Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

Courtesy of Bob McArthur I learned that in today’s online the Onion you’ll find the headline “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text.”

Can you blame them?

                                                                                                                               From the Onion

Boston resident Charlyne Thomson said, “Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.” 500 of them in fact!

Detroit local Janet Landsman said, “I’m sure if it’s important enough, they’ll let us know some other way. After all, it can’t be that serious. If there were anything worthwhile buried deep in that block of impenetrable English, it would at least have an accompanying photo of a celebrity or a large humorous title containing a pop culture reference.”  

Added Landsman, “Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t even have a point.”

In humour lies truth.

Grab it before it heads behind The New Yorker’s firewall, Anthony Lane’s marvellous overview of the history of 3-D, taking us right through to Avatar and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (did you know that this film was shot in 2-D, and converted to 3-D during post-production? Cheater!), and speculating beyond.

It’s difficult to condense the history in this long article, but let me quote from the conclusion:

True, these are early days; I watched a DVD of “My BloodyValentine,” which came with a pair of crummy anaglyph glasses, and it was like having my eyeballs rinsed in lemon-lime Gatorade. Word is, though, that Blu-ray disks offer a better service by far, and who’s to say, in any case, that feature films will be the major draw? An outfit called 3ality Digital has produced a three-dimensional broadcast for the N.F.L., and before long it won’t be just the halftime commercials during the Super Bowl which require us to don our glasses. It will be the game. We will rise magically above the end zone, at the climactic play, and watch the football rifle toward our eyes. And if we feel like grieving at the end, and need to stream some 3-D porn to cheer ourselves up, it will not be because our team lost; it will be because the vision is over for the night. Those members of the “Avatar” audience who said that they felt blue, in every sense, as the movie ebbed away were the most accurate critics of all. 3-D will ravish our senses and take us on rides that no drug could match, but my guess is that, like so many blessings, it won’t make us happy. It will make us want more.

Courtesy of a tip from Bob Sacks, and published in The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Magazines and their Web Sites” found publishers are still trying to work out how best to utilise the online medium. There is no general standard or guidelines for magazine websites and little discussion between industry leaders as to how they should most effectively be approached.” (Comment by emilybraham in the Online Journalism Review.)

Available for online reading or for PDF download from the CJR site (linked above), the 58-page report by Victor Navasky and Evan Lerner notes in its introduction that:

This is “the first comprehensive study of online practices of print magazines.

“The survey had various goals: to identify some best (and worst) practices; clarify journalistic standards for new media; and guide journalists and media companies towards a business model that allow revenues not only to be allocated more efficiently, but also channeled back into the kind of news-gathering operations that are essential for democracy.”

The final report is based on 665 responses from 3,000 magazines invited to participate. In the authors’ opinion, “these represented a significant cross-section of topical interest, including news, entertainment, sports, shelter, fashion, and men’s and women’s issues. Respondents’ circulations roughly correlated to the distribution found in our overall sample.”

The report is packed with charts and graphs and is full of surprises. For example:

(Come to think of it, perhaps this one’s not so surprising after all :-))

For anyone interested in the future of journalism in print and in electronic form this is essential reading.

Courtesy of my sister Sue, who found it on Quillblog, Apple Canada has posted the position of “Manager, iBooks Asia Pacific & Canada .” The description:

This position is responsible for launching and growing the iBook business in Asia Pacific and Canada and building an extensive offering for customers. This will involve working with the iBooks and iTunes teams in Cupertino, Canada, Australia and other countries, and with content partners to secure content from U.S., international and local providers, and to market that content on the iBooks store and through other marketing programs.

The role includes: working with management, regionally and in Cupertino to determine strategies and priorities for iBooks in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries; identifying content providers to target, establish and develop relationships; working with legal and production teams to finalize relationships and secure content; and coordinate launches with partners, production, and marketing. This role will also be responsible for marketing the books offering on the iBooks store by coordinating with Apple’s production teams, the marketing team, and the production and marketing teams of partners. The iBooks Manager will be measured according to his/her ability to establish a strong content offering for the local market to attract new customers and generate sales.

The iBooks Manager will be the primary person responsible for building the book business in Asia Pacific and Canada and will be the primary account manager for regional content providers. This will be in collaboration with corporate and local team members responsible for books and iTunes worldwide, production, marketing, and product management for the iBooks Store.

This position will be based in Toronto or Sydney and will require travel in the region and to the U.S.

Relationship and account management abilities and strong interpersonal communication skills. Experience developing business and content strategies that focus on customers and the growth of the business. Strong understanding of Canadian, Australian and international publishing industries, markets, and trends. Excellent publishing industry and business contacts. Seasoned leadership skills with demonstrated ability to present plans and recommendations to senior management. Excellent project management and coordination skills. Skilled at developing and exercising cross-functional influence. Professional attention to detail. Highly motivated, mature team-player, driven self-starter and able to work in fast-paced environment.

Apple appears not yet to have noticed that publishing in different countries and regions is highly idiosyncratic. There couldn’t be more than a dozen people who could pretend to possess a “strong understanding of Canadian, Australian and international publishing industries, markets, and trends.” I’ve worked in book publishing in Canada AND the United States for three decades, and think I’ve got a good handle on the differences between the industries in those two countries. Although Canada and Australia share the misfortune of both being former colonies of England, the similarity ends there. And from what I know of the Asia-Pacific book publishing industries they could not be more different from the North American industries than night is from day (and isn’t Asia-Pacfic a region, i.e. in itself a group of countries each with significant differences in their respective book trades?).

As Quillblog points out, “Despite this posting, Apple has yet to confirm a timeline for the international rollout  of iBooks. iBooks is listed as a feature on the American site only.” I guess the timeline is decreasing.

The job description mentions that the “successful” applicant will have to work with Cupertino, but omits a key gating factor. If you apply, should you prepare to at some point be humiliated either by memo or in person by Steve Jobs?

If you’re at all like me, you find yourself very pleasantly surprised when you download a whitepaper, research report or promo brochure from the website of a for-profit organization and it actually has content worth thinking about and passing along to others.

I’ve been remissing in failing to blog about teamDigital’s very fine “PROMOTIONS 2.0: The Future of Interactive Marketing,” which I downloaded last October. Let’s just blame information overload, but my failing means that it is very slightly dated. Rereading it tonight I find it still packed with fresh ideas, clearly illustrated and succinctly stated.

Here’s example #1:

We hear about social media ad nauseum: the notion that it is the new mass media is one that I had not considered.

Number 2:

Clear and to-the point. One of the key arguments you’ll find in this 32-page PDF file is a strong push on engagement through social media. This idea is not completely new or radical; I just have not seen it so well articulated from other sources.

And #3:

This slide/illustration really cuts to the chase, and states teamDigital’s proposition most succinctly. You’ll catch the point here. I do recommend that you download the whole PDF and give it a once-over. It’s an eye opener.

I was pleased to encounter Adrian Kingsley-Hughes’ blog posting this evening, “The Slow Demise of the Printer.” Of course many of my readers could read into the title in two ways: an acknowledgement of my frequently noted difficulties at printing companies, or as a note on the decline in the use of desktop printers. You’ll realize from the title of this blog that he means the latter.

This is a topic that I’ve been following for a decade or more. The champions of paper and printing argued early that the Internet and the web actually were accelerating the consumption of both, as most people were not comfortable with reading long documents on yesterday’s generation of CRT screens. It was true. CRT screens did tend to weary the eyes after hours of viewing, and, at the same time, a lot of very long documents were published, whether as Microsoft Word docs or PDFs. Much easier to print them out and read them at your leisure, perhaps during business travel, back in the days when that was not a complete horror show.

As recently as 2006, an article in Toronto’s Globe & Mail proudly stated, “It’s official: The paperless office, predicted for more than 30 years, hasn’t happened. Less paper? Today’s offices use more. Paper use at home is skyrocketing too, and printer sales are way up. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Yet by that December, The Christian Science Monitor was reporting that “…after decades of hype, American offices may finally be losing their paper obsession. The demand for paper used to outstrip the growth of the US economy, but the past two or three years have seen a marked slowdown in sales — despite a healthy economic scene.” More recent reports indicate that the demand for laser printer paper is now declining.

Several things have changed (besides the horror of business travel). LCD screens have significantly higher resolution that CRTs, and the evolution of video cards allows us many more controls to set those screens to a suitable brightness/contrast setting for comfortable reading (of course most people don’t bother with the adjustments, but they’re there). Digital typography continues to improve  through the efforts of Adobe, Microsoft and some of their smaller competitors.

At the same time the web has trained most of us on the art of “skimming.” Yes some documents, books and other printable materials must be read careful, even repeatedly. But the bulk is dross, and if you can make it through the executive summary, you’ve probably aced the comprehension challenge for that piece of malarkey.

I saw early on that for me at least there was far too much interesting information I could access from the web to justify printing it all out and never getting around to reading it. So instead I create PDFs of stories that I think are interesting to me or readers of this blog, and file them carefully. They’re availabe to me through my filing system, but never in my face.

Works just fine.

I occasionally print out longer articles to read while travelling, but just as often copy them to my small laptop to read on-board, on-screen. Also workable.

I do not believe that the future of publishing will include more printed output. The changing landscape is just not tending that way.

Is it different for you?

Steve Job is considered one of the great showmen in the business (showpersons?), and the reputation is, I think, well-deserved. I’ve watched him live many times, and saw that the secret of his success on stage is no accidental talent. As one first hand, in-depth article points out, in U.K.’s The Guardian:

Steve starts his preparation for a keynote weeks in advance, reviewing all the products and technologies he might include. Although development and release schedules are set far in advance, he still has to satisfy himself that the chosen products are keynote-ready. For software, this can be hard to decide: the engineering work is usually still underway, so he will make a preliminary determination based on seeing unfinished software. More than once this has caused some tense moments in rehearsal when programs haven’t behaved.

Several reporters at the recent iPad launch wrote that when the doors opened they were nearly trampled by the crowd forcing its way into San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center, hoping for front-row seats.

Despite this success, I cringe at one thing that Steve also launched into the business. He has mastered the overuse of superlatives, designed mainly to get the docile, loving audience whipped into a frenzy of belief that what they are seeing truly is “amazing,” “fantastic,” “magical,” “revolutionary,” and more. With thanks to my colleague Jon Robinson, I saw this lovely YouTube video today, which well-illustrates the point:

Steve can get away with this stuff, and keep ‘em coming back for more. Some of you have no doubt had occasion to cringe watching similar efforts from lesser presenters.

Steve has reached the treasured pinnacle that most presenters can only dream about. Even if you find yourself doubting that the launch will be a success, and remember that Jobs has never batted 1000, you’ll soon be reminded by a colleague, blogger or journalist that “It rarely pays to bet against Steve Jobs.”

When we evaluate new technology I believe that the key equation is “push or pull.” It is the rare new technology product released to the public where the reaction is an immediate: “I want that.” I suppose Facebook and Twitter are recent examples of “I want that” being a very common refrain. It certainly didn’t hurt that they were free. Microsoft pushed Vista for years without much success. Windows 7 is being pulled by consumers and businesses in record numbers.

Many new products need to be pushed hard onto the public, with the vendor hoping that it will catch on, “cross the chasm,” and thereafter an eager public will pull the product close, egged on by great reviews and great word-of-mouth.

In the case of Apple’s new iPad, was the public looking for something that met an unfulfilled technological requirement, or just hoping that Apple would provide a newfangled “must have” device?

I imagine that most (myself included) were looking for the latter. Did Apple fulfill that promise? I think not.

As Steve Jobs clearly stated in the hyped-filled product intro, he too recognizes that Apple’s task is to offer a must-have product. Jobs positioned the iPad as a pioneer in a new genre of computing, somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone. “The bar is pretty high,” he made clear. “It has to be far better at doing some key things.”

With the exception of a large and beautiful (albeit LCD) screen, we are apparently being offered a very large iPhone, without built-in telephonic features.

We can now access iBooks, a late and thus far weak entry to the eBooks foray (albeit in color).

The pricing is better than expected, although if you sign up for the whole package, the price does exceed $1,000 in year one (and most consumers will be drawn to get all the storage available as well as 3G).

Is Steve Jobs delivering on our needs or hopes? David Pogue points out in today’s New York Times, “My main message to fanboys is this: it’s too early to draw any conclusions. Apple hasn’t given the thing to any reviewers yet, there are no iPad-only apps yet (there will be), the e-bookstore hasn’t gone online yet, and so on. So hyperventilating is not yet the appropriate reaction.”

As a general observation Pogue makes a good point.

Based on the rumors of what the Apple tablet would offer I planned to buy one. Having looked fairly closely at the iPad, I’ve put my credit card back in my wallet.

Where Steve Jobs Says that Apple is Positioned

…except that you can’t use it as a phone (not out of the box, at any rate).

The iPhone Gains Weight; Becomes Deaf

And it’s not really a computer, because it runs on the iPhone OS. So yes, as Steve Jobs pointed out, there are currently 140,000 applications for that OS, but most of them are better described as “applets” rather than “applications” because they do so little (as makes sense when trying to work on a small phone). Jobs introduced several developers working on either expanding their existing applets for the iPad or developing new ones. Most were games. Apple has re-crafted its own iWorks for the iPad, which provides a modicum of mature computer-like functionality, but with OS X out of sight, the real Mac and Windows applications will also remain out of sight, unless some expensive development work gets underway to convert existing apps to the iPhone OS, assuming that would be possible.

The reaction from the press and public has been mixed thus far. Those who feel Apple can do no wrong feel, for the most part, that Apple has done no wrong, and many think it a home run. Those of us who, while admiring Steve Jobs, consider him still as human, not deity, suspect he’s well short of a home run on iPad V1.

More to follow…

“The McGraw-Hill Companies reported a 43.2% increase in fourth quarter EPS,” says today’s press release.(Log-in may be required).

The big gains were in McGraw-Hill Education at 2.6% and in Financial Services at 10.6%.

“Information & Media” declined by 11.4%; you’ll have to dig deeper than I have to figure that one out.

The major message I’m receiving is that a very old media company is weathering the storm with some aplomb.

Good for them.