Publisher Blog

So long...

July 26, 2009

Dear Friends, Enfuse will soon be signing off We have had a good run. The community we built over the last eight years has been a powerful one. Artists emerged from across the world to use the tools we put in place and created the energy that has made for an incredible experience. We have published some great work and I am amazed when I look at all the talent that has congregated here. The web and the publishing industry have changed dramatically these eight years and we have been a part of that change. I like to think that our approach at providing an emergent user-driven publication was innovative when we began. We predated the social network sites that have become the standard. We provided tools for self-promotion that were not as ubiquitous as they have become and people responded. It has been a thrill and a pleasure to have been a part of. Things are different today. It no longer makes sense to ask users to maintain yet another profile in some other corner of the web. We set out to bring great art Online. We grew into a community. But we never really ran a business. As we've scaled we've had to grow to accommodate. Costs have risen and time has grown short. But it has always only been a passion, never an enterprise. Without constant nurturing and contact, passions wane. It is time to break up. At this point, in order to really serve the people who have helped to build this thing, we need to change everything. Enfuse must move on. Otherwise, the site itself will not elevate the work published within it. We are beyond the point where a few tweaks and feature enhancements are enough. The model has changed. The web has changed. I have changed. The tools that artists need are different now. It no longer makes sense to perpetuate this mode. We may emerge in a new form. We may disperse into the flux having been a blip in a stream at a time when our resonance made ripples. To all the incredible people that have been a part of this blip, Thank You! We will leave the site Online until the middle of August. Then we will begin to dismantle. So, take a last look. Pass through looking for Matter Out of Place. Collect your stuff. Soon, we will be gone. If anyone has interest in attempting to do something different with the existing infrastructure, please feel free to contact me. We have built some great tools and I am happy to share them or to pass the reigns of management to others who may want to give it a go.

Live Book Search is No More

May 23, 2008

Microsoft announced this morning that it is pulling the plug on Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and taking down both sites. Since its inception Microsoft has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Those results will now be integrated into general search results. Microsoft has stopped digitizing new content in both its library scanning and in-copyright book programs effective immediately.

According to Microsoft, "based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries."

As I wrote about in a previous post, the digitization field is still packed. It is curious to see such a major player drop out. It will be interesting to see if other proprietary scanners will follow suit, leaving the digitization to the public realm or if publishers will take Microsoft's advice and scan their own archives.

My guess is that Microsoft didn't see a ton of profit available in the preservation of books in the public domain. They'd rather pen deals to resell advertising on the real estate provided by publishers digitizing modern bestsellers.

In the announcement, Microsoft goes on to say, "We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications."

Read the announcement here: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/.

An interesting footnote to this announcement, Microsoft plans to work in partnership with Ingram Digital Group to assist their partners with deriving sales and marketing opportunities from the existing library. Ingram is the same company that came out against Amazon over their announcement requiring POD sales to go through their print services. Any chance Microsoft plans to get into the POD space with a program more attractive to the publishers?

Book Marketing 2.0

May 22, 2008

This is hilarious. Paraphrase: "Maybe I should just give up writing and switch to downloads and widgets..." Tell me about it! The irony is... its just so true.

Here's my question to you. Does book marketing in Web 2.0 world lack the integrity that it had a generation ago or is it just the same schtick with different tools?

My take is that its the same thing but the main difference is that publishers expect the author to do more of the marketing themselves... Since the tools are so self-service. Problem is, artists are most effective as creators. Most artists really want the business side to be handled by somebody else. So, the era of YouPromoteIt! has got a lot of them chafing.

The flip-side, of course, is that it should be easier to build a grassroots marketing campaign and for an artist without institutional backing to build a name; Given they are creative marketers, savvy business people, aggressive sales people, media connected and oh yeah, they are good at their art and still have time to be creative.

What happened to specializing? As an industry emerges to provide these services on behalf of artists, at the expense of the artist, will / has the compensation structure change to account for the shift in cost?

Future of Times in News Apps

May 21, 2008

We're finally starting to get it. The capabilities of the Web aren't just in reprinting static content Online. Old media has been hard-pressed to embrace and to explore the true richness of interactivity possible in Web Apps and the use of Information Graphics. Meanwhile new media companies have innovated rich apps with great interfaces, but nowhere the depth of content available in the data stores of a publishing juggernaut like the New York Times. The result is a split between the world of rich applications that feel like toys lacking substance and substantial content sources lacking interfaces to make them easier to explore, to mine and to interact with.

New York Times Digital News Editor Jim Roberts talked about the future of NYT Online as Mediabistro Circus' keynote speaker on Wednesday the 21st of May. He noted that NYT still makes 80% of its revenue from the print version and has yet to make money on the web. "We haven't made money... It has helped revitalize the institution, it has helped revitalize the profession," Roberts said. The best thing to happen is "the harnessing of the Web, to enhance reporting, to provide data and give users the tools to use that data," he continued. They are hoping that data-driven interactive apps will change that.

Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, has been charged with creating "news-focused, data-driven apps," such as the Election Guide 2008. The site had it's second- and third-highest traffic days during Super Tuesday and Wednesday, drawing 35.9 million and 37.5 million uniques, respectively, proving that people are equally, if not more, interested in analyzing data the day after the primaries. ("There were headlines to write but I was sitting around playing with maps," Roberts said of his use of these maps during Super Tuesday.) An NFL playoffs app the group threw together over "four or five days" during Christmas break earned $150,000. Recently, the group had all 17,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's schedule online and searchable hours after their release.

Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/media_events/nyt_digital_news_editor_web_represents_golden_age_of_storytelling_85315.asp

Perhaps the NYT will consider opening up their data and content store so that third parties can create even more compelling and interactive apps... Taking a lesson from the social web, ala Facebook or OpenSocial. But, that's likely just a bit too Web 2.0.

Book Distribution by Email (or RSS)

May 12, 2008

Daily Lit. Get your fix of literature a little at a time, straight to your inbox or favorite RSS Reader. Its almost like the days of reading Charles Dickens in the Evening Post... Bite sized serializations. Or, a little like a mashup of a Podcast and an EBook. Either way, its an idea that just makes sense.

I poked around for a bit to see what they offer authors who want to make their books available... didn't see anything on first glance. Seems like a great way to self-promote as a writer... even by offering free books. I see they have free syndication of books in the public domain. Maybe I can catch up on my classics.

I want mine in twitters and text messages. If only SMS didn't have this damned 250 Character limit... and my phone's screen less readable than a mimeograph.

Maybe they should get together with Brijit.com for the SMS Subscription.

Grassroots Book Marketing

April 30, 2008

If you've got a book that appeals to a niche market, say techies or trend spotters - try to go after bloggers and idiopaths (meme spreaders) in the field. That's a path well played by author Daniel Suarez aka Leinad Zeraus. After trying to get his book "Daemon" read by literary agents with little success, he went after bloggers in the fields of gaming, warfare, AI, and social media. After generating some buzz and some reviews he and his wife created their own publishing company to distribute the book for Kindle and POD.

So many writers feel locked into the path of the publishing house which leads to the route of the conventional book reviewer - who's industry connections make it difficult for them to approach books from outside the tightly bound network. By marketing outside the publishing industry, you appeal to more than just the book "experts"... you reach the people who care about the subject.

Publishers take note... remain too insular and you may find that your audience - and your authors have used the social model of like-minded, niche interest communities and blown up your precious infrastructure of bestseller lists, New York Times book reviewers, and heavily marketed, overstocked distribution channels.

Read the full story at Wired.

The Controversy Over Flat Books

April 01, 2008

Amazon sent an open letter to "interested parties" - aka: major book publishers specifying that it will require publishers wanting to sell PODS through its Web Goliath to go through Amazon's subsidiary POD publishing company BookSurge and the publishing industry is non-plussed to say the least. Out the gate this sure sounds like predatory and monopolistic behavior - exploiting its massive sales front to force other POD publishers out of contention. Late Monday afternoon, Ingram, parent company of rival POD company Lightning Source, issued a statement from John Ingram noting the concerns it has fielded from publishers about Amazon's decision.

Publisher's Weekly has more detail. Amazon's argument is that it doesn't make sense to print a book "On Demand" at a third location if they can print the title at their own facility, thereby including it along with other titles the buyer purchased and saving wait time and cutting out the middle man. From Amazon: "It isn't logical or efficient to print a POD book in a third place, and then physically ship the book to our fulfillment centers. It makes more sense to produce the books on site, saving transportation costs and transportation fuel, and significantly speeding the shipment to our customers."

That sounds like a strong argument. It certainly falls in line with the global shift to a horizontal value chain that is forcing every company to rethink its processes in order to compete in a flat world. The time and cost difference in having a third location print a book before sending it on to Amazon for fulfillment could add up quickly - especially for an industry already struggling with lower sales and tighter margins. But, is the answer really to hand over control to a single POD publisher - or is there another option?

Perhaps Amazon should take a lesson from the UPS "in-sourcing" business model. UPS has created an entirely new revenue stream in taking parts of a company's fulfillment process on themselves. In fact, they not only act as shipping and inventory service providers, but are actually doing work on customer computers for Toshiba maintenance issues - saving shipping to and from the Toshiba plant, and are packaging products, going into businesses to analyze facilities and distribution systems, and much more. They are doing all this without taking over the brand of the company - they are just acting as a highly integrated consultant.

If Amazon really wants to get into the publishing business, they can do it without displacing established firms. They can act as consultants, more like a Cuckoo's egg in the nest of every publisher. An open fulfillment system that other publishers can integrate with would be far less controversial and create a more open playing field rather than closing it down to a single POD publisher handling it all. That way the customer really benefits.

The World in 100 Words

March 31, 2008

Brijit: A news aggregator service pays writers $5 for any 100 word summaries of news they publish. From their about page: "Brijit aggregates the world's best long-form content and abstracts it in 100 words or less, providing busy, omnivorous, and increasingly mobile readers with rich, qualitative summaries as well as better guideposts for what to read, watch or listen to now." True to all emergent news outlets, they also let users rate content so it is easier to filter even further.

100 words is enough to know whether I want to know more. Its great for mobile devices too. Its also a fascinating model for content collection and for content creation. I'm curious to know how many articles the average Brijit writer submits. I bet its a great way for journalists to hone their chops on the micro form. A medium that is likely to take hold in a myriad forms.

The information overload we're all faced with requires better filters and fewer sources. Innovations in news aggregation have heretofore offered us some great ways to get more news from fewer places. Some have also offered us user filtered and rated news. In fact, sites like slashdot and digg have defacto summaries already in place since the submitter includes a summary or headline when they post. But this site actually pays writers for quality summaries. Summaries that are more likely to accurately reflect the intent of the article - rather than a snide comment or personal injection in the summary. It also specifies the articles it wants summarized. So, there's a very interesting hybrid of top-down editorial discretion and bottom-up rating system in play here.

A well-written 100 word article is as much information as the average radio summary and often more than a television story. The truth is, this is not that different from what the media already does... slice and dice news from the wire into your own format and your own voice. But the scale of something like this is massive. I see that there are a variety of digests to select from - on specific topics or from specific publications but I wonder also, if this model would be even better if divided up and focused on more specific niches. This might make a great resource for a variety of industries where there is so much innovation and research being published and so little time to consume it all.

Amazon to buy Audible

January 31, 2008

Amazon announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire Audible, Inc. the country's largest provider of digital downloads of spokenword audio. Amazon is paying $11.50 per share and assuming Audible's outstanding stock-based awards, making the value of the deal about $300 million. Audible's stock price was at $9.33 the day before that deal was announced, although its shares were selling at a 52-week high of $14.22 in November. The purchase is expected to close in the second quarter. This news runs parallel with Amazon's announcement to investors concerned with Amazon's margins despite a jump in Fourth quarter segment revenue of 31%, to $1.64 billion and a total media sales rise of 31% in the year, to $9.24 billion. Bezos told analysts that an operating margin of 10% was possible, as compared to 5.7% for 2007. Digital distribution direct to Amazon hardware is bound to improve those margins. 2008 promises to be an exciting time for digital content publishing. New opportunities for distribution to handheld devices are more promising than ever.

Too Many Features Means More Sour Grapes

January 11, 2008

The feature wars are going to apex in all things tech - whether that be Social Sites with too many tools and a dispersion of focus or in high tech gadgets.

As Bob Sullivan points out in the Red Tape Chronicles, Accenture group will be releasing a study on gadget product returns later this week that suggests consumers often can't figure out how to use many of the gadgets they buy, and a sizable portion of those gadgets end up right back at the store.

"Customers believe that the product doesn't work or does not perform as expected," said Allen Delattre, who runs the electronics research group at Accenture. "But almost none of (the products) have a hardware or software defect. The returns are happening because people can't figure out how to make things work."

Another issue besides over-complication is compatibility and interconnectivity. Consumers don't care which side of the "integration" is broken... they just want the end-to-end to work. As social networks offer more APIs and more integration points between them, this issue will become a major problem for users. If enough Facebook applications don't work Facebook will have to take responsibility. Facebook will not be able to shirk responsibility back on the third party for long before users just bail on the entire experience. It will only get more complicated in a sea of connectedness where the ownership of properties and features blurs. Users need to know who to contact for help and have "One throat to choke" when things go wrong.

Handling returns is incredibly expensive for retailers, who have to inspect the product, troubleshoot the problem and repackage the item for reduced-price sale. An old rule of thumb in the PC industry states that one returned computer wipes out the profit made from the sale of two others, Accenture says.

Losing a subscriber because they can't figure out how your tools work, or worse, are having problems integrating another profile into your toolset is just as expensive in a world where every user brings with them a viral network of opinions and contacts. A single unhappy idea virus "sneezer" can take hundreds of users with them to the "next best thing". Losing one user in a viral social web is nothing short of social web genocide.

The solution is to keep it focused. Limit your features to clearly specified goals. Identify your core business and target users and build well designed and user-tested interfaces specifically for those users... don't get caught up in building ever more complicated functionality if you haven't nailed the basics. If you have to... spin off properties or products that focus on a smaller market. But don't let the clutter overwhelm users.

I say this knowing full well that we have let Enfuse become riddled with complexity that is causing user-confusion. We know that it is time to clean house and are assessing the site and the business to define our focus and consider reorganizing it into cleaner sub-systems. Stay tuned...

Where in the World?

December 21, 2007

Its been a while since my last post. Naturally, I've been busy and perhaps a bit uninspired on the programming front - instead I've been working on my own creative endeavors and doing a few things around the house.

Most notably I have been playing with thermal siphons for passive solar heating and thermal roman shades for insulation. Here's info on WarmWindows: http://www.warmcompany.com/wwpage.html. There's lots of specs online for Passive Solar Thermal Siphons. Here are a few that I've found:

These projects have given me an opportunity for a much needed physical creative outlet and they've also given me a chance to research eco-friendly solutions to building, heating and energy.

I've intentionally allowed myself to hold off on doing any Enfuse coding in order to give the site a chance to blossom. My OCD temperament can cause me to go crazy when adoption is not happening at the rate that I want it to. Every now and again its important to step back and let things ride. The last couple weeks its actually been nice to just check in to see what's changed and be pleasantly surprised by the activity.

Probably more importantly, it is vital to step away in order to assess whether the direction the site and the core functionality itself is aligning with the passions of the participants and the larger social web. Now and again it is necessary to assess where you fit into the needs of the world at large. If the world changes around you, adapt. Without getting a bird's eye-view now again, all you can do is move seeds around - one more ant slaving away. Never really knowing whether the work you are doing has any real value or meaning. Its really a wondrous thing how malleable any given tool can be if you allow yourself to consider the possible alternative uses for it.

Is the service we provide for the arts too narrowly focused, not narrowly focused enough? Should we retool to provide a more political or social function or compliment what we already have with new goals? Should we strip away half of what we've got in order to make the site more focused and easier to use? Without stepping back and letting users do their thing, its easy to get blinded by your own vision.

I suppose I'm developing a metaphor here - a curtain is not just a decoration, it can help you save energy, money and keep you more comfortable. A box of aluminum foil can help offset your consumption of petroleum. But you have to step away and consider the alternative uses and make some simple modifications. So, too, a forum can be used as a collaborative tool or a flaming spiral of silly human ego spew.

Anyway, here's a couple pics of my Thermal Siphon and a design for one that I'd like to try to make:

The Bubble Bloggers and the Death of the City

December 08, 2007

I stumbled upon an entry on the cross-over of blog culture and urban planning on www.planetizen.com - Blended Urban Reality: What Would Jane Jacobs Think of Facebook? An interesting write-up that notes the higher concentration of bloggers in city neighborhoods that are designed in a more mixed-use, human-centric mode...

"Outside.In, a website designed to gather and organize neighborhood news, published a list of "America's Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods." What was striking (but perhaps not surprising) is that all were living examples of the kind of places Jacobs championed: Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, Portrero Hill in San Francisco, Shaw in Washington. If the physical form of a neighborhood is conducive to community, so is its virtual form. But the other striking thing about the list was that all the neighborhoods were in a state of change--gentrifying or recently gentrified. It's certainly demographic: a neat and obvious alignment of hipster and blogger. But it also means that the newly emerging character of these places is being forged, at least in part, online. These are incontrovertibly real-world neighborhoods, but their community is as virtual as it is physical. With each year, we get better at navigating between the two. "

If you're not familiar with Jane Jacobs and her ground-breaking city planning book - "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" check it out. Its not only a scathing indictment of poor city design but has excellent and tangible examples of better ways to plan.

It's fascinating to see this convergence, but it's not really surprising. Cultural explorers, whether bohemian or intellectual or artist have personalities that embrace the vehicles of culture and are drawn to incubator locations and to mediums that resonate society's zeitgeist.

Despite this, there is a gap between the cellular bubble of digital communication and the community of place. We can now reach out to friends across cyberspace, shout out loud from our soap blogs for those readers who read us because they agree already and can "virtually" ignore our real-world neighbors who we have little in common with outside of our geography. Facebook scratches the surface of localized social networking by connecting people with school mates and with groups based on city or place... but all the features are still very much adolescent social.

Localized social networking tools with community building and civic value could really help achieve a meaningful synergy of cyber and space in a social context that will really help build physical and virtual spaces that are integrated and mutually vibrant.

Civic responsibility should be social

December 04, 2007

Last week I served on the jury of a murder trial. It was fascinating, sad, eye-opening and unnerving.

While at the City and County building I did a bit of poking around at City Council's Office and the Mayor's office trying to learn how difficult it would be to get the agendas and minutes from city council meetings (as a start) in order to build a social site based on civic interaction.

The idea would be to do some geo-mapping and keyword mining to connect users to issues, bills, zoning changes and other community actions that are relevant to them and to let users search for, subscribe to and interact on civic issues.

My thinking was to make the entire platform open - probably based on OpenSocial, and allow developers to write applications for features such as polling and surveys, petitions, etc... Also, to make the profile information itself based on OpenID Server / Consumer so that pretty much the entire infrastructure would be open and receptive - with the only major effort being collecting and mining the civic data, rather than building yet another profile management system.

It might be a challenge to collect the data because it doesn't sound like there's a standard nationally for the storage model for civic information of this kind. But, at least in Denver, based on preliminary research, I think it is possible to get the data.

I would be curious to hear what people think about this idea.

Feeding the Project and other beasties

November 21, 2007

I believe in Open Source. I use Open Source. I am into it. I am, however, fairly disorganized and highly ADD, as well as just a little bit OCD. I have always wanted to contribute code to an Open Source project, but I've never been able to organize my code well enough to package it for outside consumption. Its a pretty intimidating prospect to me. Whenever I use Open Source code in my endeavors I try provide appropriate credit and to follow the appropriate licensing: whether it be GPL, Apache License, Creative Commons, etc...

As I've said before, I don't believe more functionality is the magic bullet - it is implementation of the right features into an effective package that makes the difference. Much like a Linux Distribution if you will. You can pick one package here, one package there and bundle it together. It will be very useful for a certain type of user while others will prefer a different distribution. That's how I've tried to model the Enfuse toolset. Its about the community, the right balance of tools and interaction. Social Media is not an arms race but users still have to have the right tools to make their relationship with us sticky and our tools must be strong enough to be of value in their self-promotion and collaboration efforts.

Most of our tools have been custom-built, not proprietary mind you... but built from the ground up for use on Enfuse. Many of these individual components I would be glad to share with other programmers but, as I've said, I'm just too disorganized to manage an Open Source project. So, if there's a tool that we have built that someone would be interested in repurposing, let me know... For example, our slide show manager has been something I've considering posting on RIAForge for some time, but I've never cleaned it up well enough to actually post it... The other piece is - there are just better people out there to manage a purely technical project - I'm into the arts and the publishing side. For me, technology is just the vehicle.

[More]

A Peak at Google's Open Social API

November 20, 2007

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Google's Open Social API

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