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Tag: digital

The Evolution of Music Online | Off Book

Related to the previous, the latest PBS Arts Off Book documentary short is about the massive changes that have occurred in the music industry in the last twenty years as a result of new technology and the Internet:

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PressPausePlay

The full-length documentary PressPausePlay is now available to watch on Vimeo. The film, which somehow manages to be simultaneously both inspiring and melancholic, looks at the effects of digital technology and the Internet on the creative economy. Worth watching if you have a spare hour (although depending on your attitude to these things it might make you smile in joyful validation or retreat to your bed for about a week to weep quietly to yourself:

PressPausePlay was made by creative agency House of Radon.

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Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

James Fallows, veteran journalist and author of Breaking the News, has a lengthy article in The Atlantic on Gawker and the effect of digital media on journalism:

One by one, the buffers between what people want and what the media can afford to deliver have been stripped away. Broadcast TV was deregulated, and cable and satellite TV arose in a wholly post-regulation era. As newspapers fell during the rise of the Internet, and fell faster because of the 2008 recession, the regional papers fell hardest. The survivors, from The New York Times to the National Enquirer, will be what British newspapers have long been: nationwide in distribution, and differentiated by politics and class. The destruction of the “bundled” business model for newspapers, which allowed ads in the Auto section to underwrite a bureau in Baghdad; the rise of increasingly targeted and niche-ified information sources and advertising vehicles; and the consequent pressure on almost any mass offering except for sports—all of these are steps toward a perfected market for information of all sorts, including news. With each passing month, people can get more of what they want and less of what someone else thinks they should have.

Every news organization recognizes this shift… The Atlantic is now profitable in part because traffic on our Web site is so strong. Everyone involved in the site understands the tricks and trade-offs that can increase clicks and raise the chances of a breakout “viral” Web success. Kittens, slide shows, videos, Sarah Palin—these are a few. For us and for other publications, they are complications. For Gawker, they’re all that is.

According to Fallows, however, the disruption is also creating new, positive opportunities:

Economic history is working against “legacy” news organizations like the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, and most magazines you could name. But historical forces don’t play out on a set schedule, and can be delayed for a very long time. Economic history is also working against museums, small private colleges, and the farm-dappled French countryside, but none of them has to disappear next week. Even as it necessarily evolves, our news system will be better the longer it includes institutions whose culture and ambitions reach back to the pre-Gawker era, and it would be harder and costlier to try to re-create them after they have failed than to keep them on life support until their owners find a way to fit their values and standards into the imperatives of the new systems.

But the new culture also creates positive opportunities—as, it’s worth saying again, every previous disruption has… At no stage in the evolution of our press could anyone be sure which approaches would support life, and which would flicker out. Through my own career I have seen enough publications and programs start—and succeed, and fail—to know how hard it is to foresee their course in advance. Therefore I am biased in favor of almost any new project, since it might prove to be the next New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, NPR, or Wired that helps us understand our world.

If you are interested in journalism and news media, the whole article is definitely worth your time.

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Knots

I usually avoid discussions of digital rights management (DRM) as much as possible. It’s a Gordian Knot. We can spend a lot of time and energy painstakingly untangling it, never to find a form of DRM that keeps everyone happy. Or we can  end DRM altogether with one bold stroke (“mission accomplished!”) only to discover that cutting the knot takes longer than we expected and is more complicated than we first thought. Either way, my sense is that we will continue to have some kind of hybrid situation — with some e-books ‘protected’ by DRM and some not — as we both cut and untangle all the issues…

And for all that I’m often left wandering if DRM really matters as much as we tend to think it does. Do people outside of our strange intersection of media and technology really care about it as much as we do? Are there other pressing issues that we should direct energy towards?  I have this nagging sense that as we agonise over the do-we-don’t-we of DRM, most people just want to read good books.

Nevertheless, the great DRM debate has come to the fore again as a result of Michael Bhaskar’s seemingly mild assertion that DRM Is Not Evil on Pan Macmillan’s The Digitalist blog, which resulted in the (predictable) slew of comments.  Michael has now posted a response which has garnered another slew of comments.  It’s all worth reading if you can summon the energy and want some insight into the issue (although I don’t think anyone mentions foreign rights, but perhaps some one will get to that yet…)

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Bigger May Be Better, But Old Problems Persist

Amazon launched the new large-screen Kindle DX in the US on Wednesday. The device, apparently aimed at newspaper readers and the textbook market was met with much fanfare in the New York Times (who had leaked the announcement earlier in the week), the Financial TimesPublishers Weekly and elsewhere.

Despite the immediate gadget-lust, the hype was also met with  skepticism (and more than certain amount of unlinkable ambivalence). The DX’s $489 price tag, ‘blah’ design, lack of colour and Amazon’s decision to release the new device so soon after launching the Kindle 2 have been common complaints.

But for all these (fixable) flaws, what really nags at me about the Kindle is that whilst I can see what’s in it for Amazon, I just can’t see what’s in it for me the reader. With each launch it seems that readers continue to be secondary to  Amazon’s business strategy.

I’m unlikely to buy a Kindle because, all things being equal, I’m always going to choose a paper book over an electronic one. If  convenience is the primary concern, then I’m going to read an e-book on the phone I carry in my jacket pocket.

The Kindle DX won’t change my habits either. I already read newspapers on my laptop and I don’t want to carry 2 large devices. If I was a student, I’d want to my textbooks on my laptop too — if only because of the 2 magic words: “copy” and “paste”.

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Something for the Weekend, March 20th, 2009

Book City Jackets— Printed at a small press in downtown New York, these lovely “updated versions of the classic paperbag bookcover” are made from recycled paper and sized to fit almost any book (pictured above). And they have a blog!  (via swissmiss & Design*Sponge).

Near Heretical — The inimitable Mike Shatkin on the story of DRM.

Don’t kill me, Robert BringhurstNic Boshart, BookNet Canada intern and coordinating editor at Invisible Publishing, offers another nice round-up of lessons for small presses from the BookNet Tech Forum.

Wish you were hereSeen Reading‘s collaborative Google map of independent bookstores.

That elusive viral componentWired on Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications making e-books and excerpts available on Scribd:

For book publishers, Scribd is not the only platform they are utilizing with the rising e-book hype, but the viral components are limited elsewhere… Along with navigation features like search and zoom, the books can be download (as a .pdf) and viewed on compatible e-book readers or shared across numerous social networks including Digg, Facebook and Twitter.

“The YouTube for print”PW has more on Scribd.

Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google, but Sara Nelson doesn’t think it will be enough in the LA Times:

Sony seems, instead, to be hitting hard on the theme that it’s giving options to publishers, who have not been shy about their complicated feelings toward Amazon and the power it wields.

Making public domain books more available is all to the good. But at the moment, Sony’s move appears to be too little, too late.

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Monday Miscellany

A bolt of electricity: PW polls publishers on the challenges and opportunities facing their digital publishing programs. It’s a fascinating glimpse of where the likes of Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin are heading… A must read I would say…

Narrative medicine: Exposure to literature can influence how young doctors approach their clinical work according to the New York Times (via Guy Kawasaki):

“The idea of combining literature and medicine — or narrative medicine as it is sometimes called — has played a part in medical education for over 40 years. Studies have repeatedly shown that such literary training can strengthen and support the compassionate instincts of doctors.”

In need of a good editor: Book Lover Cynthia Crossen laments the decline of editorial rigour in the WSJ:

“Editors are the invisible heroes of the publishing industry, and as publishing companies cut corners, they cut editors… But without strong editors, writers are like cars with accelerators but no brakes”

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