Back in the 70’s and early 80’s publishing was protected by a complex range of typsetting and print considerations which provided a barrier to entry for writers or would be publishers.
Publishers looked after the business side with distribution, marketing and printing all needing serious investment to make the numbers work.
The birth of desktop publishing in 1985 (Pagemaker) started a long term series of chnages that have ultimately led to every person and his/her dog (lots of dogs! in old school publishing terms) having a go at self publishing. The largest of these is Lulu. Their corporate profile makes a few points as included below.
“To be clear, Lulu is not a publisher. It’s a digital marketplace guided by a vision of empowerment and accessibility, and built on a business model that has proven wildly successful.
The rapid growth of Lulu, which is being driven by over 15,000 new registrations a week and more than 100, 000 unique visitors everyday, is built on its proven ability to grab hold of the long tail of user-generated content and provide an empowering outlet for creators of all types.
Lulu eliminates traditional entry barriers to publishing, and enables content creators and owners – authors and educators, videographers and musicians, businesses and nonprofits, professionals and amateurs – to bring their work directly to their audience.
First, they use Lulu’s tools to format their digital content. Then they take advantage of Lulu’s dedicated marketplace, custom storefronts and advanced listing and distribution services to make their books, videos, CDs, DVDs, calendars, reports and more available to as many, or as few, people around the world as they like, earning 80% of all creator revenue, of which millions of dollars has already been paid out.
As the creation of user-generated content has grown exponentially, Lulu has been at the forefront of this still rapidly growing curve. Traditional book publishers in the United States published roughly 120,000 books a year.
Lulu alone published 98,000 new titles globally, created by some of our almost 1.2 million registered users. In addition, Lulu has empowered creators to post, sell, and share hundreds of thousands of videos, music downloads, artistic creations and great photography.”
Ross Dawson had some very pertinent things to say about when self publishing makes sense using the example provided by David Maister.
“Many more established authors and creative people are going to start making the same choices as David. Since much of the profitability of publishers comes from their big sellers, this is going to prove a problem.
There is absolutely a lot of value that publishers can create, but it is primarily for those early or in the middle of their creative careers. After that, the power and choice shifts to the author, now that it is so easy to self-publish, and the stigma is quickly disappearing.”
You should read his full post. Here is a great diagram from Ross.
“In my book Living Networks I proposed a basic “Creative Career” trajectory, illustrated below.
Ross goes on to say:
The most basic career strategy for content creators is quite simple. In the early stages, use the free flow of the networks to distribute direct, demonstrate that you can tap an attractive market, and attract the interest of a publisher. New York reggae and ska band The Pilfers sold 10,000 CDs at its concerts and on its website, using the leverage to secure a favorable record deal with Universal Music Group.
Many others have signed contracts with record labels on the basis of the success of their freely distributed MP3s.
In the next stage, you work with the publishers for as long as it is worthwhile, getting them to take much of the risk, and commit capital to advances and promotion. Finally, hopefully with reputation well established, you can once again distribute direct, taking all the profits.
Many rock stars later in their career, like David Bowie, Todd Rundgren, or the estate of Frank Zappa, sell directly to their fans. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, chose to publish his first non-Dilbert book, God’s Debris, directly as an ebook, later also selling a hardcopy version. He had full creative control, and could reap all the profits. This generic creative career strategy is illustrated above.
David Maister’s step fits exactly into this analysis. Having used publishers to help gain credibility and a strong audience for his work, it no longer makes sense for him to sell through a publisher. He can self-publish, and take all the value for himself, instead of giving the bulk to a publisher for little value.”
I do recommend reading the full post which includes quotes from David Maister. I’m just dashing out the door for a week in NZ’s deep South so don’t have as much time to write this week.
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Those 6 trends are (Each gets a paragraph or more.)
1. Pervasive connectivity
2. Immersive experience
3. New interfaces
4. Attention profiling
5. DIY apps
6. Social revolution)
However the one I was most interested in was:-4. Attention profiling
“We are moving to a world of infinite content. The proliferation of blogs, online publications, podcasts, and videos means we are swamped with information.
The first phase of the response has been user filtered content or collaborative filtering on sites such as Last.FM and scouta.com, giving us personalized recommendations.
The next phase will be to develop detailed profiles of our interests and behaviors across different categories of content, so that we can access or be presented with content in a way that matches our available attention relative to the relevance and interest of the content.
The two most promising initiatives in this space - Particls and illumio - have both been launched in the last couple of months.
We can expect it to become a completely seamless process to find or be given what we want from an infinite landscape of content.”
In the life-cycle and growth of any community we see the same phases and variations. For people to make sense of something so large expect them to use filter and tools so that the signal is stronger than than the noise coming from the massed group.
In many ways online behavior is not so different to offline - it is just more exaggerated, mobile and volatile because it can be and because of amplification of the core messages and other content.
I have a very large home library of books that I use like diving boards to explore ideas with. One of the things I like to do is to revisit older books and reread them to see what differences are years or even decades later.
Also I love the idea of being able to re read information from multiple disciplines together in some kind of giant fractal pattern and see what drops out. But that is very time consuming.
Some books like McLuhans Understanding Media are quite readable still and others aren’t so good, but the point is many writers have been speculating on the effects of socialisation and community for a very long time.
In essence what we see now are the same patterns on fast forward with feedback loops and much more dynamic interactions but similar cycles of change. Now it is possible to speed read 100 or more RSS feeds and get a much better idea where groups of people and ideas might be heading. However, there is still a need to decipher these clues and this is where attention profiling or some variation of it comes in.
What is different now is the impact of multiple trends and technologies working together. For example people using DIY apps to do their own attention profiling such as giant tag clouds for filtering and sorting.
I was reminded of the work of Jonathan Harris - who makes some kind of sense from this an anthropological display of clues writ large. There is a 20 min video on TED called The Web’s Secret Stories. There is even an API for the We Feel Fine project.
His computer programs scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.
His projects are both intensely personal (the “We Feel Fine” project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world’s blogs to collect snapshots of the writers’ feelings) and entirely global (the new “Universe,” which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same — to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.
A few weeks back we noticed some unusual host visits from a product called Conversation Miner which is another way that people can use clever tools and filters to keep tabs on what is happening in their “patch. Aubrey Turner had a similar experience and was able to ask the “miner” what was going on. The response is below.
“We pull results a variety of ways, often starting with one of several different search engines and then using our own technology to screen those results. Once they have been pre-screened, one of our employees will actually visit the blog post and read it to determine if it is of interest to our client; the hit you saw was via that system.”
The reality is that networks amplify relationships and so the concept and practise of attention profiling will be one of the key trends as we look for ways to deal with the growth of online communities.
I was at an recent event where (in passing) a presenter recounted her experiences at various TV conferences along these lines. She told us that many of the industry attendees were still asking variations of “Help the Internet is coming…what do we do?”
The question isn’t new and neither are the answers, but in 2007 the shape of both might look a bit different. Here are some ideas and observations on how content providers and publishers might answer that question and address current and future opportunities.
This has been happening for more than a decade now at various music, film, TV, media and publishing conferences.
The various incumbents are still struggling to transition their business models into a time where distribution is much less of a controlling factor due to the ubiquity of the internet. Even now it seems some media (music, TV and film) businesses are still scared of the future. Even book publishing is also facing big challenges despite the long tail theory.
This fear of the change and the new reminded me of various conferences I attended back in the early 90’s when multi-media CD, CD-i, and DVD formats were just starting to break ahead of the internet wave.
Some Conclusions on the Way Forward
The conclusions back in ‘92 and ‘93 were that anyone involved in publishing should have some kind of “digital soup” of original content that they could roll out as the public caught up with all the new format choices. Broadcasters now appear to be revisiting the idea of multi format content and platforms but to me 14 years seems a very long time for the penny to drop.
Back in the 30’s sheet music publishers controlled the music business. They were mostly displaced by recorded music and recording industry companies. Those companies kept getting confused on the strategic intent of their industry and we all know what happened to them, just like now.
In a world where everyone can be a content producer and a consumer at the same time - publishers need to learn from history, rethink their business models and adapt. Follow the money, Andrew Dubber is brilliant at deciphering the business side of this. See also the future of music.
The music industry refused to recognise a legal digital music format for some years until iTunes partially rescued them. Now a generation has got used to not paying because they couldn’t - even if they wanted to.
Multimedia History
However, back in ‘93 no one really had an idea of how big and how much the internet would change things as modems at the time were running at 1200/2400bd and only used by geeks on bulletin boards for help desk style services. Even then, some people could see the ability to deliver 600Mb + of content on a CD of some kind would be mean industry transformation would be needed.
Perhaps the difference with those multimedia conferences, was that for the most part we were outsiders to the publishing world. I had the pleasure of presenting at a conference in Melbourne where I talked about exploding value chains and other “MBA speak” with growing excitement..little did we know the full implications.
During a coffee break I also showed a music video clip of the Emma Paki song - “System Virtue” by arrangement with her record company as an example of future media content. If you’ve seen the video it has various staunch East coast references which to a middle class white audience was quite a shock.
My thesis was, that given access to a new distribution format which could hold video we would see the music industry trying out new things including new artists. I was only going on instinct and guess work but I believed better access to a suitable medium / or media might allow us to hear different voices, and different politics - such as Emma Paki.
Key question: Do you think that we’ve run out of songs that sound new?
She added these song references to her question from one of Pat’s former students.
“There’s gotta be a song left to sing
Cause everybody can’t of thought of everything
One little song that ain’t been sung
One little rag that ain’t been wrung out completely yet
Gotta a little left
One little drop of fallin rain
One little chance to try again
One little bird that makes it every now and then
One little piece of endless sky
One little taste of cherry pie
One little week in paradise and I start thinkin’ “
Here are some of Pats answers (from about 15minutes into the audio) as transcribed by me.
“Even if every song has been written’ - every song hasn’t been written by me. And in the journey of writing a song, one discovers things on a deeper level.
No matter whether that idea has been written a thousand times before.
And so songwriting is certainly a process of self discovery and in terms of it being something has never been done before,
I really loved Bob Dylan in the ‘No Direction Home” Scorsese DVD; who says - There I was in the ’60’s, ….I was doing something that nobody had ever done before. He paused and said -”I think I was wrong about that.”
New question by Kim on - The use of the senses in songwriting?
Pattinson’s answer:
You need to stimulate your listener to get / make the listener involved in your song.
There is a difference between saying “Somethings changed between us” which is sort kind of telling and abstract and..
When you can stimulate your listeners senses
They put their stuff into your words and the song becomes theirs.
Ain’t that the truth; and best of all his insights are valuable to all content communicators including marketing contact.
Great songwriting is distilled experience with a personal flavour. The connection is that like a great song our insights can help our customers if we are open to that possibility.
Every new generation appears to collectively relearn things some of us have forgotten and that is why reflecting on the history of everything is so important.
Apparently George Bush thinks the answer to global warming is nuclear power. The reality is far more complex and relies on Russian goodwill more than anything else.
“11. In acknowledgment of the important contribution nuclear power can make in meeting energy needs and addressing the challenge of climate change, Australia and the United States agree on enhancing bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation and supporting the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP).
In another APEC news report APEC 2007: Australia and USA To Push Nuke Solution Australia and the US have today unveiled a plan to have nuclear power generation as the cornerstone of its climate change proposal.
John Howard told reporters here in Sydney that he and George Bush “agreed on joint statements regarding climate change and energy, a joint nuclear energy action plan which involves cooperation on civil nuclear energy, including R&D, skills and technical training, and regulatory issues.
Australia intends to participate in the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, and there will be great benefits in terms of access to nuclear technology and nonproliferation. And the United States will support Australian membership in the Generation IV International Forum, which involves R&D to develop safer and better nuclear reactors,” John Howard said.
Australia is seen to be rich in Uranium, however this is something of an illusion as the average uranium ore grade in Australia is reckoned to be 0.045% and 0.1% is needed to be commercial.
This means discarding 99.9% of the ore (at huge environmental cost) unless there is some other co-product like gold, silver, copper or platinum to extract (see quote at the bottom of this post called a Little makes a lot.)
At present the U.S gets half its enriched uranium from the Russians who keep the disposal problem but export uranium hexafluoride gas to the U.S.
They can only keep up this supply level by dismantling weapons (which is a good thing) but uranium fuel from other sources is a great deal harder to extract and supplies are running low. John Busby points out also that:
“carbon dioxide is emitted from every element of the nuclear fuel cycle except the actual fission in the reactor and the world is running out of its fuel, uranium; a reality the lobby fails to embrace.”
“In comparison with the amount of coal burned for a given electrical generation, the nuclear proponents argue that the amount of uranium required for the same output from a nuclear power station is tiny.”
His feature is called A little makes a lot? and I recommend you read the whole piece. Supplies of nuclear fuel are running out fast.
‘The industry deals with this embarrassing scenario by pretending that there is no uranium supply problem as there is ample residing in the earth’s crust and that the rapidly rising prices that has stimulated exploration will make its extraction economic. Moreover, it argues that nuclear electricity is not as sensitive to its fuel price as other forms of generation relying on fossil fuels.
See the analysis of the flawed IAEA “Red book” by the Energy Watch Group.[5]The flaw in this argument is that unlike highly valued gold which is mined from decreasing ore grades at great expense, uranium can only be valued as a source of fuel now that the world has sufficient nuclear weapons to end human existence.
This means that to mine and mill the decreasingly low grade ores requires an increasing amount of energy inversely proportional to the decrease, so that the energy input eventually exceeds that gained from the overall nuclear fuel cycle.
The exact “cross-over” or “economic cut-off” point at which an ore grade is deemed to be of no use as a net energy source is subject to disputation as even its very existence as a concept sounds the death knell of the “renaissance”. In practice, it has been defined by the Australian mining industry as around an ore grade of 0.1% unless there are co-products such as copper, gold, silver or platinum which provide additional revenue.[6] As the average uranium ore grade in Australia is reckoned to be 0.045%, it means that claims of having the world’s largest uranium deposits are bogus — unless the prospective mines offer remunerative co-products they will not be opened.
Even so this is no panacea: BHP Billiton is engaged in a four year feasibility study as a precursor to sanctioning the expansion of its Olympic Dam mine as an open pit, where copper, gold and silver will augment its uranium production.[7] The pre excavation of 3 cubic kilometres of rock may take too much imported diesel to allow it to proceed and the processing will need desalinated water, most likely requisitioned to stem a local drought.[8]
The fact that governments around the world appear to embrace the nuclear “renaissance” is a triumph of the public relations industry, which has overcome safety concerns and a poor economic record to allow nuclear power even to be considered. It has offered economic salvation as oil, gas and coal pass (or soon will pass) their production peaks and has argued erroneously that it can offer a part solution to global warming.
However, soaring prices for uranium supplied as “yellow cake” signal the end of the nuclear power era and the “renaissance” will stall when a lack of fuel causes the premature closure of aging reactors.”
New Zealand is right to reject the argument that nuclear power offers help with global warming. It is a false hope that is based on a misunderstanding of the science and actual realities of raw material supplies, not to mention the actual process. There are also many other risks around the continued use of nuclear power as well.
Answer: From Chair, Roy Hemmingway, 4th August 2005
Although the Electricity Commission has no role in choosing which resources generating companies build in New Zealand, I believe that nuclear power is the wrong choice for the country, and I can give several reasons why that’s the case.
Answer is abbreviated below. Use the title link to check the full version. These are all local logistical reasons without looking at waste or the other usual reasons.
The first problem is size. (NZ total needs 4500MW - typical Nuclear plant is 1200)
Secondly, a nuclear plant runs flat out, it does not follow load up or down.
Thirdly, from a cost standpoint, nuclear plants produce power about twice as expensively as the plants that have been built in New Zealand recently.
And finally, nuclear really requires a whole industry to go along with it
It is now entirely feasible to build 150MW solar powered stations, for example in Melbourne, Australia a company called Solar Systems has received government funding to proceed with construction of a 154-megawatt solar power station in Victoria. It will be the bigest if the world if completed. There are also major solar projects (150Mw) in Algeria that have been announced recently although the lead times are very long - but not as long as for nuclear.
“Any forecast of the development of nuclear power in the next 25 years has to concentrate on two aspects, the supply of uranium and the addition of new reactor capacity. At least within this time horizon, neither nuclear breeding reactors nor thorium reactors will play a significant role because of the long lead times for their development and market penetration.
The analysis of data on uranium resources leads to the assessment that discovered reserves are not sufficient to guarantee the uranium supply for more than thirty years.
Eleven countries have already exhausted their uranium reserves. In total, about 2.3 Mt of uranium have already been produced. At present only one country (Canada) is left having uranium deposits containing uranium with an ore grade of more than 1%, most of the remaining reserves in other countries have ore grades below 0.1% and two thirds of reserves have ore grades below 0.06%.
This is important as the energy requirement for uranium mining is at best indirect proportional to the ore concentration and with concentrations below 0.01-0.02% the energy needed for uranium processing – over the whole fuel cycle – increases substantially.
Other Risks & Issues
For more detail on some of the wider issues see a summary of the book “Insurmountable Risks:The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change” by Dr Brice Smith who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Insurmountable Risks lays out a set of criteria for evaluating proposals aimed at limiting climate change, including:
comparative costs of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector;
risks of catastrophic accidents with long-term health and environmental impacts;
potential for compromise of power plant integrity by terrorist attacks;
proliferation and other security impacts; and
Central Finding of (Carbon Free and Nuclear Free Roadmap)
“The overarching finding of this study is that a zero-CO2 U.S. economy can be achieved within the next thirty to fifty years without the use of nuclear power and without acquiring carbon credits from other countries.
In other words, actual physical emissions of CO2 from the energy sector can be eliminated with technologies that are now available or foreseeable.
This can be done at reasonable cost while creating a much more secure energy supply than at present. Net U.S. oil imports can be eliminated in about 25 years.
All three insecurities – severe climate disruption, oil supply and price insecurity, and nuclear proliferation via commercial nuclear energy – will thereby be addressed.
In addition, there will be large ancillary health benefits from the elimination of most regional and local air pollution, such as high ozone and particulate levels in cities, which is due to fossil fuel combustion.”
More than 50 years of commercial use of nuclear plants in the U.S has already showed up the extreme expense and very large number of unnecessary risks.
It all reminds me of that old Fawlty Towers episode -’Don’t Mention the War” - except this time it is “Don’t mention the Russians”. (Of course it is more complex than this; but the huge irony of using old Soviet weapons to supply half of U.S present fuel needs is too good to pass up.)
The real headline could be ‘Bush relies on Russians for reducing Global Warming’ - What do you think?
UK Policy Update: Ashley Seager, economics correspondent The Guardian
Monday September 3 2007
At last someone in the mainstream of politics is taking climate change seriously. So it is a surprise that the Liberal Democrats’ weighty new document on how it would achieve a carbon-neutral, non-nuclear Britain by 2050 received so little attention when it was published last week.
Decentralised Energy
Combined Heat and Power and other great examples. Watch this 18 min video clip on some of the successes in Denmark and Netherlands and how this applies -especially to the U.K. The presenter is Clive Anderson.
“Gillian Welch”
“Global Warming”
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