Amazon Gets Demanding with Print-on-Demand Publishers

We often hold up Amazon as an example of one of the original Web 2.0 companies. Their survival amid the tech meltdown was driven largely by the value of the data they'd acquired through thousands of reader reviews, recommendations, and "people who bought this bought that" collaborative filtering. Amazon was a system that grew more valuable with more users: a network-effect-driven data lock-in.

That kind of lock-in is implicit: publishers were free to sell their books elsewhere, and readers were free to buy them elsewhere. Such implicit lock-in is characteristic of other Web 2.0 success stories, like eBay and craigslist. These sites relied on the value of the unique data/marketplace they were building to implicitly raise enormous barriers of entry. Not much fun if you're a newspaper, but a boon for buyers and sellers.

But today's news from Amazon about Print-on-Demand is the latest move from Amazon revealing a trend toward much more aggressive explicit lock-in attempts. (Not that it's an entirely new strategy from the folks that brought you the "one-click" patent). Amazon has effectively told publishers that if they wish to sell POD books on Amazon, they must use Amazon as the POD printer. Small/self publishers are unsurprisingly feeling bullied.

Let's look at four levels of lock-in at play here:

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TOC Conference just around the corner

On the Radar backchannel today, Make's Phil Torrone shared a link about how author Paulo Coelho has "pirated" his own book using file sharing, with surprising results:

[U]ploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more.

The use of technology like digitization, file sharing, the Internet is contributing to dramatic changes happening to the business of publishing. We launched the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last year (video on blip) to help publishers -- ourselves included -- begin to make sense of these changes. The name TOC (which publishing folks may recognize as the common acronym for a table of contents) was a nod to our intention to see the conference set the agenda for the future of publishing. We couldn't have said it better than TOC speaker Kirk Biglione:

TOC has emerged as the premier conference (possibly the only conference) designed to help book publishers come to terms with the range of technologies that are transforming their industry.

The second TOC conference is now barely two weeks away. You can preview the schedule and tutorials at the conference web site. This year's program includes several audience favorites from last year (including guaranteed profitability in publishing, hot new gadgets, and SEO (search engine optimization for publishers), and I'm thrilled about all of the new additions and speakers, including Seth Godin, Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, and Lulu.com founder Bob Young.

As a Radar reader, you can get a 20% discount when you register using discount code toc08rdr. TOC 2008 is Feb. 11-13 in New York City.

P.S. -- We're closing day two of the conference with another crowd favorite, a panel discussion with a group of teens. If you know any teens in the New York area interested in participating, drop me a line at toc AT oreilly.com

Shelfari and the New Social Contract

The high value we've come to place in reputation on the Web is underscored in several ways by the recent dustup  over Shelfari. In short, Shelfari is being called out (primarily, but definitely not exclusively, by Tim Spalding, of competitor LibraryThing) for two violations of the norms of that reputation system:

• AstroTurfing (though in this case it sounds more like Sock Puppeting) in the comments of blogs around the Web.
• Deceptive spamming of new users' Gmail address books.

While Shelfari CEO Josh Hug has posted something that might be called an apology/explanation regarding the spamming, when considered alongside the rampant AstroTurfing, claims of benign neglect lose their credibility.

What is particularly telling is the profound sense of violation (and deep embarrassment) expressed by those who feel duped:

• "Red face. Egg on face."
• "surprise and horror" (In the comments) [BTW, if their customers were expressing "surprise and horror" all the way back in July, fixing the interface should probably have been escalated]
• "what sucks is the cheap tricks"
• "I have blacklisted email from shelfari.com [from] my servers"

Our personal social networks are not only more valuable than ever to us, but also to businesses, in particular those whose success requires social transmission. Smart ones will avoid pissing in the well.

A Word of Warning about Microsoft Live Writer

I know, I know, that's what I get for using beta software (from Microsoft no less), but might I recommend that if you choose to try out Windows Live Writer, that you decline when it offers to try and download your blog theme to improve the preview feature:

Reminds of my college newspaper days, when 20,000 copies hit the street with this gem of a headline (A 2-line headline is referred to as a "double-decker"):

A Triple Decker

Goes Up Here

And Down Here

I do love the promise of applications like Ecto and Live Writer, especially for someone trying to manage posts among multiple blogs. The emergence of blog management tools like that (from Microsoft no less), and of fully hosted services like Living Dot suggests an attractive market is forming as people and companies learn that much like traditional publishing, blogging does not scale comfortably without both technical and organizational effort.

It should be interesting to see that market develop as attention expands from tools designed for individual bloggers (or small teams) to ones meant for managing dozens or hundreds (look for something like an InCopy for blogging in the not-too-distant future).

NY Times Ends Subscription-only Access

After two years (to the day, actually), the Times is (finally) opening up its entire site to all readers, ending the "TimesSelect" subscription program:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.

The newspaper said the TimesSelect project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

Whether this will help turn the Times around financially (those have been a rough two years) remains to be seen, but is an important signal of one of media's most esteemed brands reaching the Acceptance phase in coping with the new economics of newspapers. Expect Dow Jones to follow suit with the Wall Street Journal.

CFP Open for TOC 2008, Feb. 11-13 in New York

The CFP (Call for Proposals) for O'Reilly's second Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) is now open. The conference will be held in New York this time, February 11-13, 2008. Proposals are due by October 1, 2007.

We're building on the success (coverage from Publishers Weekly, Medialoper, eContent, and Book Patrol) of TOC 2007 as we put together the program for an even bigger TOC 2008, and we want you to join the conversation.

We're looking for participants and proposals for three kinds of presentations: a 45-minute session or panel discussion; a 3-hour tutorial, giving practical, in-depth instruction and guidance in using new technologies critical to publishing; and 5-10 minute lightning demos (rapid-fire presentations that provide insight into new technologies that serve publishers). You can also review the tutorials and sessions from TOC 2007. before submitting your proposal.

• Book publishers trying new digital distribution methods and models
• Publishers successfully repurposing content across multiple media, including books, the Web, and videos
• Authors blogging and promoting their books (with or without help from your publisher)
• Authors who are going it alone, without a publisher
• Technologists at publishing companies driving new digital initiatives
• Technology companies with something new to offer in publishing technology
• Developers or vendors working on collaborative/distributed authoring/editing tools
• Magazine publishers succeeding in a digital world
• Project managers leading a major digitalization/conversion initiative
• Companies serving publishers looking for a platform to launch/announce a new product
• Entrepreneurial publishers/publishing companies
• Publishing services or technology vendors looking to connect with decision makers
• Publishing businesses that have figured out how to become (or remain) profitable in a digital world
• Business strategists navigating an industry upended by the Internet
• Libraries finding new ways to connect readers to the content and knowledge they care about
• Persons, organizations, or businesses that care about books and can articulate their visions for the future

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Microsoft Open XML Failed ISO Bid Makes Big News

Microsoft's failed bid to make its "Open XML" format an ISO standard was certainly newsworthy, though it was slightly surprising to see it covered in detail in the Wall Street Journal, and to hear about it this evening on MarketPlace.

Among the most amusing responses to Microsoft's failed efforts (which include some questionable attempts at a fast-track and alleged vote packing) came from Eric Raymond:

I find I'm almost ready to recommend that OSI tell Microsoft to ram its licenses up one of its own orifices, even if they are technically OSD compliant.

To me it seems that Microsoft has misunderstood the criticism leveled at its opaque (and ubiquitous) .DOC format. It seems that they believed that the contention was merely that the format was closed, and therefore making it XML (and hence "open") would assuage those concerns. But the biggest complaints about Open XML have been around as long as RTF -- that Microsoft deliberately makes choices in their "standards" that sacrifice general flexibility for Office-specific implementation details.

Of course, I don't really blame them -- they haven't gotten where they are by being a benevolent standards body. Perhaps this will finally motivate them to stop trying to act like one.

Recent Posts

• eBooks with that "old book" smell on August 23, 2007
• Grandma definitely gets MySpace on August 18, 2007
• Authors Still Want Publishers on August 16, 2007
• Guest Blog: Teens Weigh in on Changes in Publishing, Media on July 25, 2007
• Harry Potter's no Magic for Publishers, Retailers on June 27, 2007
• Notes from TOC on the future of print on June 20, 2007
• TOC Day 3: Parallels between software development and content development on June 19, 2007