Publishing

Book, Movie, Audience: Bringing Forces Together

September 17, 2007 by Kassia Krozser

So it follows the course of human events that popular (and not-so-popular) novels are made into movies (prompting the ever-after statement, “The book was better.”). Once upon a time, books and movies, rightly, occupied different spheres. How would they meet? It’s not like they sold books in movie theaters or screened films in bookstores.

Ah, to return to those innocent times. The joy…

Seriously gang, it’s 2007. Nearly 2008. A new age has dawned and all that. So it makes perfect sense that one key way to promote books-made-into-movies is to, well, you know, work both sides of the media spectrum. Cross-promote, build on the audience of one for the other. Use modern technology the way the Internet gods intended it.
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Print-On-Demand: What Happens when Book Publishing Becomes a Commodity?

September 13, 2007 by Kirk Biglione

It’s no secret that Medialoper loves disruptive media technologies. One of our favorites happens to be one that most consumers aren’t aware of — Print-On-Demand.

As the name implies, Print-On-Demand is a technology that allows publishers to print books as they’re needed. Imagine a world where books never go out of print, no matter how obscure they might be. That’s the promise of Print-On-Demand.

Print-On-Demand also provides authors with a relatively low-risk means of self-publishing. While self-publishing may or may not be a good idea for an unknown author, it could prove be a very profitable move for established authors or individuals who are well known in some other medium.

Today we use the occasion of our first ever Medialoper podcast to take deeper look at Print-On-Demand and the implications that it has for the publishing industry, as well as authors.

How to Save The Weekly World News

July 26, 2007 by Jim Connelly

It has been a sad week around here at ‘Loper HQ. One of our totemic icons — or is that iconic totems? — The Weekly World News, is soon going to become an ex-tabloid.

While it is still going to live on as a website, no more will its headlines about regegade apes and aliens for Bush (clearly his final stronghold of support) scream at me from the Supermarket check-out line. This sucks.

Reading the coverage about the closing, I think that I’m not the only one who feels that way. Mainstream outlets from The Washington Post to Wired have been giving it a fond obituary.

While some might sneer that this just shows How Low Things Have Sunk, I think that the worldwide outpouring of grief for the Weekly World News is a good thing. These people are simply recognizing a pioneer in the field of fake news, a clear progenitor to our current most popular practitioners of the made-up news story: The Onion, Jon Stewart and FOX News.

And besides, like Elvis or Andy Kaufman, the Weekly World News doesn’t have to die. It can be saved.

Harry Potter and the Liveblogging of the Delivery of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”

July 21, 2007 by Jim Connelly

Saturday, July 21, 2007 3:00 AM PDT

It’s still not here yet.

Coming This Saturday: Harry Potter And The Liveblogging of The Delivery of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!”

July 18, 2007 by Jim Connelly

Amazon has promised — promised! — me that they will delivery my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this Saturday, July 21, 2007. But when? And can they come through?

Will it be early enough on Saturday that I’ll be able to finish it before the actual spoilers from people who have read the actual, physical book come spooling out of the ether? Or will it be right up against the 7:00pm deadline that Amazon has promised?

Make and Craft: A Case Study For Entertainment Companies

June 28, 2007 by Kassia Krozser

Here is what happens when you give a blogger free wine. After confessing that I had wheedled and whined until I was the proud recipient of the last display copy of a new publication at a recent trade show (believe me, the wheedling wasn’t pretty; it was effective), I ventured another confession. “I really want to knit the kimono.”

“Me, too,” said the employee of the publisher. She’d expressed no horror at my underhanded tactics, assuring me that had she been there, she would have given me the magazine, too. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “But did you see the size of the needles? They’re tiny! It would take forever.”

“Yeah.” What else could I say? Knitting a kimono would be a challenge, but, well, it would also be a challenge that would take the better part of a year. My current project is already moving into forever territory. I shrugged. “I’m knitting laptop covers for Christmas.”*

And off the conversation went. It turns out that nothing excites a vendor at a trade show like the prospect of knitting laptop covers and using cool, shiny, big buttons to close the snugly cover. The husband wandered over to another table, his attention focused on the Holy Grail of magazines. “It’s the pinball issue!”
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Harry Potter and The Search For “Harry Potter Spoilers”

June 26, 2007 by Jim Connelly

It’s no secret that people who write these types of online journal thingies pay attention to our traffic. And occasionally an old post that we figured was long dead and buried rises out of the morass and gets a lot of traffic. In the last month, a post I wrote back on February 3 called “Harry Potter and The Gynormous Spoiler” has become our third most-visited page.

Because the piece itself is pretty much a trifle — it’s essentially me whinging about how I’m sure to be spoiled on Harry’s fate prior to actually finishing the book, poor me! — I’m surprised that it got any traffic at all. But I think that it just reflects the public’s appetite for and anticipation of the ending of these books, an appetite that has suddenly ramped up, and is just about to explode.

DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry’s Mistakes?

June 25, 2007 by Kirk Biglione

Every once in a while you hear publishers mutter something about not wanting to make the same mistakes the music industry made. While it’s an admirable goal, the problem is that it’s not clear that we all have the same view of what those mistakes actually were. As the music industry approaches the post-DRM era, it’s pretty clear that Digital Rights Management is one big mistake that book publishers would do themselves a favor by avoiding.

The very nature of DRM runs contrary to the freedoms that all book readers know and love. The freedom to read a book anywhere, the freedom to read a book without special requirements or equipment, the freedom to loan a book to a friend, or borrow a book from a friend or library. By inserting a layer of DRM between readers and books the experience of reading is fundamentally transformed in all of the wrong ways. Not only that, DRM protected books lose all of their essential viral qualities. Unrestricted books sell themselves — DRM protected books never get the chance to.

TOC: Book Publishers Meet the Future

June 22, 2007 by Kirk Biglione

It’s no secret that the publishing industry is facing the same challenges that all of the other content industries are facing. On the one hand, new technology offers publishers the chance to fundamentally re-invent their business models, on the other hand new media is syphoning off the attention of a growing number of would-be book readers. For the most part, book publishers have responded to these new challenges in the same way their peers in other content industries have responded — s-l-o-w-l-y.

As a group, book publishers clearly need help coming to terms with their own future. Fortunately for them, O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference has come along not a moment too soon. The event, hosted earlier this week in San Jose, was designed to be a gentle introduction to all manner of technology issues facing the publishing industry. For three days TOC was a place where publishers could face their biggest fear — acronyms — and learn more about POD, XML, RSS, and DRM.

That’s What I Like: Rare Book Clubs

May 18, 2007 by Tyson

Considering this site has a decidedly technophile bent, it may strike some (well, not Kassia) as odd that I am so preternaturally focused on the oh-so-very-old-school world of books. Perhaps it’s because I have spent my entire adult life working in libraries (full disclosure: I am not a librarian, thank goodness).

So this week I attended my first rare book club meeting, where sad to say, the median age of the other attendees was “dead.” I think a few permanently left our golden orb somewhere between the departure of the salad and the arrival of the soup at the French restaurant near downtown Los Angeles where the thirty-five odd (and I mean “odd”) people gathered.

Not to get all ageist on my gentle readers, but this is a preface to saying that being thirtysomething, I look around and see my fellow Gen-Xers just don’t seem to be all that interested in collecting fascinating, if musty, tomes anymore. It used to be great sport back in the day to have succesfully collected, for instance, every volume of the sacred Zamorano 80 books on Californiana (no, that’s not a misspelling). You were lifted to the ranks of bibliophilic Valhalla, feted by your brethren-in-arms every bit as much as Audie Murphy in a New York ticket tape parade.