
Obviously it's not all easy, and there are pitfalls associated with using Twitter as a PR tool. One of which is being careful not to over-saturate the system with advertising: Twitter users will quickly be turned off the social net if all they see is PR fluff. But that's also the joy of Twitter as far as sellers like Dell are concerned--it's a consumer opt-in PR mechanism, and you only see Dell's Tweets if you follow the company's feeds or do a search. That means its a highly targeted channel and a means of garnering customer feedback too.
We already know Google wants to be everything for everyone in search. Now they're extending that goal into the real world, sticking physical tags on the windows of actual businesses from its online Favorite Places catalog. Should Foursquare be worried about Google's intrusion?
Google made the announcement yesterday, but that bit got lost in the swarm of news surrounding other new features. Nevertheless, it's novel stuff: Google has identified the "100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought-out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps" and has labeled them the "Favorite Places on Google." They're located in some 9,000 towns across all 50 states...and to identify them, you actually have to go to the shop.
How un-Google. What with Earth, Maps and Street View, Google's more about digitally visiting places, or so one would've thought. The physical windows do, however, contain a sprinkle of Google magic: A QR code that, when scanned with a smartphone running the right app, will take you to a Google page containing the business details and offer coupons and even reviews.
It's a big move for Quick Response codes (QR), which are ubiquitous in Japan and a growing phenomenon elsewhere in the World, though scarce in the U.S. (they're 2-D information-rich barcodes, like the one on the left.) And it's a big move for Google--it'll earn a tiny bit of PR from the window stickers and curious on-lookers, and it'll grab some advertising dollars for people who actually make use of the service. If you think about it, it's also a tiny move in the direction of augmented reality for Google--though of the physical tagging sort, rather than virtual data tags in an AR heads-up display.
And that might make Foursquare's owners a little nervous: When a mega-giant like Google starts playing in your local business AR-esque game, you should probably start worrying about how it'll affect your future. Fortunately for Foursquare, it's service is already evolving. It's a game and it's fun. Google's system may be useful, but like many Google ventures it's dry-boiled and a little joyless. You'll have to be a smartphone user to use Favorite Places, and if you're that type of person you'll be more inclined towards the higher-tech and more dynamic geotagged local-data info offered by Foursquare or Layar in their AR apps. No one will be bothered by Google's kooky half-high-tech, half-low-tech efforts in this market for quite some time.
A big surprise was buried in Google's real time search cavalcade yesterday: The teeny, tiny role that Facebook played in the news.
Accompanied by lots of "wow! look at that!" speech, Google's real-time search updates were the highlight of yesterday's tech-demo. The live-updating Tweets appearing in the search data flow were championed by Google's staff as really measuring what people are talking about right at this instant around the World. And though we know Google's beendesperate to get hold of this sort of real-time relevance for ages, and now has it, one big omission was glaring in this demo of data-processing prowess. Where the hell was Facebook? It's got half a billion users--making it the World's biggest social network--and likes to promote its newly-tweaked user status updates as being a finger on the pulse of the World. And yet the only data it's contributing to Google's real time engine is its public Pages update--the bland, less personal profiles that the average Facebook user doesn't actually use.
Over at Mashable, Ben Parr's dissected the reasons why Facebook might be doing this, and concludes it's a deliberate and smart move. The reasoning boils down to two points:
Facebook sees Google as a direct rival, since it's trying to develop its own real-time search engine powers within the social network itself, and Facebook connect is in competition with Google's Friend Connect
Facebook has made a deal with Microsoft to give access inside its public user profiles to Bing. And Microsoft has invested $240 million in Facebook. The rivalry between MS and Google forces Facebook's hand
Both points make sense, and are neatly tied to real business facts. But while Mashable's thinking implies it's a good move for Facebook, there is another way to look at this: It's a terrible move, and one that could hand control of the real-time status update game to Twitter.
First, it's a PR issue: Look at all the buzz Twitter gained yesterday. People sit up and listen when Google makes big changes to its system. Google just identified Twitter as the most important tool for delivering real time information to a global audience. While Twitter's growing fast, it's still a mystery to many users around the World...but after yesterday there will be millions more people interested in how it works and wanting to take part. Facebook's mention, on the other hand, was almost a throw-away sentence at the end of Google's spiel and, worst of all, it came in the same breath as mention of MySpace's new links with Google. Being allied with the gaudy, dying wreck that is today's MySpace simply isn't good.
Second, real-time search from Twitter in Google "just works" in an Apple sense of the phrase. Tweets are a discrete, compact and quick-to-send means of delivering new data, and now in Google their relevance is highlighted. Facebook's status updates can be longer, and they let you embed all sorts of media directly...but it's a bit like comparing phone calls to SMSes: One is good for longer chats and provides an emotionally richer experience, but the other is faster, often more convenient and excellent for zapping quick, useful pieces of info off to your friends either singly or in groups. The difference between these two modes of delivering real-time status is now being dramatically highlighted by Google--particularly since almost an entire Tweet will appear on the few lines of a typical Google search result, and it's hard to see how a rambling Facebook status update would fit in that space.
And here's another example of how this move works in Twitter's favor: I picked up a couple of new Twitter followers during the day yesterday, but in the hour or so after Google's system began to go live I gained five more, almost certainly because Googlers were finding my Tweets appearing in their real-time searches.
The upshot of these points could easily be that the billions of Googlers around the globe get used to seeing Twitter as the way to deliver or receive real-time data. And sure, they'll see the Tweets via Google--but to take part, they'll have to get a Twitter account and start Tweeting. While Facebook continues to limit Google's access to Status Updates, it's bleeding out lots of its supposed real-time data hotness, and risks losing the race with Twitter.
Translations, Goggles, Real Time at the Google Search Jam
Google called a high-profile press conference today, and used it to unveil not one big feature, but a number of current and future tweaks to its service. The list was impressive, so we've rounded up some of the cleverest tech for you. But man, Google needs to hone its presentation style.
Real Time Search
This was the big take-away from the presentation: Google finally officially admitted its long-suspected desperation to get hold of real time Web-search data. And it did more than that too--it unveiled it as a live, in-service product on both cell phones and desktop browsers.
The system is a progression of the tech that's driven Google's search engine for years. The company started with monthly Web trawls to sample for search query-matching data, progressing quickly as the Net exploded to weekly, daily then hourly crawls over the billions of Web pages on the Net. Until today, the fastest you could get a Google query in a live data sense was about five minutes. But now it's down to seconds--almost as soon as a relevant page is published online, it will be included in your search query as a rolling-update.
The system is called "Latest" and it has one more surprise: It includes Tweets.
During the presentation, Google placed a lot of significance on Twitter's power to break news and supply newly relevant info on hyper-local news events. Facebook, announced as a Google partner today, also will be included in the real-time search results with data from its public-accessible Pages system. Microsoft's rival Bing search engine integrated these features to its search offering last week to much fanfare (the rumble is on). Another new partner: MySpace.
But it's clear that Google's execs have tapped Twitter as the real winner in real-time status, despite Facebooks half-billion userbase, as these two were presented right at the end. You might think that's about as real-time as you can get, but the team noted they won't stop until the speed of light around the world is the only barrier to getting real time search data.
Google Goggles: Image-Driven Search
Earlier today, driven by a comprehensive CNBC piece on Google broadcast this last weekend, news slipped out about an experimental and amazing feature called Google Goggles. From a user point of view it's terrifically simple. Say you see a sign on the street for something you'd like to know more about: You'd snap a pic of it and send it off to Google Goggles. That's where the clever bit happens, of course. Somewhere in Google's powerful server farms some wicked image recognition algorithm then paws its way over your pic, and then roams a database of pre-captured images. Then it returns to you a pretty typical Google search response list.
If you're unexcited by this, then you're missing the point. Goggles is a technology that could take augmented reality into the next-generation of real usefulness. Imagine how it would work: You're using an AR browser or specific app, and you come across something interesting in the field of view. Currently you have to hope that someone somewhere has generated a geo-tagged point of interest that corresponds to what you're looking at. But with Goggles, you could rely on Google to do the work for you. It closes the technology loop from Virtual Reality (circa 1990s) to Augmented Reality (circa 2010) and inserts Google into the circle with Googling Real Reality (circa Minority Report). And before you get worried about Google matching your face in online pictures with this tech, don't: Google's chosen to exclude faces from the system for privacy reasons, for now.
Google Translation
A great deal of time was spent talking about Google's automated translation powers. Google voice search in multiple languages in the iPhone app was used to show off its current prowess. But the future of the system was demoed as well, and it's amazing: Google plans to let you speak into the phone in, say, English and have its cloud server auto-translate it into, for example, Spanish--and then to speak it back to you out loud. That bypasses Google's search engine, and turns it into Douglas Adam's babel fish or Star Trek's Universal Translator.
Embedded into smartphones--devices Google notes you have less than one meter away most of the time--it could turn Google into the World's language translator.
What's Nearby?
Google also unveiled a tweak to its local search powers on smartphones via Google mobile that'll annoy many a location-based service provider: What's nearby? Essentially Google's app works out where you are, and provides you with a list of services--keyword prompted or not--that are in the vicinity, and it'll even include things like popularity ratings.
Google Loves Apple
Another big take-away from today's PR event was the promotion of Apple devices: Many product demos were done on iPhones, and the main notebook used to present data was a MacBook. Pretty surprising, given that Google has its own smartphone system in Android. Maybe Google was trying to cozy-up to the market leader in the hope of working with it more closely, without particularly admitting as much? Could be.
Google Needs Hollywood
From the patchy (Buffering...) live feed, to mistakes in the tech demos to the badly-polished and different-designed presenter stands on the stage (nice piece of tape there on the overhead). Hire a stage producer, or at least a props manager--there must be someone in California with some experience with stagecraft. This, for sure, was no Apple event...despite the actual honest-to-goodness use of "boom!" as a punctuation at one point. Steve Jobs should copyright that.
Everything will soon be connected to the social net--we've said it before, but if you're a social network denier then here's proof positive: Now your tiny baby can status update too. It's all thanks to Twitter, Arduino, and some creative thinking.
The magic comes from Belgium's Hasselt University and a course on mobile and pervasive computing--it was the winner in the 2009 Innovative and Creative Applications competition. The judges liked its innovation and the fact it can let children "not capable of verbal communication to communicate" via the hardware/software/social net mashup.
The tech is essentially quite simple: The team took a Fisher Price Activity Center, hacked its guts by adding sensors and an Arduino board to handle the computer-Twitter interface and added pics of mommy and flashing lights to the gizmos on the device's front. When a baby plays with the toy now the electronics work out what's going on and send a Tweet that corresponds to the baby's actions. For example, if the baby plays with the button that has a picture of mom on it for longer than a few minutes, a Tweet will go out with text something like "@mom. Baby is missing you lots." There's more too: If more than one Twoddler is connected up to the net, then baby can join a physical social net, of sorts, and activate flashing lights on their peers machines too--a kind of group play with a virtual-reality angle.
While this sounds sweet, it should be filling you with a degree of dread. At least it will if, like me, you're a new parent whose nerves are jangled by the 1,000th daily activation of that particular irritating bit of electro-music that your baby's favorite toy bleeps out. Because the idea that one's baby at play can send out automated Tweets direct to your smartphone--particularly ones that are emotionally charged, if you're at work and baby's with a minder or at crèche--is slightly chilling. Luckily Twoddler is still a prototype...but I await the day when Twitter-connected electro-diapers alert you to the status of baby's movements with terror.
Foursquare's already a technology to keep your eye on if you're interested in geotagging, augmented reality, social gaming, and hyper-local ads, but it's just added a new attraction just in time for the Holidays: Charity, for New York players at least.
In a blog post today, Foursquare's team note that they are "super excited" about the new deal. For about a month the company has been looking for a sponsor for its New York City leaderboard--the table by which New York-based Foursquare players work out how well they're doing compared to the other players of the location-based pseudo-AR game. Now they've teamed up with Pepsi, but there's an unexpectedly sweet pay-off from what sounds like just another business ad-sponsorship scheme.
Simply put, every time you log into a Foursquare location and add a point to the NYC leaderboard scores between now and midnight December 13, Foursquare and Pepsi will together donate $0.04 to charity. The chosen recipient is CampInteractive--an organization that, appropriately enough, tries to "empower inner-city youth through technology skills" as well as mentoring. It's a generous move by Pepsi--a name that you could well argue doesn't really need any extra PR, and it's got such potential for generating cash (as the official blog post puts it "things can tend to get out of hand with foursquare") that there's a ceiling of $10,000.
And that is actually the most promising thing about this move: The potential implications for the future of charitable donations. For years charities have been trying to get more money out of the pockets of the generous public by co-opting new technology into their cause. And geotagging and AR are clearly future tech that could have massive potential for charities. Imagine a geocached/geotagged AR game that would reward the users with fun and sponsoring charities with hard cash if the users were required to, say, go stand in front of a particular billboard in some sort of flashmob event, or shop at a particular store. That's not so much more sophisticated than Foursquare's deal with Pepsi--but it's potentially way more fun. It's also a much more wholesome use of the clever AR tech than personalized, localized AR advertising placements.
Whistle blowing is a delicate thing--halfway between being useful or educational for the public and revealing potentially business-damaging data. Which is why Yahoo's shenanigans following a leak of its pricelist for spying on customers are so juicy.
This time it's Web site Cryptomine rather than Wikileaks that's at the center of the controversy: It's obtained, presumably from a source inside Yahoo itself, a specifications list--including pricing--for legal snooping on its customers. The 17-page document describes the "cost reimbursement" that Yahoo charges for things like accessing a Yahoo group (about $40 to $80) and details on basic subscriber data ($20). The access is to be by the authorities when there's a question of criminality, of course. But the data also reveals that Yahoo doesn't keep your email data once you've deleted it, and only retains IP data for a single year--but ten years for the computer you set up a Yahoo account from.
It's all fascinating stuff, from both a freedom of information and user privacy point of view. And you could argue that it doesn't present much of a risk, in a business sense, to Yahoo--it surely can't be making much of a profit from law enforcement queries. Or at least, you may think, it shouldn't be trying to. Which makes Yahoo's attempts to serve Cryptomine with a take-down notice under the DMCA hugely embarrassing for the company. Yahoo's lawyers have argued that the document is protected under copyright, though they don't have to deliver a proof of copyright--the legal wrangling is continuing, and the document remains live for now.
So what exactly were Yahoo's motives? It sets them out itself in its objection letter to a different attempt to make the company reveal its policies: The data will "'shame' Yahoo! and other companies" and also "shock" their customers. Hmmm. So Yahoo doesn't want the public to know how, exactly, its mechanisms for protecting that same public work? That's a pretty thin excuse, and makes you wonder exactly how many thousands (or millions, perhaps) of law enforcement requests are rolling in to Amazon at between $20 and $80 in "admin fees" per go.
It's a big move for Quick Response codes (QR), which are ubiquitous in Japan and a growing phenomenon elsewhere in the World, though scarce in the U.S. (they're 2-D information-rich barcodes, like the one on the left.) And it's a big move for Google--it'll earn a tiny bit of PR from the window stickers and curious on-lookers, and it'll grab some advertising dollars for people who actually make use of the service. If you think about it, it's also a tiny move in the direction of augmented reality for Google--though of the physical tagging sort, rather than virtual data tags in an AR heads-up display.
