The Digital Future: Copying Files Made Simple

Remember some 15 months ago we told you about Pranav Mistry of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his quest to make our interface with technology more intuitive? The video is still amazing to watch but is now becoming reality.

Our good friend a furturist Ray Hammond has now alerted us to Mistry's latest step along this exciting path where you can transfer images or text from one screen and device to another with just your fingertips? A new program called Sparsh lets you do just that and its no surprise to find Mistry behind it.

SPARSH (स्पर्श) lets you conceptually transfer media from one digital device to your body and pass it to the other digital device by simple touch gestures

The trick is the data is actually transferred via the cloud, but your finger becomes the 'cursor' and to the user the body becomes to conduit.

Pearson Adds Schoolnet Its Platform Offer

Pearson, has acquired US digital education service Schoolnet for $230 million.

Schoolnet was founded in 1998 and helps teachers in student assessment and teaching in schools serving K12 students. It is a data-driven education database that matches individual student needs to the appropriate content and uses social networking, user-generated ratings/rankings, tagging, user-generated content to achieve this. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and will dovetail with Pearson’s existing digital learning products, such as PowerSchool and AIMSweb and offer schools a significant digital platform to support schools, teachers, parents and students.

Whereever you look you find the publishing education sector is dominated by a handful of companies and it is often no longer good enough to provide just the textbook. Like others, Pearson has long recognised this and are now building a significant business platform to support their educational offer to schools, which is not only relevant in the US, but globally and has moved them from a schools content business, to a full digital education service provider. It effectively is creating a compelling platform offer to meet all the educational needs through a one stop shop and the approach is very relevant given that the content itself is often commoditised by curriculum demands by the various educational authorities.

The Nook Stops Short

Is the Barnes and Noble Nook Color, an ereader eink killer, or an iPad tablet competitor?

Barnes & Noble’s updated e-reader Nook Color certainly sits price wise smack of the ereader tablet divide, but is that good enough? The operating system is Android OS 2.2/Froyo and although it supports Adobe Flash Player, full featured email, it is not Android 3.0 and flash and email isn’t enough to differentiate it from the either of the ereaders or tablets.

Nook users can already access 2 million digital titles, but these numbers aren’t that impressive any more. The new Nook will render enhanced media titles, but given their numbers today and in the near future, this isn’t a clear differentiator and even Nook Newsstand and its 150 full-colour newspapers and magazines doesn’t excite us.

The problem is that someone looking for a tablet or iPad 2, will probably be happy to part with the extra cash and those wanting a good ereader, will probably bank the cash and choose a dedicated reader and platform such as Kobo and Kindle. Is a colour TFT LCD screen good enough to make a difference? If you want to play video there are better devices and if you want to just read there are better devices.

The big problem is the Barnes and Noble and Nook brand and its reach. To those in the US this is not a problem, but outside of the US Barnes and Noble is not a recognised brand and the Nook, not a recognised reader. Barnes and Noble may be happy to play just in the US and we accept that the market is huge, but unlike baseball and American football the technology market is global. It's a true world series and they aren’t in it today.

Anyone trying to put up ebooks onto their service, use their Pubit, or do anything Nookie from outside the US will know very well that the service is very very very xenophobic.

They could address this by striking deals with and working with the likes of Waterstones in the UK and other retailers around the world, but they and the others appear unable to join those dots and would rather plough their own furrows.

See You In Court

Are the only real beneficiaries of the new technology age the lawyers?

We have seen the music industry take legal actions on copyright infringement sometimes at the sharing of a file. We read last week of the UK Publishers Association’s drive to go after the pirates and the inevitable legal bills. We have technology companies all apparently filing cases and counter claims against each other over patent infringements. We have seen no result but plenty of lawyers earn out of the Google Book Settlement.

Now as if to add fuel to the legal fires a judgement by a Texas jury against Google has found them guilty of infringing a patent related to the Linux kernel and fined them $5m. The money may be chump change for Google but the implications could be far reaching for open source devotes and Google’s server platforms and Android mobile platform.

The case was brought by Bedrock Computer Technologies who have also sued Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, PayPal, Match.com and AOL. It could create a wave of patent toll booths and raises question on just how ‘open’ open systems and source code are?
Google states that it will continue to defend against such claims on the open source community. More lawyers fees and money into the legal world to defending old and questionable patent claims.

It has been estimated that in the last 14 months there have been 41 patent infringement suits levied at Google's Android platform and its rapidly growing developer ecosystem.

Just this week Apple said it was suing Samsung Electronics for allegedly copying the design of its iPad and iPhone. Samsung has in turn countersued Apple claiming the Iphone and Ipad infringe 10 of its patents.Microsoft have lodged a suit against the Nook e-reader and Nook Colour tablet. Oracle have claimed that Google's Android technology infringes on its Java patents.

Sony Network and New Tablets Collide

Some have been known to release bad news when there is lots of other bad news, but not good news on the back of bad news. However, Sony has done just that.

A Hacking attack on Sony has resulted in its PlayStation Network being taken offline and being still unavailable after five days! The PlayStation Network is used by 70 million registered account holders and owners of PS3 and PlayStation Portable machines and is used to download games, films and music, as well as to play online with friends.

Sony has thanked its users for their patience and assured them that it was working "around the clock" to strengthen the network infrastructure. However in its blog statement they did not reference any potential issues relating to stored personal information or credit card details.

The hacking group, Anonymous, deny that they were behind the attack but do that some members may have acted on their own without the group's knowledge. Anonymous has criticised Sony over its treatment of George Hotz, an American hacker who unlocked the PS3's closed operating system to allow pirated games to be played on the machine.
The timing of this could not be worse for Sony as it clashes with the Easter holidays and their first foray into the tablet PC market.

Sony has announced two tablets which will hit the market later this year and will both use Google's Android operating system. Sony has stated its intent to become the second largest tablet player within one year.

Sony Tablet S1 will have a 9.4” display and is wedge shaped with a thicker upper portion which Sony claim makes it easier to hold. The S2 is a folding device equipped with dual 5.5-inch screens. It has a rounded design and is small enough to fit in the inside pocket of a jacket. Both devices come with Android 3.0, WiFi and 3G and utilise Sony's premium network services, which include the currently stricken PlayStation Network for gaming and also the Qriocity media service.

Users will also be able to browse and buy electronic books which obviously raise the question over Sony’s poorly performing eInk readers and whether these will be dropped for the new S1 and S2. By combining tablets, ebooks, games and lifestyle interfaces the S1 and S2 start to become interesting tablet options.

However announcing a common platform when their flagship PSN service is on its back is not the best of timing.

A House of Books

Are You Mac or PC?

In November 2009 Hunch asked its user base ‘Mac or PC’ and got over 76,000 responses, today it has nearly 400,000 responses. Since Their original report Apple has released iPhone4, iPad2 and updated its Mac models.

So the question is whether the computer you used defines you as a person and leads to you being stereotyped?

Some 50% of respondents’ are PC users, 24% Mac and 23% straddle the fence either refusing to be typecast or unable to see wetter the case has a Apple logo on it.

However many of the respondents use both technologies today, with the majority having an iPod and 48% either have an iPhone or are considering getting one. So it begs the question is it all relivant?

To see the diagram created by ColumnFiveMedia.com

To read the Hutch article and comments

Amazon Overdrive Potentially Lock Up Libraries

It’s ironic the day after we wrote about Amazon joining the dots they take another stride and connect some more.

Today Amazon has announced Kindle Library Lending, that will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the US. Kindle Library Lending will be available for all Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps. To achieve this monumental step Amazon has aligned itself with Overdrive who have successfully built a business opening up the public libraries to ebooks and now have gone past the US and into Europe.

Today we only know what is in press releases and therefore there is potentially huge opportunity to speculate wrongly on what might be. The one thing that is certain it is a huge wake up call for all bookstores, libraries, publisher and authors. Amazon has once again invented the surprise.

The question we would have today are:

1. Is the Overdrive/ Amazon deal exclusive and what are the terms of any exclusivity as that could others from merely following the party?
2. Is there an intent from Amazon to acquire Overdrive, circumvent it later, or keep it as a partner. It would make a great deal of sense to use Overdrive as sales force into libraries?
3. What will this mean to sales as both Overdrive and Amazon as both straddle the buy and lend markets and Amazon clients now have a clear added value of choice and an opportunity to lend first?
4. Library esupply will become harder for the competitors and Kindle is a massive plus for libraries so what can competitors seriously do?
5. Does this new blurring of lend and buy now offer the libraries the opportunity to become resellers and cash in on this through an affiliate back door?

Some ask how it could work? We see the answer as being fairly simple. The libraries and Overdrive already have the system interfaces to manage membership authorisation and communicate loans etc. All Overdrive has to be able to do is present the titles available via Amazon. When it receives a loan request, it merely fires this off to Amazon to pack and dispatch in real time and conform successful receipt. They may do it differently, but it looks simple to us and probably a no brainer to them!

So we may not like eink, but Amazon have extended this to a platform offer and now are stepping up their consumer awareness. Look in the newspapers and watch TV, they are building a brand and brand awareness and now offer library lending.

The only uncertainty today may be Google, but what’s new

24Symbols: The Start of Books on Demand

Way back in January 2010 we wrote the following as part of our 2020 predictions:

‘This year will start to redefine ownership and see the entry of the streamed ‘read on demand’ model similar to what we have been raving about with the likes of Spotify. It will take the music model to open up consumers to its potential. The challenge will be the publishers and their obsession in supporting existing models that they understand and their reluctance to think outside the box on rights and royalties.’

Unlike others we have long seen digital as different, as a licence and not an outright purchase.

We believe that viewing digital as a mere substitution rendition is a dangerous route. This not only straightjackets creativity into yesterday’s economic models, it also ties royalties and rights to an inappropriate business model and further subjects the reader to ‘albums when they may find individual tracks more appropriate’.

Amazon are clearly lining themselves up to change the way we write, read and purchase material. What looks from the outside, as often disjointed steps, can be clearly seen as well thought through strides towards a new platform of writing and reading, that today others are struggling to comprehend.

We have recently seen the lending of ebooks enter the market, albeit under a social sharing umbrella. We have seen Amazon’s cloud offer continue to be developed. We have now seen Amazon start to advertise on the Kindle. Hello, can we add two and two and make four? Amazon is potentially one step away from a digital on demand service based on ads plus subscription. We could see it as a new global library, a new ‘book club’, a new way for ebooks to be read and if coupled with social networking, viral marketing, author buy in and also the wealth of tools Amazon has built, maybe a category killer that will be hard to emulate and compete against.

Yesterday we read that ‘24symbols’, a Spanish startup is planning to launch a subscription service with the aim to become the "Spotify for e-books." They will offer an ad-supported and a subscription-based access around 10€ per month for ebooks and the books will be streamed and cloud based. The challenges they face are the same as Spotify and others before them – grappling with a rights and royalty infrastructure not built for pricing not on demand licensing let alone ad supported revenues. They also have to accept that Amazon is about to set up in Spain.

Is it realistic to think that a new entrant can break the mould, or are we looking at the start of a process where the real winner has yet to enter the race. Remember Amazon wasn’t the first internet bookshop but the 14th and the first to get service right.

Book rental on demand certainly is the obvious opportunity for the industry. However, unlike music, and to a degree film, books do not have a consolidated source and supply and is highly fragmented so negotiating contracts could become a nightmare for anyone without true market clout and presence. Secondly, we have the current bookshop versus library mess, which would tend to indicate just how difficult it will be for the rights gatekeepers to see anything that is to them left field. Thirdly, we can’t even price ebooks today, let alone formulate a commercial rental model that is mutually rewarding, so moving to a lower pricing model based on term time licensing and reward could still prove a challenge. Finally, we still have to move to the cloud culture and on demand lifestyle. This may seem a natural evolution but challenges the very basics of a library and ownership that we have know for centuries.

We believe Books on demand via a cloud based services makes logical sense, but the question is less of if and who, and more when and how they can change book culture as we know it today.

Smartphones Killed The Video Star

Remember when only a short while ago everyone was raving about the cheap Flip digital video camera from Cisco. Well Cisco last week killed its production. So is the standalone video camera coming to the end of its life and to be replaced by smartphone technology which can already capture life in HD

It only two years since Cisco paid Pure Digital US$590 million to buy the maker of the Flip videocam and this month, Cisco announced a new model: the Flip SlideHD videocam and they were planning to release a further model "FlipLive," which was apparently capable of streaming live video directly to the Web via WiFi.

So why has Flip Flopped?

Some will say Cisco killed the video can to focus on networking and it wasn't really a consumer products company. However as smartphones get smarter and more powerful the closure of its Flip business may just be a sign of things to come? Despite this sign og the times the camcorder market continues to grow both in the US and globally with some 22% worldwide growth.

Imagine you are Kodak and having seen the demise of film, servicing and cameras stand wondering if their video cameras on having one last hurrah?

So what do you want on your mobile phone?

16 mega-pixel camera.
Pocket-now have leaked a video which promotes a new HTC smartphone with a 16 mega-pixel camera and dual LED flash. 16 mega-pixel camera would be a new high in a mobile device and the dual flash would help in low light, but It is worth noting out the number of megapixels does not guarantee picture quality. So if you are a keen photographer who doesn't always want to carry your SLR or DSLR around with them maybe help is on the way.

Mobile gaming
The Xperia Play gaming phone keeps your fingers of the screen and according to some that improves the game. The Android phone is being launched with six games, including FIFA 10, Bruce Lee Dragon and Crash Bandicoot.

Media
Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc operates on Android Gingerbread 2.3., has a 4.22” screen, an eight megapixel camera that shoots video in 720p HD and through Sony's Bravia mobile engine can deliver HD video to televisions through the phone's HDMI outlet.

NFC (Near Field Communications)
NFC enables your mobile to read and write information from other devices/objects with NFC chips inside. The main purpose of NFC is to facilitate “wave and pay” mobile payments that in the future will lead to smartphones replacing credit/debit cards. According to Juniper Research, 20% of smartphones , or some 300 million handsets, will carry NFC technology in just three years time.

Dual Processor
Samsung is reportedly planning a high-performance smartphone based on a 2GHz dual core CPU.The 2GHz chip is understood to be under development by Samsung, who has licensing agreement with chip design giant ARM. If dual processors come to smartphones then we will certainly see a significant uplift in processing capability and the phones may well become ‘smart’. It would enhance multi activity and question further which device will dominate the next decade.

Rethinking the Future: The Digital Divide

We would like to offer three observations which we believe are fundamental to the future of ‘the book’ and rethinking the future.

The first observation we offer is that we now live in a YouTube society. One, where self expression and opinion can now be, heard, seen and shared. Yesterday we listened, watched and read media, today we make it and share it. Today is less about quality and more about the width. Self publishing is no longer the grubby slush pile of sad unwanted titles,but a vibrant market which is increasingly engaging more and more people. This is not bad, this is not to be looked down on, but is something exciting, new and to be celebrated. We may not have more readers today but we certainly have more writers!

At the start Youtube looked bad quality with cameras often out of focus and juddering, but YouTube today has changed video and even influenced film. The sheer numbers of viewers have created a new genre of film and participation and created new stars, launched musicians and given us all very funny moments. Publishing must now learn to embrace the author whose English and grammar may not be old school, but who has a story to tell and a new language to tell it in.

The second observation is that digital is different. Many in publishing see it as merely replace the physical jacket with a digital one. Same text, same blurb same stuff. Some want to enrich it by adding more media and make it in effect ‘fatter’, but remains the same story, same stuff.

The challenge is to recognise that digital offers not just more media opportunities but a fundamental change in the amount of content produced, accessible and how it is read. Why do we still continue to produce 300 pages or the print economic model? Why does the work have to be complete? After all the serial story is not that far away? Why do we combine digital and print rights and surely its like combining film and print rights – sometimes relivant but far more the case not.

Why are we trying to shoehorn physical economic foot into a digital shoe? The digital shoe is not constrained in the same way as print and can accommodate many sizes?

The third observation is about marketing and promoting works. It’s as if the book industry is still locked into the 20th century time warp and is in denial over the 21st century. We have failed to deliver anything but an ISBN and now use it to identify everything and every part of everything. We failed to understand the need to group renditions of the same or similar works and fragments were unheard of! The International Standard Text Code (ISTC) has long missed its opportunity and one that is not coming back again and lies buried deep in the industry labyrinth of standards. Standards bodies which achieved so much to improve the print supply chain appear to stand transfixed in the digital headlights. This issue also is not so much business to business as business to consumer and this itself presents a challenge to bodies who not focused that way.

Today the line between content and context is blurred. We have gone way past jackets, blurbs, search inside flat pages. As we have already observed we live in a YouTube world of visual real time promotion and social and viral marketing and we find stuff via search engines who often care little about structured metadata and ISBNs.
So what do we draw from these brief observations and is there a way in which we should respond?

The challenge with rapid and fundamental change is that it is disruptive. Anything that takes time to adopt is probably dead before it is born. Development by committees was once needed and consensus was seen as the goal but moving at the pace of the slowest and accommodating all could now be a recipe for disaster today. Collaboration and consensus is always best, but is no longer acceptable if it takes too long.

“The most important thing is not to optimise what you do, but to find out and decide what you should be doing… find out where you should really be and to make sure that you are climbing the tallest peak, not just a false summit…If you get stuck on a small mountain, you get to the top and look around and you find you’re on the wrong mountain. A mile away is a mountain that’s twice as tall…Learn how to search the landscape very widely, and to make sure we find the tallest mountain to climb – that we find the right thing to do. And having done that, if we find ourselves on top of a false summit…In other words we’ve got to get down the mountain, and cross that desert, and come up on the tallest peak. And that’s called letting go, killing a product at its peak.”

These wise words from Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired in “Rethinking the Future” may be over 10 years old but still very relevant today.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the roles and value of those between the author and the reader are increasingly being questioned. There is no divine right to survive and some will not make it across the digital divide.

Autography: Is It Wise Dotcom?

First we had Pen and the distance author signature, now we have Autography which allows authors to insert an autograph or salutation directly into eBooks.



Autography transmits the author’s signature onto the customer's eReader device, along with a personal message. Customers merely request any of the author’s books from the selection menu, with the appropriate autograph appearing once they make their purchase. The autographs can be retrieved and replaced at no extra cost if you happen to lose your eBook.

Fine the author doesn't need to leave their desk and can do it remotely, but is this really the same as fans actually pressing the fresh and meeting the person? The readers may still connect with the author over the internet and be able to sign a book with dedication remotely, but who owns the reader and what does the reader value? Can you imagine an internet booth where the consumer merely selects from a list of authors who are online and pays a premium charge to chat with them? It reminds us of some of those less reputable XXX sites none of us have ever seen.

Then there is the question as to whether an ebook holds that same collection status of its print version? After all the ebook is basically a licensed rendition with no ‘first sale’ rights so a signature has little future value.

Digital and print are different and trying to shoehorn some print practices into a digital shoe would appear to lack joined up thinking. In the words of are Shaman friend Duke Redbird, 'is it wise dotcom?'

eBook Growth Faster than Print Declines

Books could soon start to follow some of the demand trends experienced by music.
AAP have released data from their 14 reporting US publishers that shows that ebooks sales are continuing to build, but these are not growing as fast as physical sales are falling. It should be noted that this is just 14 publishers and is against the collapse of Borders and loss of its sales contribution.

US sales of ebook are reported to have risen from $69.9 million in January to $90.3 million in February and in doing so moved ebooks from being the second-largest trade segment, behind trade paperbacks, to the largest-selling format in February (trade paperbacks only achieved $81.2 million). Reported Trade print sales across AAP members were some $215.2 million, a drop of 30%.

Music has long found that the growth in downloads has been significant, but not as significant as the decline in physical music sales. If this imbalance were to become a real trend in books, it could have a far greater impact than that in music. Books still have a wide number of sales outlets on the street and are heavier and bulkier to transport than CDs. There comes a point when the supply chain starts to creak, with an under capacity of demand and potentially over capacity of product and logistics fixed costs, all of which is not being offset by a compensating contribution from ebooks. In addition the costs within the physical book supply chain are widely spread and therefore far harder to control, whereas digital books have very consolidated channels and cost exposure and are only ‘moved’ when sold.

Print runs and publishing economics tend not to be short term decisions and as things change some of these commitments could easily unravel introducing more waste, cost and result id dead stock. One rule in logistics is, that every time stuff stands still it costs and every time it moves it costs, the art is to move it once and get it sold.

The challenge is to ensure the contribution from digital sales offsets the inevitable drop from print and that costs are driven out of the physical supply chain in a manner that matches the decline in demand.


source publisherslunch.com

The LBF Debate On Relevance Of Publishers

The London Book Fair has once again come and gone and to some we spoke to there was little change to others the future was clearly keeping many awake at night. The Fair is a great place to witness the digital divide with those who are in the know and those who are frozen like rabbits in the digital headlights.

So it was a must to attend the ‘Great Debate’ on Monday on the motion “Authors and readers are all that matter. Publishers will become irrelevant.” For the motion were Cory Doctorow, the science fiction author and co-editor of BoingBoing, and James Bridle, an innovative publisher and writer. Against the motion were , Andrew Franklin of Profile Books and the infamous ex of everywhere and now of Bloomsbury Richard Charkin. The voting on the motion was always to be irrelevant as it was like asking a room full of doctors to vote on a motion that modern medicine is ineffective. However the points raised highlighted to us the digital divide that exists and that some publishers are clearly out of touch with their emerging markets.

Obviously it is impossible to group all the various different publishing sub industries such as academic, professional, education, trade reference, trade fiction etc and apply a generic brush to their different author rewards, economics, market drivers, digital drivers and content demands and so it often sounded that if something justified that a sector had got it right or wrong it applied to all.

The major challenge was to define ‘publishing’ and the value added roles from author to reader. Some would suggest that Bridle clearly made the point that publishers need to get back to basics and recognised that the new world offered many news ways to connect the dots that publishers have apparently forgotten. Franklin however reminded us of all that some regard as arrogant, old world and out of synch with today’s changing market. He lead with one could best describe as publishers know best and all else is drose. He went on to crusade against self publishing as if it was the devil and even made the claim that , ‘Free is too much to pay for the vast majority of self-published books,’ but quickly added as any speaker would having stuck the knife in, that “It’s too much to pay for some of the books that come from publishers.”

Some publishers today will still connect with Franklin’s view that the market is getting bigger, and that publisher profits are rising, and these means all is right and that publishers such as him are doing a good job and are essential. The problem is that parts of the publishing ecosystem are collapsing others are under threat, channels are consolidating, and the user resistance to change is moving faster than the market’s ability to respond.

There were many things missing from the debate such as words like ‘digital rights’, ‘royalties’,'rights registry','orphans' ‘pricing’, ‘catherine cookson’, ‘ian fleming estate’ ‘none compete’ and too much on self publishing. The fact that; YouTube has redefined quality of film and made everyone a director, Twitter has made everyone a 140 character journalist, Flickr has made everyone a photographer, Lulu and Amazon have opened the digital doors to all writers, Facebook has change communication, Spotify and Pandora has redefine music distribution, etc. appears to be lost on some and they expect to remain the guardians of good taste. That may be so today but writing has changed, language has changed and what was once the norm is no longer so.

We appear to be still a front list 13 week obsessed industry incapable of grappling with back list and mid list authors and orphan works.

It reminded us of that all so naïve statement at the time of the first GBS hearing when one major publisher employee stated that it must be right as their CEO knew what he was doing!

Charkin and Doctorow, were somewhat the professional debaters that lacked that cutting passion of Bridle or blind arrogance of Franklin. Yet it was these two that best summed up their side’s position at the end of the debate before the expected result was delivered.

Many thanks to Susan Danziger, Dailylit and Michael Healy, Books Registry and the Publishing Post

Will Kinect Be Bigger Than Tablets?

Speaking at a lunch held in Sydney by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), Microsoft ‘s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie, has predicted the death of tablets and claims that their existence will be short lived as they get squeezed by the ever decreasing gap between smartphones and laptops. He said, "I think there's an important distinction - and frankly one we didn't jump on at Microsoft fast enough - between mobile and portable,"

So is he right or wrong and is it merely a push to get PR or a genuine vision of change?

What we do know is that the tablet is consumer market’s hot device today, but that means little as technology can change so fast. We know Miscrosoft is working to get their own tablet OS out this year but that they pulled the plug on their own Courier tablet last year.

Mundie admitted Microsoft’s failings but that they are determined to go after the smartphone market and even envisages a phone that beams light directly into your retina so you can view HDTV.

As for desktops, Mundie predicted, " the successor to the desktop is the room, that instead of thinking that the computer is just something on the desk that you go and sit in front of, (in the) future basically the whole room is the computer and you go in it."

Mundie discussed the Xbox 360 Kinect motion-sensing accessory will be be soon offered for the PC. This could be very interesting as it starts to free the computer interface and make in more intuitive using gestures and voice commands, or what Mundie calls this the "natural user interface". This could revolutionise many aspects of technology and human interface such as teaching, healthcare etc. This by itself could change the way we look at and interface with technology and even support some of the thinking expressed by Mundie re tablets.

Mundie predicts that within five years computers and televisions would be sold with Kinect sensors built in.

Google +1 = Social

Google’s hold over the search world is significant and everyone understands the term 'to be Googled'. They have built a massive business on their ability to index the world’s information and render it on demand along with Ad Words and other advertising revenues. Now Microsoft has taken an anti-competition complaint against them to the European Commission.

In a detailed blog, Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, outlined the Microsoft's claims that Google used its dominant position in the search market to restrict the growth of Microsoft services:

• Using technical measures to stop Microsoft's search engine Bing from indexing content on Google-owned YouTube.
• Blocking Microsoft Smartphones from operating properly with YouTube.
• Controlling access to online copies of out-of-copyright books.
• Limiting the ability of businesses to reclaim "their own information" generated through Google advertising campaigns for use elsewhere.
• Compelling leading websites to only use Google search boxes on their pages.

But search by itself may not be enough in today's socially connected world. So it’s interesting that on the same day that they are accused of abusing their search domination we have Google settling an FTC complaint over their faile social network service ‘Buzz’ . According to the settlement, Google will have an outside privacy audit biennially for the next 20 years, and won’t use personal data it collected for one purpose for another without permission. More interesting however, is its fresh attempt to muscle into the social network scene and take on Facebook.



Google has now embarked copying the ‘like’ features of Facebook in order to add a social element to its core search service. It’s new ‘+1’ buttons will appear next to its search results and adverts and will enable users to signal personal preferences that would then appear in other search results seen by their friends. With +1, anyone with a Google account can register a vote of approval, which can then be seen by other searchers.

Google explained in a blog post :
When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

Google state that the vote currently will not change advertisement positioning or cost. Google appear to be trying to get users to create a public page and identify services that work with that page and then they have a reverse built social network which supports advertising growth.

Music Lessons?

Music is a complex business that is not just about selling recorded music. It like all media is fundamentally a rights business with creation, performance, synchronised royalties.

We all know the music business remains stuck in digital treacle and it is no surprise to see that the global recorded music sales fell by some $1.5bn (£930m) last year.

The UK music business physical sales dropped by almost 20% with the overall performance down some 11% and although digital sales continued to rise by some 20% it did not offset the equivalent loss in physical sales. The result is that the market is shrinking and the UK is sliding down the ranking and has now been overtaken by Germany.

Now US economist Joel Waldfogel disagrees with the music industry bodies and major labels and claims that music piracy hasn’t hurt the creation of new music, but that changes in creation, production and distribution have turned the previous economics of scale of their head. He and many academics also claim that there is no link between Internet piracy and the revenues of the major music labels and that the losses claimed by the industry itself are being hugely exaggerated.

With new and cheaper recording technologies, digital music outlets and social networks, many of the tasks that were previously fulfilled by the big labels could easily be taken over by independent labels, or even the artists themselves. This sounds very familiar to that being experience in other media sectors. The economics are changing and scale is no longer an asset.

EMI was acquired last month by Citigroup and rival Warner Music is also seeking a buyer and many question whether there is a future for these former titans? EMI's losses over the past four years total £2.82bn.Warner’s fourth-quarter revenues in 2010 was down 14% at $789m and its digital turnover fell 5%, giving it a loss for the quarter.

The big labels’ monopoly is falling apart as their role can be taken over by independent labels that operate with a much smaller profit margin. Where the majors sometimes have to sell half a million albums to break even, independent labels can do the same by selling 25,000 or less.

Established artist now make a substantial amount of their money from live music and some claim this could be as high as 90%.

Creation, promotion, and distribution aided by new technologies have changed the music landscape and the Internet offers millions of ways to promote content at a fraction of the cost of the old world. Youtube, Facebook, Last.fm, Spotify and Pandora, now offer artists many new platforms to promote themselves.

Distribution has changed too and with little investment artists can now upload their work for sale on iTunes. The loss of major UK retailers such as Zavvi, Borders and Woolworth has also changed people access to physical music as they are increasingly forced online and once there they aren’t going back.

The impact of these seismic changes don’t just impact the UK with the global recorded music revenues falling by 8.4% last year. According to the Recording Industry body, the IFPI, physical sales, fell by 14.2% year on year. Again although digital revenues grew by 5.3% and account for 29% of all recorded music revenues the growth rate of digital revenue growth has halved year on year .US overall sales fell by 10% with physical sales down 20% and digital sales are stagnating with 1.2% growth. Japan’s music market declined by 8.3%. Digital revenue growth in Europe continues to grow by some 20% plus but still does not compensate for the decline in physical sales.

So is Waldfogel correct to conclude that piracy is not the root of the music industry’s declining fortunes and that the entire music industry has instead changed with more power going to the artists and smaller labels? We believe that today music is more alive, accessible and broader in its offer than ever before. If we accept this, or even a large proportion of this, then we better take a cold look at what is happening closer to home and focus less on yesterday’s economics and models and more on tomorrow’s.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer - Tablet or Laptop?

The first table we saw that impressed was a HP laptop whose screen could be swivelled and the reason it was impressive was it was then used to project slides to support a conference presentation and the presenter proceeded to drawn onto the tablet to highlight and project drawn images etc. However, the price was just too much and it was obvious that the device had a clear weak spot in the swivel point, but it did impress.

Now Asus have announced the first shipments of their Eee Pad Transformer. It’s called the Eee Pad Transformer because can use an optional Qwerty keyboard docking station with unique Android function keys. The scratch-resistant 10.1” Gorilla Glass touchscreen can be viewed at angles up to 178 degrees and it is claimed to provide 50% better rendition.

It follows the usual Android tablet spec in having an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, coming with Google's Android 3.0 ‘Honeycomb’ operating system, aka "Honeycomb" and is preloaded with Polaris Office 3.0, which supports the most PC file formats on PCs, such as MS Office, XLS, XLSX, PowerPoint, Adobe PDF, and image files.

The battery life on one charge is some 9.5 hours which increase to 16 hours when docked. As with other mobile tablets it has a 5MP rear camera that can record HD video and a 1.2MP front-facing camera for videoconferencing and can support both WiFi and 3G. As with laptops it has a mini-HDMI port, a 3.5mm audio jack, two USB ports, a built-in SD card reader and also SRS Sound technology.

So is it a laptop or a tablet, a mobile device or a PC? Will the price of $500 to $700 be low enough to tempt those looking for something extra?

As Android Tablets vie for position it great to see them all trying to be different. We think that the docking station isn’t enough and we would like to see more voice recognition and intuitive interfaces than a keyboard.

MySpace Heads Downhill, Whilst S&S Seek A Tweens Social Solution

Remember a social networking site called My Space? It transformed Lily Allen from a bedroom performer into a star and the Arctic Monkeys from an obscure Sheffield band into headliners. It once had the market share of social networks and was the place to socialise, but today it is shrinking, looks like yesterday’s news and is no longer the hip and the place to be seen.

MySpace have already tried to refocus the service on music, but perhaps music alone and a ‘music destination’ is just not enough.

Analysts ComScore claim that MySpace lost more than 10 million unique users worldwide between January and February this year, reducing the number of users from 73 million down to 63 million. Worse still is the year on year drop which equates to some 50 million. Some may say these figures are very respectable and they would be if the trend was in the ascent but in the decline they could so begin to freefall.

MySpace has already announced plans to cut some 500 of its workforce and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp 2005 purchase is starting to turn into a dog and some would now value it at around just 15% of the £330 it cost.

Facebook and YouTube have established themselves as the social hotspots today with many now falling by the wayside. MySpace even faces further competition from streaming services and blurring of media MySpace looks destined to become either very niche or quickly forgotten part of News International.

Meanwhile there are plenty of social wanabees and last week Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing has launched an online interactive book club for tweens on Everloop, a recently launched social media platform for tweens. Simon & Schuster had launched the club to connect tweens with favourite books and authors and will begin with "Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life," by Rachel Renee Russell and "SPHDZ Book (hash)1!," by Jon Scieszka. Book club members will be able to engage in online discussions with authors.

Connecting young readers and authors is hard as sites like Facebook are very conscious of the dangers of social networking and bans a reported 20,000 children a day from using the service. So along comes Everloop to fill the gap between the ages of 8 and 13 and ties every child to an adult but just because the adults like it doesn’t mean its hip to the kids and it still has to police this ultra sensitive market? Once a child is no longer a tween then by its own rules it moves on and probably to Facebook. If Everloop succeeded it could be huge, if it fails it goes the way of Bebo, AOL and others who have been down this path.

The problem for publishers is that they are struggling to build up a network and build a service. When the figures don’t meet expectation they then have to determine whether its down to them, or the service.

Catherine Cookson: The New Agency Model?

When you have sold over 100 million books, been the most borrowed author for many years in UK public libraries and had many of your works turned in to TV drama films you may ask whether you need a traditional publisher to go digital?

Following the lead of the likes of the Ian Fleming estate, the Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust has now decided to release 100of her works as ebooks . This really starts to set a precedent that many major literary estates and authors whose contract are not digitally tied may well follow. The print publishers, Transworld Publishers and Simon & Schuster, now look to loose out on all digital Cookson sales and far from positioning her for the digital world look to have lost her.

Catherine Cookson’s agent is now publishing the 100 e-book works through her own company, Peach Publishing.

Back list authors such as Cookson have made a great deal of money for their publishers, but lately have attracted relatively little real marketing, or brand exploitation and this is stimulating them and agents to rethink the management of their digital brands and opportunities.

My father in law Deric Longden has also taken a similar route with two of his best selling biographies which were turned into internationally acclaimed the award winning films, Lost For Words and Diana’s Story. My mother in law Aileen Armitage is about to reintroduce some 12 of her 34 historical novels as ebooks having been told by her previous publisher that there is no longer an interested in the genre.

Perhaps publishers need to look a bit harder at authors such as June Barraclough, Jean Plaidy, Nora Lofts, Shelia McCullagh and recognise that these perennial and previous bestsellers could offer them much digitally.

The Great Book Bank Robbery - Feedback

We have all read the press coverage, but what is often far more enlightening is industry and specific feedback from blogs.

Here are some articles worth a read:

From the Hathi Trust
Libraries are not leaving the future of digital books to Google. In light of Judge Chin’s rejection of the Google Books Amended Settlement Agreement, Authors Guild et al. v. Google, HathiTrust will maintain our commitment to long-term digital preservation of library collections curated by generations of librarians at great research libraries around the world.

From Jane Little at Dear Author
I saw some people indicate that they thought this was a blow to Google. I don’t perceive it to be a blow to Google in any way. In settling, the plaintiffs gave signals that they believed their copyright infringement claim was weak. Post ruling signals repeat this.

From John Bergmayer,a staff attorney at Public Knowledge and a member of the Colorado Bar.
As for orphan works, Congress needs to act. The law needs to be fixed to allow orphan works to be used in reasonable ways while respecting that they’re still under copyright. It’s great that Google and the Guild thought creatively about how to pay any orphan works rights-holders who eventually came forward, but a situation where the orphan works problem is “solved” by creating a monopoly digital library is untenable. If Google is able to exploit orphan works, then anyone else should be able to on the same terms.

From J Mullin at PaidConent.org
The best result that could come from this settlement would be renewed attention among thinkers, librarians, and Congress to the serious problem of how to create the universal library that future generations deserve. Now that those who complained about the “audacity” of this deal have won the day, we all need—not just Sergey Brin—to start thinking audaciously about how to study and preserve human culture in the digital age..

From James Grimmelmann Associate Professor at New York Law School writing at laboratorium.net
My read is that the parties are not enthusiastic about litigation. This has been a long road, they are tired, and the publishing world has moved very quickly from underneath the settlement. They will be happy to have a settlement that lets everyone claim a kind of minor victory, and to be done with the ordeal. A few of the author objectors, who would like to see Google razed to the ground and Mountain View sowed with salt, will continue to object, but most of the others will quietly shuffle away.

Finally a schematic from Library Copyright Alliance which chart the many ways forward for Google Books Settlement (PDF) Specifically it's the "March Madness" developed by Jonathan Band.

The Great Book Bank Robbery - A Close Shave?

Remember Judge Chin and the Google Book Settlement? Well it appears that the judge has finally made his ruling and his answer is NO!

We obviously now need to draw breath and understand the ruling in detail and its implications on all parties and their positions moving forward. Having fought this madness from day one, we at least are relieved that the Great Book Bank Robbery has once more been foiled. Someone asked if we were happy at the result, our answer is one of cautious relief, but frustration it took so long, divided the industry and it is unclear whether we have really learnt how we nearly sold a lot for a little.

However, the Judge does leaves the door open for yet another revision, but will all parties continue to flog this near dead horse and make more lawyers rich. Will Google capitulate and bend further?

The challenge is, that without a continued case, some will say Google will be vindicated and continue business as usual. Others will say that the mess that we have today is a direct fault of pursing a case for a settlement and accepting one that was not found wanting once. but twice.

The ‘opt in’ Judge Chin states is a logical change, but may be one that is a bitter pill for Google to swallow, as it will certainly exclude the orphans and foil an audacious and ill conceived settlement attempt by some to sell what they didn’t own.

So where do the APA and Authors Guild now stand? Will they try once more to seek international approvals? Will they try to work with the EU’s initiative? Will all parties just soldier on and conjure up a third settlement at whatever price it takes?

The Authors Guild and APA need to ask why an industry that is all about rights trading has no rights registry. They now need to wake up and recognise the close shave we have all had and bring all parties together, create a registry for all that is not tied to any deal and importantly listen and learn from this episode.

To read the ruling

To read statement from Authors Guild

To read statement from APA

AFP wire covering Google's reaction

Amazon Dump Lendle By NoReply eMail

Amazon has acted and effectively shut down, Lendle, revoking its access to the API that made their ebook lending service possible. Interestingly it apparently sent its ‘Dear Lendle’ notice by a ‘no reply’ email (very 21st century!). Obviously if people lend and even rent books that changes the dynamics of the commercial model and Amazon would be naive to allow an entity to live off their service without a sizable contribution. It also muddies the waters for what Amazon may wish to do long term on lending and rentals. Finally, the customer relationship would exists outside of Amazon.

In our recent post ‘Freeing Libraries to Compete’ we identified the new services that were spawning to exploit Amazon’s lending facility. We thought it was an interesting and obvious development but was not one that really benefited Amazon long term, nor offered a sustainable model as the services were merely living off a facility that could change overnight and was at the whim and fancy of Amazon.

Another challenge that may have prompted Amazon would be the realisation that if others started to open up loans and enable APIs as these new providers could create cross service platforms, these services may be harder for Amazon to deal with. This way they cut it off before it has even started.

Other Amazon based e-book lending sites such as eBook Fling and the Book Lending Club, are still operating which begs the question whether Lendle just did something to violate their terms with Amazon or they were merely first in the queue.

The salient commercial lesson is not to build services that are totally dependant on one party allowing you to make a living off their back that may not be mutually beneficial.

Come Fly With An eBook

Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, has four hundred etitles available in English or Chinese which can be read in the airport on some thirty devices. However, today they can’t be taken away or downloaded onto the user's own device. The service is run by the airport duty-free shop and was instigated by Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, whose government-funded Institute for Information Industry injected some $101,720 to establish it.

With up to 17 million passengers a year, only thirty devices, some 400 titles and the restriction to the airport duty free area make the initative very questionable and also whether this has the power to lift off.

However, it does make sense to dispense ebooks at airports and it makes even more sense to rent them for a flight or journey. You could even rent out devices based on a return flight confirmation and deposit security. You could tie the service to major carriers and ensure that the content reflects not just English language but other major languages. You could also sell devices at duty free prices to a captive audience.

Imagine a circulating library in the sky? Every major hub offering a duty free service combined with the major airline alliances. You can preselect your rental when you book your flight and merely activate it on arrival and even have a device waiting for you, just like pre ordering a special meal. At the end of the rental the title merely deletes itself, offering the option to extend the rental at a further cost.

The attractive element is that the loan of the device can be secured against both refundable deposit and a know individual. Unlike other transport everyone is a known passenger which presents great opportunities to market and up-sell and even those in-flight movies could be tied in if the device is compatible.

Taiwan may not appear to have got the model right today but have opened up a very interesting channel full of rich potential and which has millions of potential customers.

Are eBooks Being Straight-Jacketed by pBook Thinking?

Today many see digital as an evolutionary and perhaps it’s the assumption that are being made in this thinking that is causing the issues, conflicts and challenges we face today. Some would suggest that some of the very basic assumptions being made and used to determine digital strategy may be fundamentally ungrounded and not safe.

First, many assume that the ebook is a replacement for the physical book (pbook). Many may accept that both will coexists for some time, but many also believe that eventually, pbooks as we know them today, will be displaced by ebooks. Secondly, we assume that because today we buy pbooks that this model will naturally apply to ebooks. This assumes that all transactions of ebooks will be outright purchase sales. Finally, we all tend to assume all books are for life and once bought are ours to own, build into our library and even pass on to the generations to come.

Today when we buy a pbook it is enshrined in a rights licence that is based on the properties and limitations of the format. We can share it, sell it, bin it, even drawn all over it, but we are not allowed to copy it or exploit it for commercial gain. It is a physical ‘asset’ which we can value, add to our collection and pass on freely to others. In principle the physical format dictates what we can and can’t do and that contract is entered into on its initial purchase. Imagine someone saying that you can’t share it, can only keep it for only a specific period of time, can only retain it on certain bookshelves and are not able to resell it to whom you wish for what you want. These restrictions would be totally impractical and unenforceable.

This is in fact governed more by the physical format of the book than anything else.

Digital content changes these basic freedoms and in their place often imposes constraints and controls that were previously unenforceable. The number of times a file is copied can be controlled, sharing files can be severely restricted if not obviated altogether, the selling files negated and even what devices the files can be played on can be restricted. This shift in what can be granted under a licence makes digital different and demands that the rules and assumptions once applied to the physical book, are no longer relevant. The books aren’t different; it is digital that is different. All sales are rights sales, buy the rights associated with ebooks and the basic assumptions on which these are based now need to be reviewed as merely apply physical logic is unsafe and just results in the ill thought-out stances we have seen recently.

The next set of assumptions we must challenge are about the life expectancy of the ebooks themselves. Do we believe that digital formats are really persistent and perpetual? Maintaining access to digital archives within libraries may be a reasonable expectation, but maintaining the same access privately may not be so simple. Remember Microsoft Reader, or some of the other less popular formats? Remember betamax, eightrack, and formats tied to long forgotten devices. MP3 may not be the highest quality recording but until it was widely adopted DRM free music was being strangled by its own DRM and associated formats. Formats will evolve, but not all versions will remain backward compatible. Some formats will be superseded others may just disappear and that ebook that you thought was for life may have a very limited shelf life. Some believe that DRM (Digital Rights Management) protects and enforces copyright, others that it is yet another factor that radically changes the nature of the transaction and rights sold. Importantly we must recognise that DRM can tie the sale to a specific manifestation of a title and even to a specific service that distributed it. In other words an ebook today can be tied to a specific buyer, a specific distribution server and even a limited number of devices. Fine today but will those relationships still exist in say 10 or say even 5 years time?

Social DRM has yet to make its mark, but is gathering some momentum. This is about specific watermarking of digital content at a transactional level and to be effective needs to be both visible and invisible. Social DRM does not enforce restrictions and could enable the ebook rights to be aligned more closer to the pbook . However, today we still live in the draconian straight-jacket of encrypted files that can only be unlocked by DRM licence and with their own self interests in mind some want it to remain so.

So at one end of the spectrum we have the pbook trading its rights in what could be described as being driven by ‘market forces’ and sold outright. At the other end we have the ebook and its digital shackles, relationships and restrictions that make an outright sale a joke.

At the heart of the current challenges lies the question of what exactly are we ‘selling’? Some would suggest that we are trying to impose horse drawn carriage rules on today’s cars. They like pbooks and ebooks are fundamentally different. Moving towards a more open licence approach to ebooks may change to total way we sell rights, what rights are sold, educate the buyer into why digital is different and create a less volatile trading market. It could challenge still further the model conflict between libraries and the High Street, but rather than being a negative this could be a very positive move for all parties. We may see ebooks move into a rental, ‘pay as you read’, ‘loan on demand’ and subscription based models of consumption and away from today’s inappropriate outright purchase model. In doing so we may also find a commercial model that rewards stimulates and unites those that matter most the authors, illustrators and creators. Ironically we may also actually create an environment that actually enables the physical book to co exist alongside the ebook.

HTC Flyer Tablet On Its Way Next Month?

HTC’s Flyer will next month enter the tablet wars and it will offer something different – pen input. This will make it maybe a little more tactile, but will it make it a compelling buy?

In its smart aluminum case, the 7” Android tablet weighs in just under a pound, is 0.5” thick and features; a 1024 x 600 resolution Super LCD touch screen, 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon single-core processor, 1GB of RAM plus 32GB of flash storage, a microUSB port and a claimed battery life of 61 days of standby and 4 hours with video playback. It also has a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera, 5-megapixel rear camera, HSPA+ support, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

The Flyer will run on Android 2.4, which is based on the Honeycomb OS used for smartphones but will use HTC’s Sense user interface and their obvious Android technology such as HTC Scribe and HTC Watch.

However it’s the pen that catches the attention.



The user will be able to use the pen to take notes, draw pictures, and sketch directly on the tablet. The note-taking app Evernote is preloaded and offer synchronisation too and with Audio notes also synced up with the written notes through a Timemark app we have potentially an interesting tablet. Imagine being in a meeting where you capture it in audio and in writing and by tapping on a word you are instantly taken to the appropriate audio point. The question is not whether this sounds a great innovation but whether users want it, will use it and perceive it as adding real value?

There is certainly some real interest such that some million orders have been recorded and HTC claim an ‘order visibility to the end of August 2011,’ even before a release date and price had even been announced.

The two videos may be a bit long but they clearly show the look and feel and demonstrate the use of the pen.

Half The UK Registered on Facebook!

Experian Hitwise’s latest report claim that social networks are the UK’s favourite online destinations. Facebook and Twitter registered 2.4bn Internet visits in the UK in January and Facebook claim that it now has 30 million registered users in the UK alone which equates to half the population!

This comes at the same time that the BBC released its latest stats for the iPlayer, which reveal that more people than ever, some 125 million hits, were streaming live content through over the service. They also claim 2.1 million requests were delivered to the iPad alone in February. The total hits in the month was down from 162 million to 148 million but interestingly some 23 million of these were from Virgin Media iPlayer TV requests.The BBC also claim that there are proportionally more daytime and late-peak users of the service and the majority of users are under 55.

The blurring of the entertainment and social services is seen as one of the main drivers in UK traffic. Sites such as Facebook are increasingly hosting content from entertainment sites and this is driving more social interaction and stimulating more take-up. This in term attracts more businesses to advertise, promote and generally position them on the social map.

There are still strong calls, especially in the EU to tighten security on the social networks and EU law and directives. The main EU thrust today remains focused on "the right to be forgotten", letting users "withdraw their consent" to their data being held. It is felt that service providers should prove that they need to keep the data, rather than individuals having to prove that collecting their data is not necessary.

So we are now clearly seeing a step change from the vertical web services of email, blogs, flikr, youtube etc to one which overlays these within a social network construct that is wider in its appeal and deeper in its richness. Mobile technology such as tablets and smart phones are enablers that now are increasingly permanently connected. It doesn’t mean that the verticals disappear it merely means that these become the feeds that are consolidated through the likes of Facebook.

With half the UK population apparently signed up it clearly now says that we are starting to socially communicate, interact with media, express ourselves and collect and share content and opinions.

YouTube Quality To Improve With Green Parrot

We found today’s news that Google has bought Irish company Green Parrot Pictures with the objective to improve the quality of the video footage that is uploaded to YouTube very timely and interesting. Youtube has redefined video and film and also enabled everyone to be a potential cameraman, director, news reporter and social observer.

The Dublin-based Green Parrot Pictures specialises in improving image processing to increase sharpness, reducing camera shake and graininess and improving bandwidth efficiency, all while your video is being uploaded to the site. The technology has already been used by several Hollywood film studios and even improved movies such as X-Men and Spiderman.



This last weekend we spent some time filming the first dozen Bibliophile Book Reviews which when edited were posted on YouTube. The intention is to capture Annie’s book buying and editing enthusiasm to promote some of the 300 new titles Bibliophile lists each month. Bibliophile has some 50K unique copyrighted blurbs, so we thought we should capture some video blubs and now Google are potentially make them even better!

to see more bibliophile book review videos

EU Aims Their Arrow+ on the Heart of Digital Copyright

There are two rights issues we have written so much about over the last few years, one being the hierocracy that publishing is a rights business without a rights registry and the second being the need to protect orphan works from wholesale abuse and exploitation whilst freeing them from digital obscurity.

On march 10th European commissioner Neelie Kroes spoke to IFRRO (The International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations) on the launch of ARROW Plus (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works towards Europeana). Arrow was established in 2008 to identify the copyright status of European works and do through co-ordinating the activities of libraries and rights management bodies to estrablish the details of who owns the copyright in written works. Arrow will now be extended to Arrow Plus and cover multimedia material and is seen as a critical component in the reform of the law surrounding orphan works.

In her speech Kroes stated that Arrow Plus was now aimed at addressing what she referred to as a serious risk of a "20th century black hole" on the internet. She stated that ‘estimates of the number of orphan works in cultural institutions vary from ‘around 20% for films and slightly less for books, at the low end, to up to 90% for photography at the high end…The British library estimates that 40% of works in their collections are orphan and over 1 million hours of TV programmes from BBC archives are not used due to the impossibility or the disproportionate cost to trace rightholders – and the risk of a subsequent legal action is simply too great for this material to be made available online.’

She went on to say that, ‘while the US is looking for solutions through complex judicial means, Europe should move forward and find innovative practical solutions for tapping the huge treasures of our culture.’

Kroes importantly outlined her “Vision” ‘One search in ARROW should be all you should need to determine the copyright status of a cultural good in Europe. If it were embedded in the forthcoming Directive on orphan works, ARROW could become the official portal in Europe where you can find essential rights information and do automated searches of rightholders and copyrights. In the medium-term, it could cover all European print works (books, magazines, etc.) in the EU, and afterwards – why not? – also photographic and audiovisual works.’

‘ARROW should become a one-stop shop for determining, easily and quickly, with full legal certainty, whether a work is orphan or not, out-of-distribution or not, and so on.’

We respect that there will be a need to compromise as the Arrow Plus project moves forward but respect that it recognises the two fundamental issues and is attempting to address these not from a single party’s or group’s interest but from a collective standpoint that includes all interests. This alone is a major step forward to that on offer today in the US whilst it awaits Judge Chin’s decision.

Speech transcript

'Smartphone and Free Kindle', Certainly Sir!

If you were a ereader platform and wanted to extend your market in the UK the best option to do it is through bundling it in with mobile providers on a non exclusive basis and to choose Carphone Warehouse who dominate the independent channel. Next to line it up with the traditional consumer electronic devices retailers such as PC World, Currys and Comet, finally make sure its available through the bulk shippers such as Best Buy.

That is what Amazon has done with the Kindle with the Wi-Fi-only version is priced at £111 and the 3G and Wi-Fi Kindle 3G version priced at £152 Kindle 3G. The twist comes when you select a smartphone contract and effectively get the basic Kindle free or the Kindle 3G for a one off cost of £15.

As most book sellers will discover selling ebook readers is not what they do or should expect their staff to do. They are booksellers and as we have pointed out are ill equipped to sell ereaders. The interesting thing now is that the eInk contenders all look sidelined and struggling to compete in a market when a multi platform service such as the Kindle is effectively going for the channel killer.

We have never been a lover of the eInk solution but in the Kindle platform it makes sense and we would even buy into it. This latest move by Amazon clearly gives everyone else a challenge and we believe that unless the service, the reader platform and the reach is multi platform the game could be up in the UK ebook market.

Zune Today, Gone Tomorrow

Microsoft may have made history with the sales of their Xbox Kinect but it appears the writing is on the wall for their Zune media players.

In 2006 when MS CEO Steve Ballmer released the Zune, he predicted that Microsoft could one day overtake Apple. What a long time four year is in today’s technology.

An unnamed inside source has been cited by Bloomberg saying that MS is not going to extend the product further. The media player market has clearly moved on and Zune has failed to move with it. Today the smartphone is the media player and that is why MS have turned their attention to their Windows Phone 7 OS platform.

Freeing eLibraries to Compete?

The book world appears to be caught wanting on one hand to promote reading, the love of books and sharing books as an experience and at the same time also wanting to repress any thought of ‘free’ that they don’t control through license and DRM. The publicity exposure and promotion of giving away 1 million free books on World Book Night is countered by the stance by many over lending ebooks and HaperCollins’s new rules on ebooks life expectancy being 26 lendings. On one hand we wish to promote ‘free to share’, yet on the other, we face the commercial reality of inappropriate terms.

We have long argued about the hypocrisy of free to borrow from the library, versus buy on-demand on the High Street or Internet. As is often is the case within media industries, they react late, often heavy handed and lack any real cohesive position across the market.

Today we find that the digital goalposts have moved. Amazon and B&N now both offer 14 day loans and with this we now find a number of new service providers all geared to assisting readers to share ebooks under a commercial umbrella.

BookLending, Lendle,eBookFling, ebookexchange, ebooklendinglibrary,Fictionwise Booklends, are but a few of the services now aiming to cash in on sharing or lending books.

Before Amazon, B&N and Google etc become the new library services we should explore our options. After all, what is the difference between one exclusive loan by Amazon and another by the public library?

Should public libraries ‘rent out’ ebooks, as opposed to the current ‘loan for free’ model? If you find the ebook you want is out on loan and don’t want to wait in the queue, why not buy it online there and then? New York Public Library apparently already has a "Buy It Now" link, which is "powered by" OverDrive and gives a portion of the revenue from purchase back to the library. Is this not merely a shop within a library and why shouldn’t libraries sell as well as loan?

If all public libraries also sold ebooks we could see an explosion of ebook virtual shelf space. We could find ourselves with a new book ‘chain’ , with the libraries becoming white label stores. Public libraries suddenly could enjoy a revenue stream ,that could not only subsidise their continued existence, but also provide a compelling offer of loan, or buy, or even rent.

Surely that would promote reading and put the library back in the centre of the community and even promote physical loans.