An interesting piece on the digital comics market in the FT — nothing especially radical, but a good summary and one of my favourite pieces of #verbcrime in the quote from Peter Phillips of Marvel:

"'Digital sales are hockey sticking right now and we’ve got a lot of
room to grow internationally' . . . But the fragmented distribution system for comic books, their inherently tactile appeal and the digital savvy of their target demographic are creating unique management challenges for the big publishers. Although digital editions still make up less than 5 per cent of sales in the $635m US market for comic books, demand is growing fast."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66a608ee-0483-11e1-b309-00144feabdc0.html

Charlie Stross on fine form:

"[I]f you sign up for Klout you are coming down with the internet equivalent of herpes. Worse, you risk infecting all your friends. Klout's business model is flat-out illegal in the UK (and, I believe, throughout the EU) and if you have an account with them I would strongly advise you to delete it and opt out."

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/evil-social-networks.html

"More than two thirds of all mobile phone purchases are now smartphones and 43.8 per cent of Britons owns one . . . Google's Android operating system powers most of those phones (49.9 per cent), while BlackBerry and Apple are following, with 22.5 per cent and 18.5 per cent respectively."

"According to research by communications regulator Ofcom, 12-15-year-olds now say they value internet and their mobiles more than television . . . [M]ore than three quarters of people said that while watching television, they would also sometimes use the web, a mobile phone or a tablet computer."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8848264/Teenagers-would-miss-phones-more-than-TV.html

I'm somewhat removed from the day-to-day creation of ebooks, but periodically I'm asked for advice on skills for people starting in the industry. This piece is worth reading, and from my perspective the argument is compelling — I've seen many publishers having to go to outside specialists for these particular skills, but in an ideal world they would be covered in-house.

"With KF8 and epub3, the web stack is the ebook stack. It has all of the same features. It suffers from all of the same problems. I don't see any way out of fully dedicating yourself to understand HTML and CSS if you are intent on a longterm career in ebook development."

http://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/css-and-ebook-design/

Great post by Steve Yegge:

"I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.

"In some sense you wouldn't even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

"But how do you prepare a presentation for a giant-brained alien?"

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq

"However, for publishers there is a paradox: [the amount consumers will pay for a children's app] is much lower than they would generally charge for a much simpler ebook, read on a devices such as a Kindle or Nook. Yet an app with interactive graphics and sound costs much more to make – anywhere between $5,000 to $100,000 depending on its complexity."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fe945968-f055-11e0-96d2-00144feab49a.html

James posted a typically fantastic essay today:

"We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, "enhanced" books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things."

http://booktwo.org/notebook/the-new-value-of-text/

There's a lot that I agree with in this, and it's worth keeping in mind that the most successful ereading device, the Kindle, shows no "profound lack confidence in text", but is built around it. But there's one point in the essay that I do want to dispute:

"Contrary to popular thought, everyone is not a publisher. When you hear a publisher say it, it's even sadder. Publishing is a complex and well established collection of knowledge, competencies and processes, refined over time, practiced under forever difficult circumstances in a frankly indifferent market. Which is not to say that it’s exclusive: the bar to entry has dropped massively, obviously, in the last ten years. But it’s still hard, and hard to do well, and the rewards are still small. Writing something and putting it on the internet is not publishing. Producing an application and getting it into the app store is not publishing. If you think everyone is a publisher, go home now, and come back when you’ve thought about what you do."

I've followed the advice in the last sentence on countless occasions over the last three years — digital publishing is good at inspiring existential crises. I agree that "everyone is not a publisher". But I think that they can be if they want, taking a sufficiently broad view of publishing. Wikipedia gives us this definition: Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information — the activity of making information available to the general public. This broader view isn't just a modern interpretation. A more succinct version comes from the beautiful 17th Century dictionary that I was given for Christmas last year: "making common"¹. The definitions are 340 years apart, but either of them fits the web, or apps, or books. In its purest form publishing is the end result not the process. It brings me back to something that I said recently: Anyone can be a publisher, but I think a more interesting question is how to be a successful publisher.

¹: "Printed by Tho. Newcomb, and are to be sold by Robert Boulter, at the Turks-head in Cornhill, over against the Royal Exchange. 1674."

"I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now. On the one hand, e-books are beginning to offer writers technical possibilities that, being human, we’re going to be unable to resist. On the other, the form fits with life now. So much of what we do is hyperlinked and mediated by screens that it feels important to find a way to reflect on that condition, and fiction, literature, has long afforded us the possibility of reflection."