The popularity of Netflix-like subscription services: or a book is not a film (nor a song

But is this exciting prospect of a universal, personal library a pipe dream or an already existing reality that is bound to prosper? In the course of this essay, I will attempt to answer this question by investigating – and ultimately calling into question – the viability of broad-based, subscription services in consumer publishing.

for every time he takes the volume out of his pocket, this will become whatever title he wishes to read

As times moves on, humans will be unlikely to prefer one type of writing over the other. Some people will happily read formulaic, computer generated novels, others will be intrigued and will voraciously read literary novels written by computers, while traditionalists will stick with their human written works

will not mind if a computer writes them instead of a human

If they prefer the computer-generated content, what would this mean for authors?

privacy

Consenting to EULAs or abstaining from a service are not adequate choices: people need a regulated, safe way to set privacy levels they are comfortable with.

as the right to possess, use, and distribute, rather than as physical ownership

(Davis et al. 2013)

If horror movies are the expression of our collective fears (Philips 2005), then Unfriended is the perfect case study. The action unfolds entirely on-screen, following the interactions of five friends on Skype, Facebook chat and text messages–all of which are being manipulated by an unknown stranger. As Spotify’s suggestions grow steadily creepier, gory deaths ensue (Gingold 2014). Blood splatter aside, Unfriended perfectly captures a zeitgeist of fear about information technology. The victims’ intimate encounters are watched and recorded by a sinister, faceless entity. Their inability to carve out a private space reveals a cultural anxiety about being tracked, manipulated, and exposed online.

innovative ways

and learning process.

A breakdown of this study is shown below;

start extending services beyond their reach

kobo Reading Apps “Still love its simple yet effective interface I’ve been using this app since 2011 & still love it. I now have it on 3 devices and syncs beautifully! Don’t know what people are complaining about” March 26, 2015 “About epub extension I like this app but not the way this crumbles epub book internally… besides, this doesn’t catch up epub extensions itself, so the only way is it to import if recognises the file” March 14, 2015 Kindle Reading Apps “Obviously all such apps basically do what they are supposed to, but actually I do notice differences, other than “fancy visuals like 3D page-turning.” I find Apple’s books implementation on the iPad much easier than the Kindle app. Not at all because of the skeuomorphic 3D look, but rather because of the ease-of-use” May 2, 2013 “I love my iPad and the Kindle app. My only frustration is that even though I have an Amazon Prime membership, I can’t access the Kindle Lending Library because I don’t own the actual “Kindle Device.” July 13, 2013 Nook Reading Apps “I love the recently updated version of the nook app. Shopping is easier, I can see the balance on my gift cards, and locating the book I am currently reading is easier than ever. I recommend this app to people all the time” April 3, 2015 “I love the new version of this app! It’s more like the nook. I also like that you can watch video directly from it rather than needing to download the other app” April 4, 2015.

buyers

promoting and branding their product

etc

either

number of potential readers

undoubtedly

comfortable

etc

apps

This study

providing increased returns to publishers.

apps

Publisher’s market targets were marginalized and potential readers without these ‘e-readers’ were deprived.

specially designed e-readers by specific book stores

retrieve electronically published

its

Hopefully this will become a trend that will encourage academics in other disciplines to do the same

Thus, continuous real-time editing doesn’t only benefit Wikipedia’s currency, but inevitably its accuracy as well

community of dedicated Wikipedians.

it’s fair to assume that today’s Wikipedia content is even more accurate

content

.

Wikipedia is an excellent example of the kind of effective commons-based peer production that Yochai Benkler discusses in his book The Wealth of Networks

Even today, the “Harvard Guide to Using Sources” includes a page outlining what the university thinks is “wrong with Wikipedia.” The information on this page reiterates the most common objections to the online encyclopaedia’s accuracy: anyone can contribute to it; the expertise of contributors is not evaluated; the information may be outdated; and the entries are not reviewed by experts. [2] Nevertheless, there is evidence that suggests an increasing shift in the attitude of some academics in favour of Wikipedia. For instance, a 2013/2014 study conducted at four California State University campuses found that their faculty’s perception has shifted in favour of Wikipedia over the five-year period preceding the study

Common types of social media include internet forums, social network services, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, podcast, video and social bookmarking. Some of the popular technologies or tools used in social media-based communication include blogging, photo/music-sharing, vlogs, wall-posting, crowd-sourcing, and voice over IP.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines social media as “forms of electronic communication (as well as sites for social networking and micro-blogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages and other content (as video)” (Merriam-Webster)

drawbacks

undoubtedly

about most and effective

apps, which are another form of social media

, Facebook

Undeniable of

has made facilitated

presence

Social media would also be a great platform for editors of magazines to access information by giving the audience the opportunity to write or to be interviewed.

undeniably

Great tools like Google docs

draw insights from some other reviews and questions posted

social media as a direct source of their content

Amidst the arguments against social media as its ineffectiveness through virtual communication

it is seen as a new editing tool that enhances the work of editors

The editorial process, which involves correction, condensation and organization of a manuscript with an intention of producing correct and accurate work, is a very crucial stage in the publishing process.

what their audience wish to read.

opportunity opportunity

The work of the author becomes important as they develop original written content for books

media is not transactional

also the ease in file sharing

”

content

and provides diverse benefits as per the us

oted for being user friendly

LinkedIn and Twitter

LinkedIn, which is a professional networking site allows users to request introductions to business people who are known to the contacts.

.

skills

counter arguments

The uprising of social media has facilitated the global exchange of information and thus, could be a great tool to the publishing industry amidst several arguments against its use.

have undergone great transformation through the invention of computers and other technological inventions.

If publishers and the major players in e-reading technology want to experiment with analysing reader data, all users of e-reading platforms should at least be given a clear and direct choice of whether or not they want their reading behaviour to be tracked.

People should have the right to keep it that way.

his constitutes an unnecessary invasion of privacy for e-reader user

Genre fiction provides a unique case in which publishers may find it worthwhile to take e-reader data into greater consideration, but this is a topic that’s too large to be discussed within the scope of this paper.

how could publishers let e-reader data affect their editorial decisions

such as a Kobo, can lead to inaccurate analysis, since it doesn’t provide a complete overview of how readers engage with e-books.

These potential causes of e-reader data inaccuracy show that sales and reception continue to be the most effective ways to evaluate a book’s success.

Since e-reader data isn’t matching up with other clear measures of success, it’s logical to question its accuracy.

However, the e-reader data released to date has shown that the titles with the highest unit sales have actually had low completion rates

sales and critical reception, which includes literary awards

ength is one factor that Kobo has attributed to low completion rates. [7]

his is a powerful yet highly questionable statement because what can be viewed as ‘catering to the masses’ may help generate fads, but not classics.

buyers

completion rates of their nonfiction

often a lack of correlation between such data and other measures of a book’s success

Surely, there is an argument to be made there, but this assertion should not be accepted as fact — or at least not yet.

[1, 2, 3, 8]

Unlike in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, people today are being watched by numerous companies and agencies, not just one Big Brother.

This reversal on Amazon’s part sets a precedent,

A machine cannot read with proper pauses or intonation.

Macmillandictionary.com,

audio book rights

also claim

Why would Amazon undercut their own audio book sales, for which author are compensated.

They lauded it as a great victory for authors everywhere. But was it really? What did they actually achieve? As author John Scalzi noted: “Has it escaped the general notice of folks that the same company that is putting out the Kindle is also the same company that owns Audible.com? Yes, Amazon owns both, and I don’t really see the company trying to put one section of itself out of business with the other.”

even though no legal precedent was set, a recognizable precedent was set nonetheless.

reversed course to maintain good relationships with authors, not because of legal concerns.

Some may argue

There is also the question of TTS itself. “There shouldn’t be anything controversial about TTS: it’s been available on personal computers since the 1970s. It’s important to people who have impaired or no vision, but little used by anyone else. However, the Authors Guild argues that the audio rights for a book are different from the reading rights, even if the audio is provided by a software robot.”

““publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn’t given them—the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me.”

“Lawrence Lessig,

“a work based u

Amazon would have won.

the hassle and legal fees.

reached by phone late Friday

udio book rights.

Traditionally

prove a point

them

E-readers like Kindle should be allowed to have a read-aloud feature for their e-books in a text-to-speech (TTS) format.

equitable internet

Genius is perfectly positioned to delve into two-way linking and channelizing funds into conceiving new ways of accomplishing it.

What makes this prospect of two-way linking irresistible is that Genius can do this without needing the permission of either newspaper.

This is, however, still a one-way link. But, with the right backlink software, Genius will be notified that a user has linked to http://genius.com/www.latimes.com and can use bots to display the in-bound link to Seattle Times (http://genius.com/www.seattletimes.com) on LA Times (http://genius.com/www.latimes.com)

But how does this inform annotations?

Xanadu’s provision for two-way linking

In the ground-breaking Death Of The Author, literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote: “The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”

courtesy: www.kottke.org

closely compared side by side and closely annotated

Fonts and glitz

brief excursus into its fundaments is crucial to drawing lessons for online annotations.

Project Xanadu,

nascent internet community of the early 90s

vulnerable to deletion

inconspicuous and relatively decontextualized

without requiring that the publishers provide it themselves

In 2014, technocrats and open source crusaders from around the world gathered at an annual conference in California to ruminate over the possibilities of palliating an information-saturated internet with the use of online annotations. Conspicuous among the attendees were representatives from Genius, formerly Rap Genius, which has been provisioned with millions of dollars of VC funding since its inception in 2009. The thrust of the conference was the creation of a universal online annotation system that would not only critique and question the veracity of online content but also network it by hyperlinking and minimizing the degrees of separation between reams of webpages which might otherwise be insulated from each other.

the blend of subcompact and lean publishing can be monetized.

This blended concoction isn’t synonymous with free.

Perhaps they would have found more success if they looked at the weekly as a combination of lean publishing and subcompact publishing, and went more subcompact than they did.

It lived in the digital world and had covers and content unique to it. “

segment of readership wasn’t frequenting Newsstand

He continued, “We need to be where they are. We have the content, now we have to deliver it.”

By embracing the open web, Mod and Armstrong ensure that our blended concoction of lean pub and subcompact publishing is based on HTML 5 even if the product is destined for iOS and Android ecosystems.

e turnaround time afforded by the lightweight publishing tools Mod and Armstrong support.

Clayton Christensen’s work cited by Craig Mod,

For new publications in the digital world, taking all measures to reduce financial risk when advertising value and reader support remain low is an imperative.

But perhaps McSweeney’s is the smart publisher here: I would hazard a guess that the budget for Snow Fall—just one of the tens of thousands of pieces that the Times publishes annually—could financially fuel McSweeney’s several years over.

Compare subcompact with epic publishing, a term used by Jon Lax to describe everything that subcompact publishing isn’t: think McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and then think the New York Times’s Snow Fall piece

Financial Risk

Blending these two manifestos will give new digital indigenous publications a framework to reduce financial risk, build and leverage community, and reach readers across the open web.

no oil-and-water separation. No nasty kale gobs.

The common findings from all the researchers is that enhanced ebook have their benefits, and when used in moderation can be a great supplement to reading, but are no replacement for a young child’s print books.

adjustments need to be made specifically in regards to multimedia elements.

tudies have also been done on children older and further along in their reading ability. Research done by Luca Colombo and Monica Landoni found that in the age group of 7-12, enhanced ebooks provided a better reading experience than basic ebooks (Colombo et al. 135).

including mood setting music, interactive elements, and moving scenes.

Context and picture exist in print as well

Enhanced ebooks do not challenge the young reader as much as print versions do, and children who lack comprehension skills in reading will compensate with “context clues or picture supports” (Zucker et al. 52)

The two important strands of skills needed to develop literacy are “the ability to rapidly decode printed words, and the ability to understand and construct meaning from the language of a text” (Zucker et al. 50).

This is especially harmful at ages when children are first beginning to read.

New enhanced ebooks from the publisher

and is defined by a study on

students

With research against them, parents not entirely sold, and high costs associated with making these enhancements, publishers might want to refocus their enhancements into ebooks for children of an older age where they have been found more beneficial.

during an age

many researchers support basic ebooks

nd are harmful to the young child’s reading comprehension by setting the text aside and focusing their attention on moving images and interactive gamin

childrens

Even with parents not entirely sold on e-technology for their children, publishers have gone ahead and adapted the basic ebook even more creating “enhanced ebooks”.

Without any concrete research presented to them, parents feel this way mostly because they want their children to have the “same pleasant book-reading experience they remember from when they themselves were children”, and also because they want to preserve the sensory experience of flipping pages of paper (Zickuhr, Pew).

minor children

he book as an object has been taken apart and put back together in an electronic form as long as the technology to do so has been available. Books have appeared as floppy disks, CD-ROM’s, cassette audiobooks, as applications on tablet devices, e-readers, online and more. These changes trickle their way down the publishing stream and find themselves in the exciting and colourful world of children’s publishing.

To succeed, publishers will need to learn to value reader’s engagement on its own terms, rather than as a direct lead-in to sales. They will have to make sure their texts are easily shareable and clippable, and use the data they gather to inform marketing and production as well as acquisitions.

their own impact as a press is measureable too

compensate for the fact that far fewer trade books are accessible online for free or through subscription services as compared to academic books and articles.

This data should include reader engagement with purchased books (such as time spent reading and completion rate);

However, with trusted, recognized measures of their impact, they could turn their book into a better job, a speaking engagement, or a more profitable contract, just as an academic leverages high metrics into tenure, promotion, or increased funding.

Down in the tail, where distribution and production costs are low (thanks to the digital technologies), business considerations are often secondary. Instead, people create for a variety of other reasons — expression, fun, experimentation, and so on. The reason one might call it an economy at all is that there is a coin of the realm that can be every bit as motivating as money: reputation. Measured by the amount of attention a product attracts, reputation can be converted into other things of value: tenure, audiences, and lucrative offers of all sorts.

“The Reputation Economy: “

they filter existing published content to help it get into the hands of the right readers

they fill

These concerns are valid, and I am not suggesting that impact metrics should be the only consideration editors use to drive decisions. The purpose of these measures, as with academic altmetrics, is not solely to inform acquisitions.

Trade publishers could develop similar factors for text novelty, genre, and subject, and test them accordingly, to help them assess incoming manuscripts

interesting

“In recommendation networks, the more times a text is recommended ‘by’ another text, the higher its prestige value. In review networks, where the links (based on co-occurrences) have no directionality, it is even simpler: nodes with the most links are the most prestigious,”

If many people look up, in order, an obscure word used in Chapter 1, a song reference in Chapter 2, and a movie referenced in Chapter 3, they are engaging with the text across media in a way that is valuable to the publisher.

Publishers could also track fan fiction online

There have been a few attempts to measure social media sentiment towards academic articles.19 Trade publishers may wish to expand upon these attempts and track sentiment across social media, since readers will be unlikely to pick up a book that has received overwhelmingly negative reviews.

To compete

they favour mass-market bestsellers

acting on the assumption that the public was just like them.

Fiction publishers invest in their authors in much the same way universities invest in academics

And it works

altmetrics, or article-level metrics

This paper will examine these metrics, then explore the challenges and opportunities for trade publishers in building similar rankings for themselves.

Gone are the days of red ink-stained editors straining their eyes over a slush pile, a pack of Marlboros and a glass of cheap scotch their only company in the dim, slatted light of their tiny office. Today, editorial acquisitions are increasingly driven by sales data.

it needs a Rocky moment, where after getting beat down, it picks itself off the mat and comes back with a vengeance. But unlike Rocky II to Rocky VII,

The good news is that ebooks within the subscription platform don’t carry a direct price, and, in the publishers’ eyes at least, shouldn’t devalue the print price like selling an ebook version for .99 cents does.

70% of that goes to publishers

100,000,000/month in ebook revenue alone

mainly because of its perceived value.

Can you imagine a site that had just about any book you could want on it? Including newly published works? For only a few dollars a month? One could only imagine how quickly, and how vast that network would grow.

relinquish their front lists (new books). Our hero will have to change that.

Secondly, it needs to provide a community not only for subscribers, but for publishers as well.

greater perceived value and that outdoes its competition at all levels to ensure that network

Without a network