The Rise of eBook Applications
Tomorrow’s eBook will become an interactive platform for third-party applications—software that delights targeted reader audiences. There are already a variety of apps in mobile and tablet marketplaces that would complement many genres: cooking apps, history apps, and Harry Potter apps. But the development of independent software applications that can be plugged directly into an eBook will drive a new type of app marketplace that will make eBooks more compelling, interactive, informative, and fun. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue Books have historically been a static, linear medium: we progress from page one through to the end, and any interruption means a break in the flow. But society has been shifting to more of an interrupt-driven culture where multitasking meets multimedia. While Baby Boomers might have driven their parents crazy by watching TV while doing homework, today’s youngest generation is adept at combining simultaneous phone, text, web surfing, YouTube watching, and music listening (hopefully not while driving). The eBook of the future will be poised to cater to this “ADD Culture” by changing the linear, personal nature of reading into a dynamic, multimedia-enhanced experience. A year ago the EPUB3 standard, one of the most popular and open (non-proprietary) eBook formats, developed definitions for how internal and external links will be handled within an eBook. This is an important first step that will finally let the barbarians through the gates. My guess is, half of you are excited about the possibilities of interactive eBook apps, and half of you are cringing at the prospect of dancing, singing, self-interrupting eBooks. (I’d love to hear comments from both groups.) For the latter, let me reassure you that the nature of reading will not change for everyone. You can always read without apps, and I’ll even offer up that some books are simply meant to be read, period, in that wonderful linear fashion. But many books, and many readers, will be improved with the onset of embedded applications. eBooks will feature companion apps to aid in networking, research, and play, and everything in-between. eBook apps will enable you to interact outside your book, pulling up relevant photos, maps, videos, reviews, and annotations. Imagine music pre-selected as ideal reading soundtracks…links to social networks…related articles and further suggested reading…related products that you can purchase…real-time connections with other readers engrossed in the same passages. There are few limits to the potential for interactivity. eBooks with companion apps will become more fun to read. This will drive demand, and ultimately a host of noble results will be drawn into the mix from the powerful venturi effect of fun. Even the dullest schoolbooks (for me it was chemistry) will come alive, and great things will emerge: better learning, understanding, involvement, and community. (This reminds me of the themes in Volkswagen’s http://www.thefuntheory.com/ web site, “dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.” It’s worth checking out.) This is the future of the eBook: to become more interactive, social, and multimedia driven. Digital media is converging, and the possibilities for an eBook platform are almost limitless when cross-pollinated with other interactive technologies. Today, I am able...
read moreSocial Reading: Beyond Gutenberg? Beyond Zuckerberg!
In previous posts I’ve touched on some of the social-transformational aspects of eBooks, but perhaps the most interesting will be the effect of social networking. I’m going to propose in this blog post that the eBook platform of the future will support not just models for more social aspects of reading, but will support multiple reader personas to define how you interact with social networks. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue Today we manage our career network on LinkedIn, and a more personal network in the Neverland of Facebook. But that really isn’t enough to define who we are to our different social networks. While, as Zuckerberg says, “you have one identity” on Facebook, the truth is, most people are not so easily homogenized, especially after college. Facebook is only now realizing the importance of separating out our college, family, and other social interactions. In one sense, the Facebook experience will only mature as Zuckerberg grows up and becomes more multifaceted himself. We really have many different personas based on our different roles, interests, and hobbies. Let me illustrate with an unapologetically narcissistic example: I read literature in the persona of a former English Department faculty member. I read programming manuals in the persona of a software developer. When I read martial arts books, I am the sensei. Books on wine and cooking touch me in my beloved role as a party host, while repair manuals speak to the former mechanic who still has a garage full of shop tools. These personas are unique; they don’t generally speak to overlapping social groups. (Unless of course I want to host a party for members of my social network that are mechanically-inclined martial artists who want to discuss Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.) More than any other media, what we read defines our interests, and who we are as a reader. So the eBook is the natural place to engage with that multifacetedness. The eBook needs to be a part of a larger eBook social platform, a foundation that connects you, your library, and your social networks. The platform will provide you with the ability to create and store multiple reader’s personas: avatars that speak to different facets of your personality. These will enable you to be who you want to be, for a given book or entire genre, and within a given social network. Reading has been a largely private experience for a thousand years. Why now would we want to interact with fellow readers? For the same reason that women’s book clubs are so popular, or students take literature classes, or people sign up for adult workshops; indeed for the very reason we have social networks at all. Any medium that captures our imagination, calls out for interaction. People are generally wired to share their experiences. This is true of all media; when we share information with a group who share common interests, we gain a greater understanding and appreciation of what we are reading, watching, gazing, hearing, or gaming. The eBook platform can introduce us to a group of individuals that we can self-select for our personal, virtual book club, social salon, study group, or...
read moreeBooks and the Triple Bottom Line
I’ve written about why eBooks are useful, and even inevitable. But I want to take this a step further, and look at why they are important, in the sense of social impact. One useful measure is to see how eBooks serve the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue Triple Bottom Line refers to the three pillars for measuring organizational success: People, Planet, and Profit. TBL has been adopted by the UN and various governments for public sector cost accounting and corporate social responsibility initiatives—which of course makes it sound awfully dull. But TBL is actually a progressive and useful way to think about how a technology will transform the organizations and societies it touches. The Effect on People and Society We live in the Information Age, of which the Internet is often described as the key driving force. But the Internet is just a communication vehicle, a vast cloud of information, disinformation, and generally wasted computer space, largely curated by Google. On the other hand, eBooks are catalogued, edited, and critically validated. Whether they deliver wisdom, entertainment, facts, fancy, lies, or opinion, eBooks are part of a global digital library that is far better managed and organized than the hopelessly cluttered and chaotic Web. While eBooks are personal and static today, they will soon become networked. Once we connect them digitally, eBooks will serve as interactive “knowledge nodes” on a vast social network. The cloud-based technology infrastructure is already here; it’s now a matter of building the eReader platform that will connect every eBook to the global community. That’s when things will get really interesting. Tomorrow’s eBook will have the power to transform society in fundamental ways. It will drive social change in health, education, and literacy. It could even fuel a new global Renaissance. Or at least cure boredom on a global scale. Consider just a few examples, and then think about what will happen when the truly innovative thinkers get going with it: a medical worker in a remote village in Africa checking an online medical dictionary on her smartphone, and using that dictionary to connect with health care professionals in real-time to help prevent the spread of an epidemic; the works of one culture disseminated across other cultures, with few barriers to repress or censor the free flow of ideas; crowdsourced (volunteer) translation of millions of titles into dozens of languages, spreading knowledge and literacy effortlessly around the globe. members of social micro-networks sharing their views on topics from science to the arts, accessed as wikis from within the eBook’s limitless, virtual margins; And consider the more personal ways that the eBook can contribute to our daily lives: a cookbook that guides you through your local grocery store, describing where to find ingredients and suggesting the perfect wine pairing; a car repair manual that links via Bluetooth to your vehicle’s onboard computer and reads out your fault codes (yes, there’s an app for that); performance poetry downloaded for 50 cents, as a video of the poet doing the reading; children’s books that come alive with song and video and images. There is a vast potential, from the sublime to the pornographic, that...
read moreThe Future of Books
I previously wrote that it is high time for eBooks to evolve, and of course this begs the questions why, how, and by whom? I’ll answer all of these in a series of upcoming posts, but let me first address why even book lovers should not decry the inevitable ascension of the eBook. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue I am a book-lover myself; my home office is a library with almost every square foot of wall space dedicated to bookshelves. I believe that old hardbound books are beautiful. I collect rare books on a few particularly arcane topics. And I keep literary paperbacks not because I want to hand them down to my daughter (a romantic notion that is fast fading), but because every time I look at them I recall fondly the memory of having read them. But book-lover that I am, I see a time coming when I will clean out many of my paperbacks; that age is slowly coming to an end. Yes, book sales are still strong today, but as anyone who has worked in the news industry will tell you, change is in the wind. Today we buy books and, like cast-off college textbooks, we sell them back on eBay and Amazon in order to fund new purchases. My daughter is already plotting how she’ll spend the money she’ll make selling back her American Girl and Magic Treehouse books (for new books and perhaps a few new games). This sort of buying and selling of physical media is inefficient; it is simply a means to reduce the cost of new purchases, and a way to keep the Postal Service in business. The ultimate expression of what we are trying to achieve is the eBook, which wings its way silently, instantly, and digitally into our hands. Such is the digital future of all media: news, movies, music, books, magazines. Digital media is downloaded directly into our lives and crosses easily from one device to another, always within reach. This is not to say that the paperback book will fade away quickly, certainly not as fast as is happening with the print newspaper. I believe that certain books will always be better in print. Coffee table books belong on the coffee table, not in an eReader. I think there will be a place for both print and eBooks, just as there is a place for both electric and acoustic guitars. Is there such a thing as a nostalgic futurist? If so, I may be one. I can see how the digital future of books will play out; there will come a day when I reminisce about the feel of a paperback, just as I still recall the satisfying heft and roundness of old vinyl records (which I still have a stash of, btw). And yes, bookstores are romantic places to sip java and perhaps meet that pretty girl in the white turtleneck. But despite such notions, we all know where the future is taking us, and even for a veteran writing teacher like myself, I have to say that the benefits will greatly outweigh what we will lose. What is it that we love about paperback books? It certainly...
read morePrologue: It’s Time for eBooks to Evolve
I’m a habitual bedtime reader—especially my daughter’s bedtime. I’ve been reading to her almost every night for what is coming up on 10 years; since she was almost 10 months old. We have gone from Sandra Boynton to Dr. Seuss, from all the Magic Treehouse books to countless American Girl books, from timeless classics like the Little House on the Prairie series to fantasy classics like The Hobbit and of course Harry Potter. I dread the day, and I know it’s coming soon, when she’s too old for bedtime stories. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue A few years ago we purchased our first Kindle, and then an iPad. My daughter and I both like paper books, especially hardcovers, but we have grown comfortable with eBooks. I personally find them easier on the eyes, not to mention far more convenient while traveling (some of those Potter books are over 900 pages). A little over two years ago I wrote to a colleague, “Children’s online books need more than a black-and-white Kindle experience. Children need color and imagery, and the e-books of tomorrow will include animation and both sound and video narration. The technology is there; imagine sitting in bed with your child and an iPad, choosing what to read from among thousands of titles. Imagine a child not glued to a TV but to an e-reader. What kids and parents need is a safe and simple medium for discovering both old ‘static’ titles (perhaps enhanced by wonderful narrators with masterful storytelling skills), as well as a new generation of highly interactive books that resonate with the online world of tomorrow’s generations.” Today we are much closer to that reality, but eBooks are still far behind where they should be. Color and multimedia are making inroads, and there is some rudimentary social networking, although nothing particularly interesting yet: just the ability to express your likes and tweet happily to your social network (which assumes that they care about your reading habits). Some of today’s eBooks offer text-to-speech, and Amazon Audible offers the premium-paid option of a professional narrator. Regrettably, digital rights management has made it all but impossible for my wife to lend me her Kindle edition of Hillenbrand’s Unbroken (the 14-day lending feature is not enabled for that title). So instead of being able to borrow her copy, I’ll have to purchase my own or borrow her Kindle (if you think it’s hard for working spouses to set aside quality time for each other, try setting aside time for each other’s devices!). I admit that as a writer and educator, with multiple liberal arts degrees, I have a profound love of old fashioned books. But I’m also a card-carrying member of the tech geek literati, and I see a not-too-distant future where eBooks, powered by digital media and real social networking, will usher in a new Renaissance. Yes, put in the right ingredients, and eBooks will become truly magical. And of course, just as the rise of literacy in the 19th century gave birth to the dime-novel, tomorrow’s eBooks will also reinvent wonderful new ways of wasting time that will compete with, or perhaps merge with, online gaming. After all,...
read moreJournatic, The Tribune, and Offshore Outsourced Journalism
I am struck by the recent angst over Journatic’s use of fake bylines. The byline business is regrettable, but I wonder how much of the issue is really about the Tribune’s investment in Journatic, and the resulting loss of half the Trib’s hyperlocal staff. The Journatic model of outsourcing “grunt work” to offshore sources will be familiar to anyone who has followed US business trends over the past 20 years. Companies want to stay in business, and even those that aren’t under significant financial pressure will embrace operating efficiencies. The news industry is under terrible pressure–most of it due to digital inaction: an incomprehensible failure or worse, a self-inflicted refusal to sell the new media advertising products that businesses are actually seeking at record levels–and Journatic offers a model that increases inventory while cutting costs. That makes this model all but inevitable. Offshoring has happened across many American business sectors, from manufacturing to knowledge work. Even legal firms are offshoring patent writing and research to India. In the software industry, it is quite a common practice to offshore certain tasks like software quality testing. This was bemoaned by the industry at the onset, and the quality of service started off fairly low, but over the past decade it has become an industry standard. The old argument goes something like this: do American workers really want to do the rote tasks, or do they want to focus on the skilled work? If companies can efficiently cut costs by offshoring the grunt work, those savings can be used to fund innovation back home. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way; sometimes US workers simply lose jobs, the savings are poured into management bonuses, and the product suffers. But just as often when companies forfeit quality, there is a correction as they lose market share and realize they need to improve the product. Hopefully we’ll see that trend in journalism, where consumers should, and do, demand quality reporting. But many in the world of journalism, despite their focus on news, seem to have remarkably little sense of their place in the new world order. The newspaper industry is struggling to stop a revenue freefall, and offshoring practices are of course painful for the journalists. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s think about this from a business perspective (which is really the only way to look at it). Say you add offshore staff to supplement your reporting with a full complement of articles collected from easily accessible community sources on the internet: legal notices, birth and death notices, real estate sales, crime stats, sex offender databases, sports results, school test scores, court reports, and so forth. There is a small investment to be made there, but that investment could pay off. Yes, you could lay off some of your US team, but why not try the high road first, at least for say 90 days. Your US staff can focus on writing better quality articles that really engage the community on a deep level: investigative journalism, in-depth articles, local hero interviews, photo slideshows, videos, event coverage: things that get the journalists out of the office and into the community. Now you have a greater amount of inventory (those “data reporting” articles plus the good work of your local journalists), you...
read moreWarren Buffet is No Fool
Why is Mr. Buffett buying newspapers? Is he just collecting quaint old businesses out of sentimentality, like someone might collect old baseball cards? I don’t think so. Yesterday Christine Haughney of the New York Times wrote “Three years after telling his shareholders that he would not buy a newspaper at any price, Mr. Buffett has moved aggressively into the business, buying 63 papers and revealing a 3 percent stake in Lee Enterprises, a chain of mostly small dailies based in Iowa.” (http://nyti.ms/MnAtpX) What has changed in three years? Well for one, given the steady downward spiral of the newspaper industry, newspaper companies are certainly cheaper to buy these days. Buffet himself is somewhat vague about his motivations: “I do not have any secret sauce,” Mr. Buffett said in a phone interview. “There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you’ll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.” (Haughney, NYT, ibid) I believe this to be a bit disingenuous. Buffett is picking primarily local newspapers, ones with deep roots in the community. This isn’t sentimental, this is a business strategy. And I don’t think it has to do with faith in the resurrection of print journalism. Local newspapers have powerful assets, currently undervalued and underutilized, that can be leveraged in a digital world. They have strong brand identities, longstanding ties to the community, a loyal readership, and rolodexes full of advertisers. The smart money is on those who make this connection, who understand that news is part of an advertising ecosystem. Gannett is moving aggressively to capture the local business advertiser with Gannett Digital Marketing Services (and ShopLocal). Patch.com is steadily growing its hyperlocal news network. There is value in those small local newspapers, but the value isn’t the paper itself; it’s in the interplay of valued content, consumer attention, and relationships with local...
read moreThe Ultimate News Device: Tablets
According to Pew Research, The State of the News Media 2012, “44% of adults own a smartphone, and the number of tablet owners grew by about 50% since the summer of 2011, to 18% of Americans over age 18.” While the news forums all but crackle with journalists claiming that the newspaper isn’t dead, I’m sure we can agree that the tablet is the best medium, if not the likely future, of news. So it’s certainly time to discuss the design elements of a good tablet news app. In order to do so, we need to first look at what are still today’s most popular devices for news: newspapers and magazines. Yes, these are devices. They are made of paper, but they are still machines for discovering information. And they still define how we think about news. I can’t resist looking at them from an information architecture standpoint. They have: a user interface designed to support search, discovery, navigation, and browsing; a controlled vocabulary (universally recognized labels and signposts); standard organizing principles (or schema, in the world of cognitive psychology). What are these organizing principles? I could write a very long article about this, but basically, in plain terms, newspapers are designed for: Discovery (Any important news today?) Casual browsing (What’s going on in town this weekend?) Known-item search (How is the S&P doing? What was the football score?) Standardized navigation (It’s easy to flip to topics like Sports, Business, Politics, and at a finer granularity, Classifieds.) Newspapers use different sized headline fonts and page placement to indicate relative importance, with more important articles on the front page, section front pages, and odd pages. Overall, a newspaper is easily scanned and navigated. Plus it’s easy to clip articles and coupons. Magazines also score well for browsing, navigation, and search, especially if they cater to a specialty topic (Sports, Brides, Fashion, etc.). Magazines have a table of contents, and often have an advertising index. Print, of course, lacks rich media capabilities, social networking, and hyperlinks. But it’s easy to carry, and works without wifi, which meant that until the smartphone revolution, print still had an advantage over digital, especially in subways and airplanes. But not so much any more. Mobile and tablet apps enable users to access news-on-demand from a variety of sources, and store great volumes of news in a smaller and more convenient form factor than print. Mobile news is convenient, but not terribly satisfying, especially if you favor long-form journalism. Nor is it pleasant reading if you have less-than-perfect vision. But tablets are almost perfect devices for news. The form factor is terrific, you can increase font size and still display enough content for a satisfying read, and best of all, you can enjoy a mix of rich media and social interaction. So what are the elements of a killer tablet app? Well, if you think a “digital edition” (the faithfully-rendered print version displayed online) is going to be a good tablet experience, think again. Again quoting the Pew Research report: “There are some signs that the way people interact with news on mobile devices is quite different than news behavior on the desktop/laptop computers. Data from Localytics, a client-based mobile analytics firm, analyzed by PEJ reveals that people spend far more time with news apps on the...
read moreThe Future of News: It’s Not About You, It’s About Them
I spend a fair amount of time in forums discussing news, both newspapers and digital news. I am struck by how often someone will chime in with “My grandmother won’t read news online” or “I don’t own a smartphone” or “I like paper coupons” as if those lone opinions somehow underscore a business case for favoring print. Now don’t get me wrong, it is true that there is a demographic associated with every one of those statements. But alone, one person’s opinion is not in itself proof of a trend, a market size, or even a powerful and resilient demographic. Too often an editor or publisher makes business decisions based on their own personal world view, or based on the views and experiences of the newspaper people with whom they associate. This is a mistake that can kill an industry. I came to the newspaper industry by way of the information design and user experience world, serving for over a decade as an information architect (or IA in Silicon Valley parlance). Information architecture is defined by Richard Saul Wurman as “the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge.” While a trained IA or user experience designer might develop solid user interfaces through natural instinct, we are trained early on not to design for what we would find intuitive ourselves, but for what the intended users (profiled into market segments or demographic archetypes), would find intuitive. This is one of the basic principles of user-centered design: you must think outside yourself and continually test your assumptions. I have worked for several years in marketing as well, and I know that marketing folks have similar tenets: don’t rely on positioning that would sway you, the writer, but instead think about what positioning would most influence your targeted demographic markets. And so I would strongly urge decision makers in the news industry (heck, everyone in the news industry!) to spend more time thinking not about what they would like, but where their advertisers and their readership are headed. Study the facts and figures. Looks at trends and analysis. You know how to find sources, and of course you can get most of the data you need from Pew Research (Journalism.org), Nielsen, NAA, and comScore. Just don’t assume that you, or your grandmother, are representative of the demographic you are targeting. I’ll leave you with one personal case in point: I don’t particularly like Facebook. Surprising perhaps, from someone whose work includes helping news organizations embrace social media. I consult on Facebook strategies, I help organizations build powerful Facebook presences, and I integrate Facebook on a systems level. Does this mean I spend much time on Facebook myself? Not at all. (Not that I’m a social media curmudgeon; I practically live on LinkedIn.) My point is, you may love everything about newsprint, you may not own a smartphone, and you may loathe Twitter. You don’t have to change yourself; you just have to recognize that you are not the target audience for the future of the news...
read moreNewsroom Software: WordPress and Other Open Source Options
Some publishers, including thought leaders like John Paton, have cited the potential of using Open Source software to develop low-cost digital newsrooms. In the blog of the Journal Register’s Ben Franklin Project, they write: “we will be using only free web-based tools” and they then deliver a catalogue of such tools. T. S. Eliot, when speaking of the “Free Verse” movement, wrote “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.” In Silicon Valley there has long been a similar saying that “Free Software is never really free.” The issue at hand is what business and finance folks call TCO: Total Cost of Ownership. TCO is the measure of the true cost of a system, including acquisition, customization, support, maintenance, training, and several other cost factors. Open Source software is also known as Free Software, as in the Free Software Foundation, the non-profit body that supports the Open Source movement and who wrote the most common Open Source license, the General Public License or GPL. But “free” refers to the freedom to use and distribute the software; it does not actually refer to price. “The word free in the term free software refers to freedom (liberty) and is not at all related to monetary cost.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software) For newsrooms, “free” Open Source software may well be the most expensive option available. Now, before I get too deep into the issues with Open Source newsrooms, I want to go on record as saying that I am a proponent of Open Source software myself. I love WordPress, and all its fun plug-ins (look, I am blogging in it right now). My company’s web site runs on WordPress and our cloud-based newsroom software runs on the free Open Source Linux/MySQL platform. I am among other things, a tech geek with a team of open source developers. I even write code myself, when the developers aren’t looking. I can afford to use Open Source. But most small newsrooms (and a lot of larger ones) do not have the technical depth to use Open Source, software, and if they do, that technical depth is part of the cost of an Open Source solution. Most newsrooms looking to use Open Source would either have to accept out-of-the-box packaged solutions, which are in general insufficient for the modern digital newsroom, or hire developers to build proper newsroom software. And then pay those developers for support, hosting, and training, not to mention ongoing customizations and maintenance. A Few Words About WordPress WordPress, for example, is not a newsroom system, not unless you are a really small operation with little or nothing in the way of editorial workflow, multimedia, analytics, multi-channel publishing, media management, and third-party aggregation needs. WordPress, for all its publishing power and ease-of-use, does not publish to print and email, does not integrate page planning or Run-of-Print advertising, nor does it integrate advertising systems like coupons, page sponsorship, or restaurant guides. WordPress has some useful plug-ins for journalists, things that notate simple workflow states and multiple contributors. But it doesn’t provide an editorial dashboard with at-a-glance views of the status of dozens, or hundreds, or stories. It doesn’t manage extra fields for flagging print vs. web versions of a story, manage delayed publishing, track the status of story components like video,...
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