Medialoper

Chasing the long tail of new media

books

Book Piracy Is on the Decline

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Finally, some good news for publishers.

All year we’ve been hearing predictions that the book business is on its death bed — about to be completely transformed by ebooks, then eaten alive by pirates. Yet, despite recent reports to the contrary it turns out that book piracy is on the decline.

Based on piracy loss estimates published by the International Intellectual Property Alliance and generated by the Association of American Publishers, book piracy dropped over 13% between 2005 and 2007 (the most recent year that data is available).

The numbers look like this:
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Five Questions with Novelist Seth Harwood

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Jack Wakes Up For novelist Seth Harwood the path from the Iowa Writers Workshop to the New York Times Book Review runs straight through the world of digital media.

While honing his writing skills in more traditional literary venues, Seth struggled to find success. It was only after he began serializing his novel as a podcast that Seth found an audience.

Seth is part of a new breed of authors who have embraced new media as a tool to reinvigorate the novel in an era when consumers are awash in a sea of digital entertainment options. Others, including Scott Sigler and J.C. Hutchins have taken a similar routes, proving that Seth’s podcasting success is no fluke.

Seth’s debut novel Jack Wakes Up is released today. Seth took time out from his book launch schedule to answer a few questions about Jack Wakes Up, podcasting, and the impact that new media has had on his approach to writing. [Read more…] about Five Questions with Novelist Seth Harwood

Traditional Publishers Crash (and Burn at) SXSW

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I’ve seen a fair number of remarkable events at SXSW over the years, but I’ve never seen anything quite like what unfolded at the New Think for Old Publishers panel yesterday afternoon.

On paper, the panel must have seemed like a great idea. The publishing industry is in transition with the rise of digital reading and devices like the Kindle, iPhone, and applications like Stanza. SXSW has always been about convergence and the evolution of old media in the digital age. Why not bring a group of book publishers together to address the digerati at SXSW about the changing nature of their industry?

As the twitter stream reveals, the panel never quite lived up to its promise. Now that the dust has cleared, I feel compelled to describe what happened at the New Think panel. From a remote distance it wasn’t necessarily clear what prompted the audience uprising.

This wasn’t a case of digital natives waging a mindless war against old media. On the contrary, at the beginning of the session a show of hands revealed a high density of heavy readers in the audience. Throughout the session audience members demonstrated a profound love for books. Combine that with the fact that the panel featured the ever popular Clay Shirky, and the publishers started the session with what might best be described as a sympathetic audience.

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How Not To Sell Books

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So, yeah, it’s Monday morning and I’m checking headlines, and I see an interesting article from Publisher’s Weekly about the Penguin group: turns out they’re pushing the direct sales. Now, me being me, I’m immediately interested. This is the first time a major publishers has made direct-to-consumer sales — no local bookstores, no Amazon — a high-profile goal.

Or not.

Let me explain, first by quoting from the PW article:

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It’s Hard Out There For A Critic

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This summer, the major studios decided press screenings weren’t all that — they bypassed newspapers critics in favor of popular review: weekend box office numbers. The recent Los Angeles Times poll suggested that today’s kids prefer peer analysis to highly trained professional analysis. We’ve suggested that today’s critics are out-of-touch with the real world.

So what role should film (music, book, architecture, etc) critics play in the real world? In response to a question from colleague Patrick Goldstein, there is this:

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Why Kids Don’t Watch Movies On Cellphones

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Both the motion picture industry and publishing industry have been scrambling to go mobile*. Mobile, they believe, will save the world. And I think they’re partially right. Mobile will be one of the possible choices viewers have — but it can’t and won’t be the only option. If Medialoper has a religion, it is the doctrine of choice.

I’ve been following the Los Angeles Times series on today’s kids and their attitudes toward new media with more avidity than most — it is, after all, my job. And I’m not surprised to learn the two key reasons for slow adoption of the cell phone motion picture experience:

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6 Books You Should Read Right Now If You Wanna Get Some Insight Into This Whole “New Media” Thingy

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Wanna know the philsophical underpinnings of some of our posts here at Medialoper? (I’ll pretend you said “yes.”) The following books have helped me work out some of the concepts that infuse nearly everything that I write about what we are calling the “new media.”

Here they are, alphabetical by author:

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Books And Bytes – It’s All Good

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After a delightful weekend away from the keyboard, I’d planned to return, refreshed and ready to talk about something other than publishing. But even as I was shopping and cooking and pretending to clean, something kept nagging at me. It became more insistent as I parked myself in my the backyard yesterday, book in hand.

When it comes to new media, it’s not paper-versus-bytes argument. For those who have a “passion for paper”, as Inside Higher Ed’s Alex Golub does, there is no issue. Except that of the cost of paper increasing while the cost of bytes decreases, but I think we’ll still be at the very affordable level for the foreseeable future.

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Publishing Versus The Net Generation

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Despite the fact that it’s had ten years to prepare, the publishing industry doesn’t have a new media plan. To suggest that the rapid changes appear to be blind-siding the industry might be harsh, but, yeah, it looks like someone got caught with their strategy down. As the world is changing — for proof, oh publishers, talk to your younger editorial staff — the industry remains mired in Old Ways.

For an example of what happens to an industry that refuses to acknowledge external change, please see the annals of music history, particularly the chapters on Napster and Kazaa.

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