text:
- monthly subscription or
- one time payment
- cancelable any time
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
O'Reilly GM and publisher Joe Wikert (@jwikert) wrote recently about how he can't shake his ereader. I read his story with interest, as I can't seem to justify buying one. I was gifted a second-generation Kindle a while back, and it lived down to all my low expectations. The limitations were primarily the clumsy navigation and single-purpose functionality. I loaned it to a friend; she fell in love, so my Kindle found a new home.
At this point, I do all my ereading on my iPad 2: books, textbooks, magazines, news, short form, long form ... all of it. I will admit, I found the new Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight that Wikert acquired somewhat tempting. The technology is much improved over the second generation Kindle, and though I haven't yet played with one in the store, I bet the execution is much more enjoyable. Still, my original hang-ups prevail.
First, I don't want to be locked in to one retailer. On my iPad, I have apps that allow me to read books bought from anywhere I choose. I can buy books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other smaller retailers, and they will all work on my iPad. True, this spreads my library around in a less-than-ideal organization, but the ability to buy books from anywhere is more important to me.
Also, I'm not so sure ebooks and ereaders will have a place down the road, making the value proposition of the investment that much less appealing. Much like the music journey from records to MP3s, digital reading technology is advancing, and perhaps at a much faster pace than its music counterpart. Jani Patokallio, publishing platform architect at Lonely Planet, recently predicted the obsolescence of ebooks and ereaders within five years, suggesting the web and HTML5 will become the global format for content delivery and consumption. And publications such as the Financial Times and MIT's Technology Review already are dropping their iOS and Android apps in favor of the web and HTML5.
I doubt my iPad will become obsolete any time soon. I look forward to the day books are URLs (or something similar) and we can read them anywhere on any device — and that day may not be too far off. I think I'm so attached to the iPad experience because it simulates this freedom to the best of its ability.
Ereader shortcomings also are likely to present a rich content hindrance, even before a shift to a web/HTML5 format gets underway. In a separate blog post, Wikert talked about a baseball book that missed its opportunity by not curating video links. He wrote: "The video links I'm talking about would have been useless on either device [his Kindle or Nook], but if they were integrated with the ebook I would have gladly read it with the Kindle app on my tablet." As publishers start realizing content opportunities afforded by digital, I think my iPad will serve me better than a single-purpose ereader.
Another hang-up I have, and this is likely to do with my general aversion to change, is the form factor. Most ereaders are somewhere around mass-market-paperback size, and the Nook Simple Touch and Simple Touch with GlowLight are nearly square. I prefer hardcover or trade paperback size — about the size and shape of my iPad. I might be able to get past this particular issue, but given the others I've mentioned, I just can't justify trying.
I will have to surrender to Wikert on the battery life and weight points — the one thing I really liked about the Kindle was its feather-light weight and the fact that during its short stay with me, I never had to charge the battery. I expect the surrender to be temporary, however. I have faith in our engineering friends — two years ago, a research team at MIT was using carbon nanotubes to improve the battery-power-to-weight ratio ... I can't imagine it will be too much longer before life catches up to research. In the meantime, I expect to remain happily connected at the hip to my iPad.
Before we dip into the news that caught my eye this week, here's a thought-provoking excerpt from a new interview with Clay Shirky over at the Findings.com blog:
"Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word 'publishing' means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says 'publish,' and when you press it, it's done ... Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry." (Read the entire interview here.)
Now, here are a few stories that got my attention in the publishing space this week.
Ken Doctor over at Nieman Lab took a look at Next Issue, a newly launched Netflix-like magazine platform. He describes the venture:
"It offers single-priced, all-you-can-eat access to top-shelf magazines, including Time Inc's People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time; Conde Nast's Vanity Fair, Allure, and Conde Nast Traveler; Hearst's Esquire and Popular Mechanics; and Meredith's Better Homes and Gardens and Fitness. Thirty-two magazines in total, at launch."
Though there is some comparison to be found between magazine and newspaper revenue losses in the digital era, as both so far have failed to fully embrace the web for profit, this platform appears to be disruptive in a big-picture fashion. As Doctor points out in the post, the big difference here with newspapers — and I might add book publishing houses — is the five big magazine companies that together own Next Issue (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.) pooled their efforts to create the platform.
Doctor describes the pricing tiers and offers a nice analysis of how this endeavor might play out — it's well worth the read.
Also in magazine-related news, Zite is expanding its offerings, with the blessing and support of eight publishers (nine if you include its parent company CNN), with its new Publisher Program.
Tom Krazit at GigaOm took a look at the program and explains that though no money is changing hands, publishers will be allowed to place house ads at the bottoms of their sections linking readers back to their websites or apps. And though Zite initially had issues with publishers, the tension is waning. Krazit reports:
"... publishers are starting to realize that they can attract new readers through apps like Zite and build their brands, [said Mark Johnson, CEO of Zite] ... he said that content publishers have the same discoverability problem that small mobile developers have to confront, and that apps like Zite can drive traffic to those publishers that they wouldn't otherwise enjoy."
Google jostled indie booksellers again this week with an announcement that it will discontinue its ebook reseller program come January 2013. Scott Dougall, Google's director of product management for digital publishing, explains the situation in a blog post:
With the launch of Google eBooks in 2010, we introduced a multifaceted approach to selling ebooks: online, on devices, through affiliates and through resellers. One part of that effort — the reseller program — has not gained the traction that we hoped it would, so we have made the difficult decision to discontinue it by the end of January next year.
It's important to note that the separate affiliate program will not be affected. Jeannie Hornung, a spokesperson for Google, told Good E-Reader: "... booksellers will still be highlighted in the 'Buy this book' section of Google Book search, supported with our affiliate program and have access to free Books APIs."
Indies may not be left selling solo, however. American Booksellers Association (ABA) president Oren J. Teicher told The Next Web:
"... we have every confidence that, long before Google's reseller program is discontinued, ABA will be able to offer IndieCommerce users a new alternative e-book product, or choice of products, that will not only replace Google eBooks as it currently works on IndieCommerce sites, but that will be in many ways a better product."
The original letter the ABA sent to booksellers can be found here, and (hat tip to ShelfAwareness) the ABA is offering an FAQ about the situation.
The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a new study report on ereading this week. The report findings show a marked increase in the number of people ereading:
"... some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone."
Findings also show that by February 2012, 21% of adults in the U.S. had read an ebook in the past year — up from 17% in mid-December 2011.
And those numbers are likely to continue to rise in a steep incline. A post on the study over at Reuters notes that "Forrester, a consultancy, has forecast that nearly a quarter of Americans will own an e-book reader by 2016." The post notes Amazon's marketshare as well: "Online retailer Amazon.com Inc has about 65 percent of the e-book market, according to Cowen & Co estimates."
The Pew study, which was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, generally focused on reading behavior, both print and digital. And the news for publishers looks very positive on one front: According to the study, readers — especially ereaders — prefer to buy books:
And some stats for publishers afraid of losing sales via library card holders: 14% of readers reportedly borrowed the last book they read from a library — however, 12% of those who purchased their last read started their search at the library. You can find a nice selection of the study's library statistic highlights at INFOdocket.
One of the more surprising areas of the study looks at the devices on which people are reading. I found the percentages for computers and, in the U.S., for cell phones notable:
You can view the report in full here. Lee Rainie, the head of the Pew Internet Project, also will be the featured guest on today's Follow the Reader discussion on Twitter at 4 p.m. EST. You can join in at #followreader.
Here's a look at the top stories published across O'Reilly sites this week.
Why StreetEasy rolled its own maps
Google's decision to start charging for its Maps API is leading some companies to mull other options. StreetEasy's Sebastian Delmont explains why and how his team made a change.
What is Dart?
Dart is a new structured web programming platform designed to enable complex, high-performance apps for the modern web. Kathy Walrath and Seth Ladd, members of Google's developer relations team, explain Dart's purpose and its applications.
My Paleo Media Diet
Jim Stogdill is tired of running on the info treadmill, so he's changing his media habits. His new approach: "Where I can, adapt to my surroundings; where I can't, adapt my surroundings to me."
The unreasonable necessity of subject experts
We can't forget that data is ultimately about insight, and insight is inextricably tied to the stories we build from the data. Subject experts are the ones who find the stories data wants to tell.
Direct sales uncover hidden trends for publishers
A recent O'Reilly customer survey revealed unusual results (e.g. laptops/desktops remain popular ereading devices). These sorts of insights are made possible by O'Reilly's direct sales channel.
Where Conference 2012 is where the people working on and using location technologies explore emerging trends in software development, tools, business strategies and marketing. Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my eye this week.
Mathew Ingram at GigaOm took a look at the ebook landscape this week and welcomed everyone to "the platform-dependent bookstore of the future." Ingram reviewed a situation that occurred between author Seth Godin and Apple regarding hyperlinks in his new book, "Stop Stealing Dreams," that linked to books sold at Amazon (Godin also has a blog post about the situation here). Ingram argued:
"[Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble] have far more control over whose ebooks see the light of day because they also own the major ereading platforms, and they are making decisions based not on what they think consumers want to read but on their own competitive interests."
Ingram also pointed out that blame for the oligopoly marketplace in the U.S. doesn't fall solely on the chain store giants:
Publishers are partly to blame for the walled-garden status of the market as well, since they handed Amazon and Apple the stick of digital-rights management, which the two companies are now using to beat them.
Ingram's post is a must-read and a clear warning of what the future will hold if something doesn't change: "Welcome to the mutually incompatible, silo-based, platform-dependent and user-unfriendly future of books."
Another publisher broke up with Amazon this week in response to the IPG-Amazon situation. A post at Publishers Weekly reported that "Educational Development Corporation (EDC), publisher of Usborne and Kane Miller books in the U.S., has announced that "the company will no longer sell any of its books on Amazon or to any entities that resell to Amazon."
Randall White, president of EDC, stated in the report that the decision was based on Amazon's moves to "gain control of publishing and other industries by making it impossible for other retailers to compete effectively."
Last week, author Jim Hanas made a stand against Amazon as well, removing the Amazon "buy" button from the website for his book "Why They Cried." This week, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America also removed the Amazon links on its website.
But, in the end, are moves from mid-level publishers and distribution houses and individual authors going to dent Amazon's hefty armor (read: boat loads of cash and rapidly expanding market share)? Probably not much. But as I (and others) have written before, the Big Six have an ace in the hole: DRM. In a post at Dear Author, Jane Litte touched on the DRM solution and highlighted the toll this situation is taking on the consumer:
"IPG is asking readers to make a moral decision with their wallets without providing a plausible alternative. Why not go DRM free and offer Mobi books to Kindle owners? This really strikes at the heart of Amazon ... Amazon isn't making money off device sales ... We [consumers] recognize that Amazon as the exclusive vendor of books would be bad for us, but what are publishers doing about it? Why is it the reader, the only party who does not make money in this equation, have to be the one to take the financial hit in the fight against Amazon? Why aren't publishers making it easier for readers to move away from Amazon? Why aren't they trying to appeal to our wallets instead of our morality?"
In a post at Publishers Weekly, Peter Brantley noted the lack of customer service amongst the large publishers and how the subsequent alienation of readers is actually driving publishing customers to Amazon:
"... through the combination of usurious pricing strategies and their undeclared war on libraries, the largest publishers have unerringly drawn their customers — readers with whom they've never cared to have a direct relationship — closer into the arms of the retailer whose market power and influence they most fear — Amazon. So much for a strategy of self-interest ... And, because publishers are not working in alignment with my interests, their marketplace goals have moved into conflict with mine."
Javier Celaya proposed a solution over at Publishing Perspectives: Publishers should band together and create a joint platform. He compared the publishing industry's situation with Amazon to the situation the aerospace industry had with Boeing: "The aeronautical industry, which was once dominated by Boeing, managed to develop the Airbus consortium. The publishing industry can also aspire to create its own 'cultural Airbus'."
Celaya offers several key factors for publishers and international online retailers to consider. His post is well worth the read.
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) released the first installment in Volume Three of the ongoing "Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading" survey this week. According to the report release, digital may be at the tipping point with readers, particularly among "power buyers," or consumers who "acquire ebooks at least weekly" and who function as "predictors of where the market is moving."
The release noted::
"... more than half of ebook readers increased their use of apps to purchase books and more than one-third increased their use of general retail websites such as Amazon.com. The gains for these digital vendors come at the expense of brick and mortar bookstores, even independents. More than a third of ebook buyers decreased their spending at national chains and 29% said they are buying less from their local indie.
This installment of the study also showed that though ereading devices remain dominant, "multi-function tablet devices and smartphones are gaining in popularity" — 17% (compared to 13% in November) said they most often used tablets for reading ebooks.
For more on this BISG study, check out the presentation slides and transcript from the "Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading" session at TOC 2012.
Top Photo: Silo by eirikref, on Flickr
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my eye this week.
Two weeks ago, Amazon made a move that might have landed it access to B&N brick-and-mortar stores. Last week, B&N slammed its brick-and-mortar doors in Amazon's face. This week, B&N was joined by Canada's Indigo Books and Music and Books-a-Million, and also (in effect) by the American Book Association (ABA) — in what the Guardian dubbed the "cold war between North American booksellers and Amazon."
In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Janet Eger, vice president at Indigo, explained the company's position: "In our view Amazon's actions are not in the long-term interests of the reading public or the publishing and book retailing industry, globally."
The ABA denied the initial reports by Publisher's Weekly (which has since edited its original post) that it joined the "boycott," but it did remove Amazon titles from its IndieCommerce database this week and made an overall change in its policies. As PW reported:
"Not only has IndieCommerce decided not to list these titles, but it has created a new policy that states 'only publishers' titles that are made available to retailers for sale in all available formats will be included in the IndieCommerce inventory database'."
Individual stores, however, can opt to add Amazon books as custom products to their own websites if they so choose.
Amazon didn't appear to be phased by the news. In fact, the company appears to be focused elsewhere: Rumors of Amazon's plans to open its own brick-and-mortar store heated up this week when GoodEReader reported on a proposed location in Seattle.
Battle techniques for the Big Six to use in this cold war against Amazon were proposed this week as well. Paul Biba at TeleRead suggested that the Big Six have greater control and influence than they realize — they just need to wield it:
"There is no reason why the Big Six can't offer exclusive deals to Kobo and B&N. Give them a three-month exclusive selling period for expected ebook best-sellers and do away with the agency pricing during that period. After three months, make the ebooks available to everyone and reinstate agency pricing. This would boost competition and play against Amazon's exclusivity program."
The problem with this strategy is the same problem that would arise if publishers cut out Amazon altogether — consumers would be alienated and sales would suffer (let's face it, Amazon's got the biggest piece of the market share pie at this point).
Publishers do, however, have an ace in the hole — they just need the courage to play it. O'Reilly publisher and general manager Joe Wikert pointed this out in very clear terms in a post at Publishers Weekly:
"In a terrific blog post entitled "Cutting Their Own Throats," author Charlie Stross argues that publishers' fear has enabled a big ebook player like Amazon to further reinforce its market position, often at the expense of publishers and authors — an unintended consequence of DRM. Given all these issues, why not eliminate DRM, since even the music industry has seen the light and moved on from DRM."
Alan Jacobs at the Atlantic made a couple of thought-provoking observations about reading this week. In one post, he compared Nick Carr's affinity for the "fixities of the printed book" and Kevin Kelly's for the "fluidities of the ebook." He argued that both Carr and Kelly's observations, though they make good points, are too narrowly focused on the book as an object, rather than as "a tool for use." Jacobs shared a story about losing his Kindle, but not losing any of his content and annotations as a consequence, and observed:
"So what we have here is best described not as fixity or fluidity, but as transferability — a reassuring kind of consistency across platforms and formats. You might say that this is fixity enabled by fluidity: the reproducibility of pixels combined with the stability of Amazon's enormous database amount to insurance against the fragility of any particular designed object. (And by downloading my books and annotations to two or three 'designed objects' I also insure myself against the failure of Amazon's databases.)"
In another post, Jacobs took a look at the cognitive experience of reading and suggested that retention is improved by increased "cognitive friction" — the effort required to read, annotate, highlight and otherwise process digital content. Both posts (here and here) are well worth the read.
Photo (top): NO ENTRY by markhillary, on Flickr
Photo (bottom): battle 002 by Paul J Everett, on Flickr
Here are a few of the stories that caught my attention this week in the publishing space.
Last week, Amazon teamed up with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to print and distribute the Amazon Publishing East Coast's adult titles under a new imprint, New Harvest. Some speculated the move might get Amazon through the brick-and-mortar doors of B&N. This week, B&N made it clear that not only would HMH's New Harvest imprint not make it in the door, but that no Amazon Publishing title would. In a post for the New York Times, Julie Bosman quoted from a statement made by Jaime Carey, B&N's chief merchandising officer:
"Our decision is based on Amazon's continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain e-books to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It's clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest."
O'Reilly's general manager and publisher Joe Wikert called on B&N this week to disrupt the industry — maybe this is its first move. Bosman also took a look at B&N's position in the industry and its importance to the publishing ecosystem, especially in the face of a competitor like Amazon. Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic mulled the prospects of Amazon killing publishing and argued: "In a financial arms race, publishers simply can't beat Amazon's arsenal."
Amazon had issues with a social networking partner this week as well. As of Monday, Goodreads no longer displayed book data from the Amazon Product Advertising API, opting instead to move its data partnership to the Ingram Book Company. A Goodread's representative told Laura Hazard Owen that "the [API license agreement] terms now required by Amazon have become so restrictive that it makes better business sense to work with other data sources." Owen outlined some of the specifics on the restrictions:
"Amazon requires sites that use its API to link that content back to the Amazon site exclusively — so a book page on Goodreads would have to link only to its product page on Amazon and not to any other source or retailer ... Amazon also does not allow any content from its API to be used on mobile sites and apps."
Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb took a deeper look into the situation — and explained why Goodreads will survive its breakup with Amazon.
The news caused some readers to worry about their cultivated Goodreads bookshelves. GalleyCat detailed potential data issues and offered up a Goodreads link that allows users to check on the state of their shelves to see if any tidying up is necessary.
There's no shortage of things slated to be destroying society, and this week, author Jonathan Franzen added ebooks to the list. The Telegraph quoted Franzen speaking at a book festival in Cartagena, Colombia:
"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that."
Chenda Ngak at CBS's techt@lk took offense at Franzen's remarks, stating: "Even if I agree with him, as a book lover, his statements are too condescending to take seriously." Jonathan Segura at NPR chimed in as well, calling Franzen's comments "absurd" and pleading that we "get past the e-books versus print books thing." Segura's final comment pretty much summed up the overarching sentiment:
"We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading."
Photo (top): Kiftsgate Court, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire - No Entry - sign by ell brown, on Flickr
Photo (bottom): Broken Kindle by kodomut, on Flickr
The recently released Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading study by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) showed impressive growth in ereading. From October 2010 to August 2011, the ebook market share more than tripled. Also notable, readers are committing to the technology, with almost 50% of ereading consumers saying they would wait up to three months to read a new ebook from a favorite author rather than reading the same book immediately in print.
In the following interview, BISG's deputy executive director Angela Bole reviews some of the study's data and addresses growing trends in ereading.
Bole will further examine the study's results — including data from the new third volume — at the "Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading" session at the upcoming Tools of Change for Publishing conference.
Angela Bole: When the first survey in volume two of BISG's "Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading" was fielded in October 2010, the market share for ebooks was less than 5%. In the latest fielding, conducted in August 2011, the market share was almost 16%. Clearly, readers are embracing ereading. The greatest interest today seems to lie in narrative fiction and nonfiction, with interest in more interactive nonfiction and education taking longer to develop.
Angela Bole: In the October 2010 and January 2011 survey fieldings, there were two distinct categories of ereaders — tablets like the iPad and dedicated devices like the Kindle — with a wide functionality difference between them. During the May 2011 and August 2011 fieldings, the NOOK Color and many new Android-based tablets were released, and distinctions between device categories began to blur. Even so, dedicated ereaders remain the favorite ebook reading device for book lovers, especially for reading fiction and narrative nonfiction. The Kindle, in particular, remains strong.
A graph illustrating responses to the study question, "What device do you now use most frequently to read e-books?"
Angela Bole: This depends to a degree on whether you're a "tablet person" or a "dedicated ereader person." Data from the Consumer Attitudes survey shows that the Kindle and NOOK are the preferred devices of survey respondents in all fiction categories, while tablets like the iPad hold the edge in nonfiction categories. In these reports, the data have suggested that dedicated ereaders may be better optimized for narrative reading, while the richer media capabilities of tablets may be more appropriate for nonfiction, education, and scientific and professional titles.
A graph illustrating responses to the study question, "What genre(s) do you like to read, overall (in any format)?"
Angela Bole: Until August 2011, our data showed that the computer (desktop or laptop) was the prevailing purchasing platform. Today, however, more and more people are purchasing directly on their dedicated ereaders — 49% of respondents to the August 2011 fielding, up from 36% in May 2011.
Angela Bole: Consumers who migrate to digital are spending less on physical hardcover and paperback books. The research supports this out quite clearly. That said, respondents to the survey actually report increasing their overall dollar spending as they make the transition to ebooks. Almost 70% of the respondents to the August 2011 fielding reported increasing their ebook expenditures, compared with 49% in the October 2010 fielding. Respondents reported increased spending on books in all formats to a greater degree than they reported decreased spending. Assuming the publishing industry can develop the right business models, this is good news.
This interview was edited and condensed.
This post is part of the TOC podcast series, which we'll be featuring here on Radar in the coming months. You can also subscribe to the free TOC podcast through iTunes.
Book reading has always been considered a solitary activity, but maybe that's just because of the limitations of print. Social reading platforms are sprouting up all around us, and mobNotate is one of the more interesting ones. This TOC podcast features insight from mobNotate's founder, Ricky Wong (@kinwong), as well as their technical advisor, Sean Gerrish. They talk about where they are with the mobNotate platform, why social is an important part of tomorrow's reading experience and what it will look like.
(Listen to this interview via the embedded player or download the MP3 file.)
Key points from the full interview include :
You can listen to the entire interview here.
Many of publishing's big developments from 2011 will continue to shape the industry in 2012. So with that in mind, here's a look at five of the most important lessons from last 12 months.
If it wasn't apparent before, Amazon's publishing intentions became plainly obvious this year. The wave started out small, with a host of expanding self-publishing tools for authors, but it grew to tsunami proportions as Amazon launched imprint after imprint, from romance to science fiction. Amazon also hired industry heavy-hitter Larry Kirshbaum, who "is charged with building something that will look like a general trade publisher.'"
Some of Amazon's publishing projects.
Amazon further extended its reach into publishing when it launched the Kindle Owner's Lending Library. The ebook lending waters already were murky and contentious for publishers — HarperCollins instigated a memorable dustup, as did Penguin — but Amazon's move into the space caused a full-fledged uproar among publishers as well as authors, and may have damaged the publisher-library relationship further.
O'Reilly's Joe Wikert highlighted one of the main problems from the publisher perspective:
As Amazon stated in its press release, "For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with publishers to include titles for a fixed fee." So no matter how popular (or unpopular) the publisher's titles are, they get one flat fee for participation in the library. I strongly believe this type of program needs to compensate publishers and authors on a usage level, not a flat fee. The more a title is borrowed, the higher the fee to the publisher and author. Period.
And Amazon may be encroaching on feature magazines like the Atlantic and the New Yorker as well. In a sign of possible things to come, freelance journalist Marc Herman took his long-form story, "The Shores of Tripoli," and expanded it into a $1.99 Kindle Single. According to his blog, he has plans to expand on the model, which would further sideline traditional publishing avenues.
Authors have figured out they don't need publishers to publish books. The self-publishing book market saw quite a boom this year as the publishing format started becoming more mainstream and the services offered by self-publishing companies became more comprehensive — providing authors with platforms, sales, marketing, editing, etc.
Amazon has a role in this boom as well. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Amazon.com Inc. fueled the growth [in self-publishing] by offering self-published writers as much as 70% of revenue on digital books, depending on the retail price. By comparison, traditional publishers typically pay their authors 25% of net digital sales and even less on print books."
Another trend emerged this year to further sideline the publisher's role: the rise of the agent-publisher. This controversial and contentious business model allows agents to step in to provide expanded publishing services to authors. In an interview, Booksquare's Kassia Krozser explained that the new agent-publisher role emerged because of failings on the part of traditional publishers: "Traditional publishers need to not only rethink how they sell their value to authors and agents, but they also need to rethink the economic structure of their deals." Krozser also expressed concerns that the agent-publisher role carries a conflict of interest — see her interview here.
There good news is that people are still reading and they're embracing the digital transformation. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) released a report in November that showed that readers are solidly committing to digital books. A couple highlights from the report:
The number of devices sold is telling as well. A Pew report found that "ereader ownership growth in the U.S. doubled in six months, from 6% to 12% of adults owning an ebook reader."
Though the new Kindle Fire is selling at a loss, Amazon reported that it is selling Kindles at a clip of "well over one million Kindle devices per week" — at least for the three weeks following Black Friday. Amazon hasn't disclosed the total number of devices it has sold, but one analyst estimates the sales to be 8% of total revenues in 2011 and predicts that amount will rise to 9.9% in 2012. So ... a lot of Kindles. Combine those numbers (vague as they might be) with the 40 million iPads sold, and the conclusion is clear: ereading is now mainstream.
HTML5 entered the publishing space in a big way this year — some calling it the "future of digital publishing." From storage to multimedia to content behavior (think shaking the iPhone or automatically sizing for different screen sizes) to geolocation to a host of other interactive features, HTML5 has squared itself up to become an important player in the industry. Amazon (mostly) embraced it in its Kindle Format 8, and HTML5 is supported in EPUB3.
HTML5 is platform agnostic and may even be able to save — or make — publishers money. In an interview early in the year, Google's Marcin Wichary explained:
It's very important to recognize that HTML5 fits all the devices you can think of, from the iPhone in your pocket to Google TV to the tablets to small screens and big screens. It's very easy to take the content you already have and through the "magic" of HTML5, refine it so it works very well within a given context. You don't have to do your work over and over again. Of course, all of these different means come with different monetization opportunities, like ads on the web or on mobile devices.
You can view Wichary's full interview below.
It turns out DRM does more than provide publishers with a false sense of security — locking the content of books also locks those books into a platform (ahem, Kindle). This point was highlighted by author Charlie Stross in a November blog post in which he argued that DRM had become a strategic tool for Amazon:
... the big six's pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you're naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms that can't read those locked Kindle ebooks — and even more reluctant to buy ebooks from rival stores that use incompatible DRM ... If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position.
So, to recap, we've learned that DRM doesn't stop anyone from pirating, nor does it come with the necessary data to support its impact. But it does give publishers one thing: a longer length of rope with which to hang themselves.
Since 2009, author and digital book producer Peter Meyers (@petermeyers) has been researching and documenting the digital publishing revolution in his project "Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience." His investigation into digital books has uncovered a host of tools and use cases. The project has also shown that when it comes to digital book enhancements, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
A free preview edition of Meyers' project is now available — in ebook format, of course — and he'll discuss "Breaking the Page" in depth at his TOC New York 2012 session, "Breaking The Page: Content Design For An Infinite Canvas."
In the following interview, Meyers talks about how and why the project got started and what's surprised him thus far. He also reveals the unfortunate connection between today's enhanced ebooks and the font-filled newsletters of the mid-1980s.
Peter Meyers: I was an early adopter of everything that was happening around the world of the Kindle and ebooks. It struck me that it was still the very beginning of the digital publishing revolution, and all that was really happening in the world of Kindle was that publishers were taking these digital snapshots of print books and stuffing them onto the Kindle. As much as I love my Kindle and I love reading Kindle books on platforms like the iPhone, I felt like we weren't yet seeing authors and publishers deliver new kinds of reading experiences.
So, back in 2009 or so when it became clear that the industry overall was undergoing these significant changes and when it also became clear that some kind of tablet device was on the horizon from Apple, I felt that we were on the cusp of a sea change. Publishers and authors and readers alike weren't yet getting their heads around how books were going to change, and I wanted to take a systematic look at what these new kinds of books were going to look like. How are they going to change the things that authors create? How are they going to change the reading experience? What parts of the reading experience can and should stay the same? And I wanted to do so in a way that put the needs of the reader up front. "Breaking the Page," for me, was a way of taking a considered look at all of the innovation that was going on but trying to think through some of the best practices.
Peter Meyers: I'm not sure that I would say plain EPUB ebooks are missing the point. In fact, the sales figures show they're doing an incredibly good job of satisfying maybe everyone except for the bean counters at the big publishing firms, who, at this point, are understandably afraid of how things are looking for the future. But from a reader's perspective, I think traditional plain-vanilla ebooks are doing a great job — you get mystery readers and romance readers and serious literary fans, and they just can't get enough and they're buying more books. If I'm any sort of measure to judge by, I'm buying many more books on all my digital devices.
I think where things were less successful was in that first wave of enhancements, where the entire industry kind of decided collectively, "Hey, we need enhancements. We need enhanced ebooks." And I will raise my hand and say, "Guilty." I was complicit, and I participated in a number of enhancement projects.
The collective reaction on the part of readers was pretty much a big giant yawn of disinterest. Publishers spent a fair amount of money experimenting on that front. Now they're starting to conclude that the time and resources required to create these enhanced books are probably not worth the effort. In some cases, enhancements are a quick way to turn off people who are interested in reading books in the first place.
Peter Meyers: I certainly see a lot of experimenting happening out there. At the risk of sounding like a total company shill, I will say that O'Reilly does an admirable job in terms of not thinking of itself as a company that is in the business of selling print books, but staying true to its motto of changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. There are places in which a company, be it O'Reilly or any other publisher, is so centered on books as the unit of delivery that it's hard to respond to a disruption like StackOverflow, for example, where people pose and field questions having to do with technical challenges. StackOverflow is a great and constant reminder that the competitive threats to publishers often don't come from other publishers, but from different approaches.
In the world of textbook publishing, there's a firm called Inkling that specializes in textbooks for the iPad. A lot of what Inkling has done has been successful because rather than taking a PDF replica of a traditional print textbook and cramming it onto the iPad, Inkling has "XML-ified" everything — it's ditched, more or less, the print page. Inkling has a nice little trick in there for teachers who have classrooms that are split between students who have the print version and those who have the iPad version, and the company has really rethought how to design content and reading experiences for the iPad.
Inkling integrates a music textbook and the scores that go along with it. Students can listen to what the music sounds like and follow along as the music is progressing.
Peter Meyers: It's funny. On the one hand, the list is pretty easy — it goes something like: Objective-C, HTML5, XML, and anything that will help your development team use those tools in conjunction with an author to create compelling stories or informative teaching material. But on the other hand, this has nothing at all to do with tools. And as crazy as this might sound, I think market research should be part of everyone's toolkit. The reason I say market research is because in this digital publishing world, a lot of times what publishers and authors must do is think through the consumer's need for their products.
For example, if you're a publisher and you've got an amazing coffee table book about great travel destinations for coffee lovers, the market research question might be, "Does that print book do the best job of satisfying people's need to learn about coffee-centric vacations, or will an app do a better job?" In many cases, the answer is going to be, "Print actually does an amazing job when it comes to coffee table books that have to do with travel." So, researching the market before we embark on these digital publishing initiatives is a way of determining where a product fits into the landscape.
Peter Meyers: The biggest surprise was when I got started, roughly around the time of the arrival of the iPad. I had this hypothesis that storytelling and narrative nonfiction were going to be changed significantly as we entered the world of touchscreen publishing. I've more or less come 180-degrees around on that and come to the conclusion that the bound codex, be it a digital collection of pages or a printed collection of pages, is actually the perfect form for telling a story of about 100,000 words — and it probably just needs words, especially in the hands of the right author.
As so often happens when new technologies arrive on the scene, the new technologies don't eliminate the old technologies. Rather, they add to the kinds of stories that can be told. My revelation was that plain prose stories didn't go away and probably won't go away. They certainly will occupy a smaller portion of most people's media consumption in the years and the decades ahead, but they do a wonderful job in telling a 100,000-word love story or biography or what have you.
The other thing I have found extremely surprising and kind of eye-opening is the way that books, in an age and a time of information overload, provide a source of refuge for people. At the risk of getting too touchy-feely, we're assaulted by so many micro bits of content from status updates and Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds that books of the 200- to 400-page variety give people a reason to focus and to follow a story. The books actually acquire an even greater value in a digital world because they give people continuity and a thread to follow while the rest of their days are fractured by so many different kinds of information sources.
Peter Meyers: I do spend time thinking about that — ten years from now, is it going to be Steve Jobs' youngest daughter taking over Apple and announcing the iHolograph while graciously ushering out Tim Cook? Who knows, that may be a possibility. What I am a little bit more confident about predicting is that the tools authors and publishers will have at their disposal will be a lot better and a lot easier to use. I really think that we're at a point in time that's analogous to web publishing in the mid-'90s, where most of the good stuff that you could do required hand coding and a certain amount of expertise.
Just looking at the companies I'm following in the world of authoring software and authoring solutions, there's so much activity on that front that's targeted at designing tools that let creative people tell their stories without having to master Objective-C or JavaScript. It's uncommon, I think, to find people who have creative dispositions who are also skilled in these kinds of programming-style tools.
The other thing I see happening in the next decade is more authors emerging who are multi-mode threats. My favorite example these days is David Pogue. He's a great speaker, he's a great writer, and he's also very nimble in the world of putting together fun and entertaining iMovie productions. As the next generation of authors grows up — hopefully somewhat capable in the world of writing — they'll also be adept in other media forums, like audio and video. [Disclosure: David Pogue is the creator of the Missing Manual series.]
Also, the urge to binge on multimedia will subside. It'll be less of a thrill to put every single thing that you can do as an author into your latest production. It's similar to how we all learned in the mid-1980s that putting 28 different fonts in the church newsletter just made it look awful. The instinct to put video and audio in an ebook — and, yeah, we can have a bird fly down as the cover opens — it's just too much. As authors get more skilled with these tools, they'll develop a restraint and a respect for the audience. Authors will know that not everything needs to be included.
This interview was edited and condensed.
Here are a few stories that caught my eye in the publishing space this week.
In a bizarre turn of events, Jim Romenesko, the renowned blogger at Poynter who was on the brink of retirement, quit his post after Poynter ran a story about attribution inconsistencies in his writing — 12 years into his blog.
The Poynter post states:
Though information sources have always been displayed prominently in Jim's posts and are always linked at least once (often multiple times), too many of those posts also included the original author's verbatim language without containing his or her words in quotation marks, as they should have.
Calling Romenesko out raised eyebrows and ire. No one ever thought Romenesko was trying to take credit for others' work, but then again, some argue that aggregation should be held to journalistic standards. This is a much larger question than it may appear on the surface. Felix Salmon over at Reuters has a nice analysis on the issue and points out, "[Poynter's Julie] Moos is using the standards of original journalism, here, to judge a blogger who was never about original journalism." (He's referring to Moos' original post about the offending attribution errors and Poynter's guidelines.)
So, does aggregation require a new set of rules and standards, or should the traditional journalism guidelines apply? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Probably the biggest industry news this week was the sale of Kobo to Japanese e-retailer Rakuten. The deal was summed up nicely in an All Things Digital headline: "The Amazon of Japan Buys the Kindle of Canada."
For Indigo, the majority shareholder in Kobo, the sale was about refocusing its core business. Brand strategist Anthony Campbell told the Globe and Mail:
Taking on Apple and Amazon and Google isn't just a distraction, it puts Indigo in a position where the brand would completely lose focus. By maintaining its focus, Indigo's better prepared to take on the likes of Target and other retailers who are trying to corner the lifestyle space.
For Kobo and Rakuten, the acquisition means expansion — for Kobo, geographic expansion; for Rakuten, market expansion. Michael Serbinis, Kobo's CEO, told the Wall Street Journal: "This is not a one-country game. Two-thirds of the book market is outside North America. We're going into countries where we will be No. 1." And according to All Things Digital, "[Rakuten] said the acquisition of Kobo will assist the company in its move to provide downloadable media to consumers, starting with e-books." Perhaps it won't be long before the "Japanese Amazon" is making a major play against the U.S. Amazon.
For more on the situation, there's a nice Q&A over at Canadian Business with Serbinis and Indigo CEO Heather Reisman about the sale and what comes next for both companies.
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) is getting ready to release results from a new study that show the rapid growth of ereading. Highlights from the final survey in volume two of the "Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading" report include:
The full report is available for pre-order now. It will be published on November 21.
The Books in Browsers conference continues today — and it's being livestreamed. Speakers today include Wired's Kevin Kelly, BookOven's Hugh McGuire (@hughmcguire), Kassia Krozser (@booksquare) of Booksquare and Brian O'Leary (@brianoleary) from Magellan Media Partners.
Now, onto a few highlights from this week's publishing news.
On the heels of EPUB3 being signed off on, any hopes that Amazon might participate in an EPUB3-united publishing format were dashed when it announced its new Kindle Format 8 — or to keep with the acronym standard, KF8 — ebook format. Martin Taylor has a nice analysis of the format battle over at eReport. Much like EPUB3, the new Kindle format is fancy and shiny, accommodating all the latest web standards (including HML5 and CSS3), but as Taylor points out, the continued incompatible formats keeps things complicated:
But for publishers, it [KF8] could add challenges as the new features these formats offer mean ebook production requirements and costs will scale up. And for the newly-minted EPUB3, it poses a challenge to stay relevant as Amazon';s importance as the number one sales channel might tempt some publishers to bypass it.
This is to say nothing of device and app support issues for continued incompatible formats — and how the confusion might ultimately affect (nay, I say annoy) consumers.
As newspapers continue to struggle to find their way and experiment with out-of-the box ideas, one newspaper continually rises above the fray: The Guardian. With its Open Platform and strong commitment to data journalism, I guess it should be no surprise the newspaper would stride ahead of the pack in crowdsourcing and reader engagement as well.
Along those lines, this week The Guardian launched n0tice, a new social news gathering platform, and @GuardianTagBot, a Twitter-based bot that will search The Guardian's tags to find the information a user needs.
Megan Garber over at Nieman Lab was all over both stories and provides great analysis — her piece on n0tice is here and her examination of @GuardianTagBot is here.
The new social platform, n0tice, goes way beyond engaging readers with comments or links to send in news tips. It offers readers an entirely separate section of their own. From Garber's post:
'It's a place where you can share news, post details about forthcoming events or let people know you have something to sell or share,' the project's FAQ puts it. Just like IRL message boards, 'everyone else in your locality will be able to see what you've posted and also take part."
This gives readers yet another entry point into the newspaper and another reason to interact with its brand in a much more personal, communal setting than simple comment areas or reader blog setups — not to mention giving The Guardian an additional line into hyperlocal news coverage.
The Twitter bot achieves a similar goal, and then some. Many newspapers signed up for Twitter and/or Facebook accounts and called it a day, but creating the search bot was a stroke of ingenuity: It allows readers to interact with the brand in real time, and the newspaper is using the search results to make improvements to its tagging system.
With both products The Guardian is not only extending its brand to engage readers, but using that engagement to also enhance its brand. Struggling newspapers, take note.
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released results from a new study this week that took a look at tablet usage in terms of news and book consumption across several categories. Some highlights from the study include:
The full report is available here.
The upcoming Books in Browsers conference will focus on books as "networked, distributed sets of interactions," as opposed to content containers. I've asked several of the event's participants to address the larger concepts surrounding books in browsers. We'll be publishing these interviews over the coming weeks.
In the short interview below, Corey Pressman, founder of Exprima Media, tackles a question on ownership versus access. He says that though access is becoming more and more compelling, ownership is still more important for content that can be personalized and customized, such as for book annotations and marginalia.
Corey Pressman: Ownership is very important for experiences or content consumption on platforms that can be personalized and customized. This is especially true if the customization gets baked into the content.
For example, music access versus ownership is very compelling. I could see a possible near future in which "accessible music" (streaming unlimited cloud access) trumps "owned music" (purchased CDs or downloads). In this scenario, customization — creating customized playlists — is external to the media; customization is handled by the conduit, not the content.
This is also true of many types of reading; it certainly is when it comes to news. I am very curious to see how the new Kindle/OverDrive plan to allow library lending via the Kindle and Kindle app plays out. In many reading use cases, free two-week access to ebooks seems quite compelling. This is especially true for existing ebook converts already untethered from the symbolic "social display" function of a book collection.
There is a reading behavior for which ownership is important: annotation. The personalized customization of a text with marginalia requires, ideally, some level of ownership in both paper and electronic contexts. Annotating a borrowed paper text is anathema and moot; annotating a borrowed ebook will probably be impossible and moot.
I suppose there could be some scenario in which one borrows and annotates an etext and somehow keeps the annotations, which will realign with the etext when it is accessed again. Perhaps this is a use case that ereading designers and publishers can work on. Business models will dictate the provider-side benefits of ownership versus access. With the help of user experience experts, providers can help preserve essential reading behaviors as they experiment with content delivery models.
This interview was edited and condensed.
This post is part of the TOC podcast series, which we'll be featuring here on Radar in the coming months. You can also subscribe to the free TOC podcast through iTunes.
Like so many other European countries, Spain still hasn't seen the significant rise in ebook sales like we've experienced in the U.S. But due to the fact that the country has such a high percentage of mobile device owners and the bias toward print seems to be changing, it may not be long before ebooks represent a significant portion of overall sales. Dosdoce Digital Culture's CEO Javier Celaya (@javiercelaya) recently met with me to discuss the state of econtent and what's likely to impact the future. Some of Celaya's more noteworthy points from the full video interview (below) include:
You can view the entire interview in the following video.
The challenges publishers face today trying to transform a centuries-old industry into (arguably) an almost completely new business traverse every sector of the industry. Beyond all the challenges with technology and changing business landscapes, however, lies the root problem with the transition to digital: publishers' mindset, says Timo Boezeman (@boezeman), digital publisher and non-fiction editor for A.W. Bruna Publishers and a speaker at TOC Frankfurt. In the following interview, Boezeman addresses issues of territorial rights, technological opportunities and DRM, but says publishers must first accept that "change is a must."
Timo Boezeman: The largest hurdle in the transition is the mindset. Publishing is one of the oldest industries around and now has to deal with a transition from analog to digital at a speed that is at least twice as fast as the music industry faced. What I see around me in the Netherlands — and I don't know if this is or was the same in the US — is that the publishers don't want to learn from the mistakes made by the music industry, and they make every mistake all over again: DRM, high pricing, not enough titles available, technical difficulties due to the different readers and types of ebooks, etc. If they would just see that the world is changing rapidly, that digital will be bigger than analog soon, and that change is a must, it would help us all — including consumers.
Timo Boezeman: This is a difficult question. In the US and the UK, you have closed ecosystems like Amazon, Google, B&N, and iBookstore. In the Netherlands, we don't; none of these players are here yet. Right now, we have one file type: EPUB, which is supported by all the ereaders — including the iPad — available here and by all the ebook retailers. Most publishers use DRM to protect their titles, though this is easy to get around if you want to. The ebook price is generally about 75% of the hardcover price; the price of paper books is set by the publisher over here — by law — and can't be altered by retailers. This results, for now, in ebook retailers not lowering the prices of ebooks, even though it is allowed — the fixed price is only for paper books. It also results in consumers saying ebooks are too expensive.
To come back to my comparison with the US: if we had an Amazon — a big retailer with its own ebook format and reader — it would matter less if the system had DRM or not. But in our situation, there are several issues: first, getting an ebook on an ereader; second, reading it — you need to register with Adobe to use the DRM'd ebooks on some readers and tablets; and, lastly, switching between retailers and/or devices.
Timo Boezeman: Cloud technology is something I believe in very much, but it is a difficult topic because of the mindset. This technology will support reading because if books are in the cloud, you can also let readers read them by subscription instead of buying them one by one, like Spotify with music or like 24Symbols already is doing with books. And indeed, one step further, you've got the potential for books as browser URLs, which HTML5 will make possible. This offers other advantages — you don't have to program for specific operating systems, for example. The biggest challenge in this, however — just as with music — is the money that can be made. Spotify shows that money can be made, but that it is still a very low profit margin. Should we see this as "better than nothing" because otherwise it would be missed income or illegally downloaded? Or as "the start of something more" — growing revenues, maybe even a change in the mindset of consumers that content is worth paying for, so prices eventually will rise again?
Timo Boezeman: Both, because I believe in what I call "tastes." You should provide a different taste for each consumer. There will always, or at least for decades to come, be people who want paper books. Maybe their demands will rise — higher quality, full color, etc. — but paper will be here for some time. Then you have people who read digital books, but they want to own their content. And last, you have people who don't want or have the need to own digital content, but want access to it when they want, how they want and on the device they choose. But if you put everything in perspective, I would say that access is a trend coming to the book industry, which until now has been ruled by ownership.
Timo Boezeman: In the way they are arranged now, yes. One other thing that has to change in the mindset of the publishing industry is to start thinking of the consumer first — not of the bookstore or retailer you want to sell your books to, but the end user of your product. Do they benefit from territorial rights? No. They only suffer from it — it means that titles are not available everywhere at the same moment. Which, when the interest in a title is high, only encourages piracy. Just look at the film industry for examples. But that doesn't mean those rights have no reason to exist; it means that along with rights, there also must be thought of the consumer. And this is all for the good of the publishing industry because we all want consumers who like our products to pay for them, don't we?
This interview was edited and condensed.
Associated photo on home and category pages: Men with printing press, circa 1930s by Seattle Municipal Archives, on Flickr
LiquidText founder and CEO Craig Tashman (@CraigTashman) says his annotation and document manipulation software began as an academic project, but commercial applications quickly became clear as students participating in the research started asking for copies. The software allows users to annotate, highlight and manipulate PDF content with multitouch gestures. It may be the next major step toward making etextbooks more practical for students — and it's another nail in the coffin for the "death of marginalia" debate.
I reached out to Tashman to find out more about his research-cum-business project. Our interview follows.
LiquidText will also be featured in the next TOC Sneak Peek webcast on August 25.
Craig Tashman: LiquidText actually began with an observation about multitouch technology — being able to detect several fingers at once on a touch screen. We could see that it had this amazing potential for letting people interact with computers in much more expressive ways. Instead of the single input point on a mouse, you now have 10 inputs — fingers — that can coordinate with one another, or work in patterns.
At the time, multitouch was largely being used in attractive demos with little practical application. So we thought about how it might be applied to real-world activities, such as reading and writing, and how those tasks could be improved by giving people a much richer way to interact. The answer we found was that, to really take advantage of this technology, we couldn't just paste stretching and pinching on top of traditional ereader software. Instead, we had to reconceive the reading experience itself in the context of multitouch, envisioning anew how people would want to work with documents.
Initially, this was just an academic research project, but participants in our studies got to try out our earlier prototypes and they asked for copies. So we started exploring commercialization, and the rest is history.
Craig Tashman: LiquidText helps people read and make sense of long, complex documents — it lets people annotate, visualize, and navigate text documents in highly flexible ways using a collection of powerful, natural multitouch gestures.
As people read, they often take margin notes, compare different sections of a text, make outlines, highlight, and so forth. But a lot of research, including our own, has shown that people often struggle with this very "active" form of reading. LiquidText facilitates this kind of reading by giving people multitouch interactions that offer more flexible control of how content is visualized, annotated, and navigated.
For example, one can pinch together parts of a document to bring disparate areas into proximity to compare them, or one can touch two text selections at once to create a link between them. Cumulatively, these functions together with those addressing annotation, note taking and other parts of the reading process let LiquidText bring to the world of ereaders even greater flexibility than paper.
Our first shipping product will be an iPad app, expected to be released later this year. This app will let people import standard, unprotected PDF documents and manipulate them using most of the same LiquidText interactions seen in the prototype version we use in our demos.
Craig Tashman: LiquidText seems to provide the most benefit for reading documents that are complex as well as long — situations where a person's memory is strained keeping track of both the past content and one's own thoughts and reflections.
This audience includes tens of millions of knowledge workers and students, but our studies point to a few groups in particular. College students, for example, are especially well suited to the features of LiquidText, as they gradually read things like textbooks where they have to build and maintain an understanding of a text over the course of months. I also think LiquidText would be quite appropriate for legal and analytic work, where identifying relationships and inconsistencies within a text can be critical.
Craig Tashman: On a broad scale, I think LiquidText can enable a wider shift to electronic books, especially in higher education where ebooks tend to underperform in comparison to their paper counterparts. On a finer scale, we have already seen a shift in how people read and take notes using LiquidText. For example, rather than only annotating the document itself, people are much more likely to create elaborate note spaces with comments and excerpts using our technology. Effectively, they seem more likely to create intermediate documents that reorganize the content of the original and integrate it with their own thoughts.
Craig Tashman: We are not setting a date in stone for LiquidText for the iPad since we want to ensure the app is well tested and has solid PDF compatibility before releasing it, but we are planning to have the beta out later this year.
LiquidText for the iPad is being targeted very broadly, but we have also been exploring partnering with higher education publishers to develop a version of the software for reading etextbooks.
As for platforms, right now we're focused on small, portable devices like the iPad. But internally, we have explored using LiquidText on touch screens ranging up to 30 inches in size, and we think that certain applications, such as intelligence analysis, would really benefit from that type of hardware.
This interview was edited and condensed.
According to some sources, the early arrival of winter made the 2010 holiday season the biggest ever for online electronic retailers. With comScore reporting that more than $32 billion was sold during the holiday shopping period, and overall sales were up 12 percent over the previous year. Now I'm confident that this year's numbers would have exceeded those of 2009, even without thousands of people being snow-bound in their homes, but I'm sure Internet retailers aren't complaining.
As I predicted, it was also a big holiday season for ereaders. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble recently announced that their respective dedicated ereading devices were the best-selling items for each of the companies. Now stop and let that one sink in a moment. According to Amazon, they've sold more Kindles in the U.S. in 2010 then any other single product during that same time. Barnes & Noble also says their latest LCD-based Nookcolor tablet was the company's top-selling gift of the holiday season.
The holidays weren't that kind to Borders and small bookstores. The diminishment of either outlet will likely accelerate the adoption of ebooks as the primary publishing medium.
This week, all gadget lovers were focused on Las Vegas, as the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show kicked off the year with a new round of device announcements. The dominant ereading trend was multiple-use tablets, with ASUS, Lenovo, and Motorola each announcing new tablets (HP was notably absent, though they do have a Feb. 9 WebOS event).
Here's a look at some of the new tablet offerings.
The ASUS Eee Slate EP121 is one of the first Windows 7-based tablets to come to market. The tablet features a 12-inch (1280×800) multitouch display and will run a full version of Windows 7 Home Premium. The multitouch display comes with a built-in Wacom digitizer, which means a user can control the tablet with the included stylus or attach a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard. The EP121 is powered by a Core i5-470UM processor, includes 2 to 4GB of RAM, and a 32 or 64GB SSD. Amazon is accepting preorders ($999 for the 32GB model, $1,099 for 64GB).
ASUS also released three Android devices: the Eee Pad Slider, the Eee Pad Transformer, and the Eee Pad MeMO. The ASUS Eee Pad Slider includes a 10.1-inch IPS touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that will incline the tablet screen vertically. The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer includes a 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen and optional docking station with full QWERTY keyboard. The ASUS Eee Pad MeMo is a 7.1-inch capacitive touchscreen based on Android 3.0.
Lenovo is the first device maker to bring a hybrid design approach to their tablet strategy. This week they announced the IdeaPad U1 hybrid with LePad slate, a two-in-one device that combines a high-definition slate featuring access to Android applications and a keyboard base that provides a full Windows 7 computing experience.
The device weighs less than two pounds and is half-an-inch thick. While the tablet currently uses Android 2.2, Lenovo says that when it ships in the U.S. it will run Android 3.0. Other features include a front-facing camera, WCDMA and EVDO connections, a 1280x800 10.1-inch display, a 32 GB HDD, and 1GB RAM.
Once docked with the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, the slate converts into a Windows 7-based netbook. A 1.2GHz Intel Core i5-540UM processor will power the IdeaPad, and it will also include 2GB DDR3 RAM, a 320GB SATA hard drive, and 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 networking.
Verizon Wireless teamed with Motorola Mobility to unveil the Motorola XOOM, supposedly the first device on Google's new Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system. It features a dual core processor and a 10.1-inch widescreen HD display. The tablet will launch as a 3G/Wi-Fi-enabled device in Q1 2011 with an upgrade to 4G LTE in Q2. The XOOM will support 1080p HD video and HDMI output to display content on larger HD screens. It also features a front-facing 2-megapixel camera and a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera that captures video in 720p HD.
This week also saw the Wall Street Journal draw their focus onto the growing battle between the planned Google Digital Newsstand and Apple's iPad magazine offerings. The article raises one of the most controversial and unresolved issues in this new era of digital publishing: the relationship between the content producer (author) and his/her readers. Content producers want a more intimate and engaged relationship with their audience and readers want to get closer to their favorite content producers.
The future of publishing demands a cohesive relationship between producer and audience, which for the most part is currently non-existent. For example, authors that in the past have used traditional publishers have relatively little information about who bought their books. They may know some sparse demographic details, but there is no direct connection between author and reader.
In my opinion, look for this issue to become one of the biggest challenges for publishers of all types to address. Many top-selling authors are leaving the fold of traditional publishing to free themselves of the layers of intermediaries that separate them from their audience. How existing publishing houses respond to this issue will be a major factor in their long-term relevance.
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too... maybe I'll even get a shirt?" (there will be limited edition shirts for two and other goodies for each supporter as soon as we sold the 200)


text:
Escorts north east Kiruna
With the help of specialist experts on Norway and Sweden, 50 Escorts north east Kiruna North, we've designed a sensational adventure into the Arctic snow nort ice. We'll have enough daylight to chase reindeer and landscapes under the sun plus deeply dark nights for shooting the Northern Lights. Starting in the North-East of Sweden and finishing in the North-west of Norway, this adventure includes reindeer races, traditional markets and some of the eeast breathtaking scenery Scandinavia has Escorts north east Kiruna offer. Early arrivals can visit the Gammal Stad area or shop for their winter wardrobe.
|Relationship Status:
|Searching Adult Dating
|Dyed blond
|Relation Type:
|Swinger Couples Ready Sex And Massage
Views: 4125
If you're ready to learn Edcorts skills while you travel then this is the trip nogth you. On the other hand, the geology near the abutment site is extremely complex and includes fault slivers, with rapid lateral changes in materials and presumably seismic velocities. After enjoying Escorts north east Kiruna three-course meal in Escorts north east Kiruna traditional wooden Kota, go back to the comfort of Trelleborg meeting place for singles glass igloo to try your luck with spotting the Northern Lights.
I Seeking Sexy Meet
People take this chance to ski at midnight, or enjoy the midnight Sun. Angelholm single dating scale bars were Solna massage wagga from posterior Kiruna sex Escorts north east Kiruna periphery of the retina.
Dry eye disease in French elderly subjects: To describe dry eye disease in French elderly subjects.
Navigation menu
Buy now Buy. Kiruna sex kovai eye had a baseline fluorescein scan prior to any fluorescein dye. Escorts north east Kiruna Seri Begawan.
Human amygdala Sweeden hotels girls during Escorts north east Kiruna Kiruna blackstone eye movements of rapid eye movement sleep: The amygdaloid complex plays a crucial role in Kiruna sex kovai emotional signals and in the formation of emotional memories.
Cities and towns People Villages. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. In noth calculations, our schematic model eye Helsingborg escorts similar size of Escorts north east Kiruna diagram compared with Kavlinge mens gallery and Bakaraju's model eyemuch Escorts north east Kiruna than Arianpour's model eye. The dam was intended to offset rapid Kiruna sex kovai growth by nofth food supplies through the transformation Escorts north east Kiruna irrigated land in southern Ostermalm girls with dicks from seasonal to perennial cultivation and by providing water for the reclamation Kirua desert land.
Escorts north east Kiruna the study of adult stem cells and regenerative mechanisms, planarian flatworms are a Kituna in vivo model. All these desired properties are accompanied by an Escorts north east Kiruna drawback: Nepalese dating Jakobsberg first step to investigate Escorta feasibility of bio-inspired optics in photodetectors is to perform light interaction with the optical Gaydar Kinna gay that gather light and detect it.
The age-standardized incidences of early and late AMD Kiruma 5. Although increased risk dam were to be decommissioned, the mean risk would not be greater than kovwi current existing risk, indicating that the dam rehabilitation scenario had a higher rank for decreasing the flood risk Escorts north east Kiruna the decommissioning scenario, but that dam rehabilitation alone might be of little Tall girl Tullinge Sweeden in abating flood risk.
Additionally, newly Paginas Grove contacto gay dams may use these results for the estimation of the jorth response of the rock foundation to the construction. Transfer to hotel, where an evening at leisure will be enjoyed. Got Escorts north east Kiruna Question?
An intoxicated woman was escorted home by concerned police who then discovered Escoorts cannabis farm stashed in the loft.
The head musher will tell us all about the life and Escorts north east Kiruna of these Arctic animals, before Escorts north east Kiruna through the Finnish forest with a pack of huskies. Results In on-axis calculations, our schematic model eadt possessed similar size of Escorts north east Kiruna diagram compared kovwi Navarro's and Lerum submissive model eyemuch smaller than Arianpour's model eye.
I Wanting Men Kiruna sex kovai
Its publication roughly coincided with the Escorts north east Kiruna of large- dam construction in the United States. What kind of camera gear to bring? Both of the direct and the indirect band gaps of DAM -ADC Prostitutes mobile Solna decrease Escorts north east Kiruna increasing of the gamma absorbed dose.
Measures include estimates of the incidence of visual impairment and age-related eye disease Escoets opacities, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration and Kiruna sex kovai progression wast eye Escorts north east Kiruna lens opacities and myopia and associated risk factors.
Escrts Guinea: Malabo. Kiruna sex nortj Look For Sexual Partners.
Travel guide to Kiruna
The width of the tail of Escorts north east Kiruna states in the band gap, Eu was evaluated with the Urbach's method. This suggests that the dam itself is not strongly influencing the records. Statistically, the trajectory type energy dissipation is the most widely used in the built norgh arch damsand the water plunge poor were Kiduna set Prostitution Helsingborg san lucas the dam body.
This comission helps me keep Grove sexy grannies site up and running. There is proposal for byepass road from Sulur Kangeyampalayam via neelambur for Mettupalayam via odanthurai to Ooty. The obtained results eat shown that immediately Kkruna the dam failure event a total of ca. Escorts north east Kiruna groups mean less drama, more fun and are infinitely more rewarding.
I Am Wanting Horny People Escorts north east Kiruna
SH80 mettipalayam to avinashi via annur. ❶The optical Foot worship escort Kavlinge band gaps, Eg for the detectors were obtained from the direct and the indirect allowed transitions in K-space using two methods Tauc's model and absorption spectrum fitting ASF method. Tamuning, Tumon. Clustered random sampling was used to select adults aged 50 years and older in Liwan District, Guangzhou.
Our drive takes Escorts north east Kiruna few hours normally, but because we Excorts for many dedicated photo shoots en route it may take all day.
Lapland to Lofoten Photography Tour
Continue via Nusfjord and return to Svolvaer in the early evening. Groups did Kiruna sex kovai differ in their gaze behavior concerning Kiruna sex kovai vs. This is due in large part to their abundant pluripotent stem cell population and ability to regenerate all cell and tissue types Kiruna sex kovai injuries that would be catastrophic for Escorts north east Kiruna animals.
Noryh will have the unique opportunity to meet wolves, bears, deer, elk and reindeer. In addition, Escorts north east Kiruna and true iris insertion was classified in four quadrants with static Esckrts dynamic gonioscopy.
Beginners Welcome These tours are not just for advanced photographers, we Candlelight massage new Tumba welcoming beginners Escorts north east Kiruna the craft to help them fast track their creative abilities.|A year-old woman and Partille sex rate year-old man have been arrested and released under investigation following the discovery in Heaton.
An intoxicated woman Arvika singles groups escorted home by concerned police who then discovered a cannabis farm stashed in the loft. Northumbria Police nrth got a call from a member of the public in Heaton who was concerned Escorts north east Kiruna a woman Ecsorts her front garden.
A year-old woman and a year-old man were arrested while growing equipment and 54 plants Escorgs seized during Saturday afternoon's discovery. Inspector Julie Rana oversees the work of the eastt team in the area and said any Escorts north east Kiruna farms found by police will be Escorts north east Kiruna and destroyed. The two people arrested have since been released under investigation while the Massages in Huskvarna ks and growing equipment found at the address have been seized.
Anyone with information about drug use or supply in their local community is encouraged to contact police on By Katie Collings. A cannabis farm uncovered in a loft in Heaton Image: Northumbria Police Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe We will use your email address only for the purpose of sending you newsletters.
Please see our Eeast Notice for details of your data protection rights.
Escorts north east Kiruna I Search Adult Dating
Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice. Read More Today's must-read news, sport and entertainment. Like us on Facebook Follow us Busty escorts new Kinna Escorts north east Kiruna north east Kiruna.]Starting Escorts north east Kiruna the Shemale escorts Rasunda of Sweden and finishing in the North-west of Norway, this adventure 2 weeks of Photographic escort and instruction with Ewen Bell We visit the famous Ice Hotel near Kiruna and enjoy a drink at the Ice Bar.
Begin your journey in Stockholm, before making your way up north to experience the In the afternoon, we notth towards Kiruna – enjoying the Escorts north east Kiruna Escort of northern Sweden. Region Kirnua the gateway to the east, taking you through beautiful northern Norway Bi-lingual Tour Escort from Day 2 to Day flowed, in particular iron ore shipments from Sweden's Gällivare and Kiruna mines.
and a nautical 'highway' for the transfer of military units headed to the East. escort, ASW and patrol duties in both the Baltic and North Seas were placed.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Thank you so much to Aldo Fiordelli (@aldofiordelli) and all the editorial staff for the nice article. Here the original post (in Italian) on the website Civiltà del Bere
Luiz Barichello, a Brazilian in Chianti Classico
Dido Russo, wine blogger Brasiliano, flies to San Casciano Val di Pesa to visit Luiz Barichello at Villa Titurris. In his post (in Portoguese), Il sogno di Barichello, he talks about Luiz and his dream to create amazing wines in Brazil and Tuscany. "Not satisfied Barichello leaves Porto Alegre and goes to Tuscany to plant a […]


text:
plural mainliners
Definition of mainliner
1 : a member of a mainline group (such as a church) Of the remaining mainliners, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has suffered most. It has lost 40 percent of its members and now claims only 1,146,000 faithful.— Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek, 22 Dec. 1986
2 informal : a person who injects a drug into a vein : a person who mainlines a drug She holds nothing back about the awful things done to her, or about her attraction to the social danger zones inhabited by strippers, heroin mainliners, rhino poachers, and guerrillas.— Gilbert Taylor, Booklist, 1 Dec. 2000
Keep scrolling for more
to insert between existing elements
Get Word of the Day daily email!
Test Your Vocabulary
The Eponym Quiz
- Which is the best synonym of bowdlerize?
Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words?TAKE THE QUIZ
Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way.TAKE THE QUIZ
Love words? Need even more definitions?Merriam-Webster unabridged
Words at Play
Ask the Editors
Word Games
- The Eponym Quiz
Do you know these words that come from names?Take the quiz
- Liar, Liar Quiz
Test your knowledge of words for lies, liars, and those being lied to. In other words, everyone.Take the quiz
- Spell It
Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words?Take the quiz
- Syn City
Build a city of skyscrapers—one synonym at a time.Play the game


text:
Run a search by name for anyone in Paxtonville, Pennsylvania & get free white pages information instantly. Paxtonville, Pennsylvania white page directory listings include full name, phone number and address.
Jeremy Doersam
Alice Steininger
Leroy Rearick
Ned Ritter
Jason Bruner
Nancy Klinepeter
Dean Shirk
City Population: 207
Middleburg, PA
Beavertown, PA
Richfield, PA
Penns Creek, PA
Mount Pleasant Mills, PA


text:
Rarely has there been a greater example of the hypocritical divide between high-falutin' rhetoric and meaningful achievement than in the hysterics surrounding carbon emissions.
The pearl-clutching hysterics of the anti-carbon bandwagon stomp about the globe with Godzilla-scale carbon footprints. Worse, contrary to all the back-slapping and cheer-squadding surrounding supposed carbon-reducing initiatives as the Paris Agreement, emissions are steadily rising.
Average global greenhouse gas emissions are rising at double the rate of Australia's, exposing the mismatch between the "hope and reality" of meeting Paris Agreement goals, a report has found.
A major report by energy giant BP said the world was returning to coal, and without shale gas from the US and LNG exports from Australia the emissions reduction picture would be much worse.
Massive investments in renewable energy were needed but would not be enough to satisfy increasing demands for power, most notably in China and India.
Green activists are determined to close down job and wealth creating projects in Australia. Virtue-signalling left-wing governments are crippling Australia's energy infrastructure with 'renewable' flights of fancy. Yet none of this makes a jot of difference to global emissions.
The increase of 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases from energy was greater than Australia's total output.
Officials said the report confirmed Australia's carbon dioxide emissions were "minuscule in absolute terms and lower (than the world average) in percentage terms as well".
BP said last year's global energy demand and carbon emissions from energy use had grown at its fastest rate since 2010-11.
The BP statistical review of energy is a highly respected annual report that examines trends in energy demand and use, including from renewables.
The findings mirrored those of the recent Global Carbon Project, which reported global greenhouse gas emissions had been steadily accelerating since 2016.
The worst global carbon culprits are the two nations who have been given the biggest free pass by the Paris Agreement.
Increased demand for power in China, India and the US underpinned most of the increase in demand. Unusually hot and cold weather led to a spike in demand for heating and cooling, notably in North America, but BP could not say if this was a one-off due to natural variation or part of a worrying climate change trend.
It's becoming increasingly hard to disguise the fact that, contrary to the hype, renewables just don't cut the mustard.
BP chief economist Bob Dudley said the 2018 figures showed globally there was "a growing divide between societal demands for an accelerated transition to a low carbon energy system and the actual pace of progress".
The BP report said building more renewable sources of energy could not keep pace with rising demand.
"Even if renewables are growing at truly exceptional rates, the pace of growth of power demand, particularly in developing Asia, limits the pace at which the power sector can decarbonise," the BP report said.theaustralian
Sooner or later, the Greens are going to have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into saying the dreaded n-word…
Who is Lushington D. Brady?
Well, a pseudonym. Obviously.
But the name Lushington Dalrymple Brady has been chosen carefully. Not only for the sum of its overall mien of seedy gentility, reminiscent perhaps of a slightly disreputable gentlemen of letters, but also for its parts, each of which borrows from the name of a Vandemonian of more-or-less fame (or notoriety) who represents some admirable quality which will hopefully animate the persona of Lushington D. Brady.
To read my previous articles click on my name in blue.


text:
Pot Roast
- ½ tablespoon salt
- ½ tablespoon pepper
- 4 pounds chuck steak, center cut
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 1 medium onion, chopped coarsely
- 1 clove minced garlic
- 3 tablespoons shortening
- 1 cup boiling water
- 3 large carrots, halved and cut into 2-inch sections
- 6 ounces fresh green beans, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
- 1 pound of ripe tomatoes, cut into eighths (or 16 ounces of canned stewed tomatoes)
- 1 bay leaf
- 2 tablespoons Kitchen Bouquet
- Salt and pepper meat and rub with flour.
- In a heavy roasting pan, saute onion and garlic in the shortening until translucent but not brown. Add meat and brown, about 15 minutes.
- Add water, carrots, beans, tomatoes, bay leaf, Kitchen Bouquet and, if desired, more salt and pepper. Cover pot with aluminum foil and seal. Simmer over low heat on top of the stove for 20 minutes.
- Unwrap, baste and reseal. Continue basting every 15 minutes (you may need to add water). Scrape onion and garlic from the pan as you baste and turn the roast once during cooking. Continue to cook for 2 1/2 hours, until the meat falls apart.
- Remove meat and vegetables to a serving dish, leaving pan drippings. Skim fat from the drippings and, over a low heat, add 4 to 6 tablespoons of flour, bit by bit. When the flour is brown, add one to two cups boiling water and stir until the desired consistency is reached. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve the gravy over pot roast and mashed potatoes.
Like this recipe?


text:
7 Mistakes can spoil your affiliate career
Affiliate marketing offers you to earn money sitting at home. It has become the most popular online marketing program at the present time. Knowing the benefit of affiliate marketing such as starting a business with zero investment, zero employees, no office space e.t.c. people become inspire to make money through affiliate marketing. But there are some common mistakes that cause failure in your affiliate carrier. Affiliates make these mistakes unconsciously. Among so many mistakes of affiliate marketing, in this article we are going to tell you about some serious mistakes which affiliates do very often.
Never ignore this 7 Mistakes can spoil your affiliate career else you will suffer much
7 Common Mistakes of Affiliate
1. Selling Tendency Rather Than Helping
In affiliate marketing, the basic selling strategy is raising a customer's interest to the recommended products or service before selling. But most of the beginner affiliates make mistakes in this case. They are much more intended for selling, but not for helping the customers so that they can know about the product. But it is quite impossible to sale without raising a customer's interest for the product. Some affiliates suggest the customers to buy his recommended products very soon. But it is a great mistake. While you say this, customers think you a biased seller, so they do not believe you.
Tips: Give detail information about your product including its ingredients, usefulness, how to use, where to use and yes, most importantly opinions of those who have already used your recommended product.
2. Joining Too Many Affiliate Program
Yes, it is true that affiliate marketing is profitable, but it is not wise to join much more affiliate program. If you join in too many affiliate programs at a time, then it will be very difficult to manage for you. Consequently, you will be overwhelmed.
Tips: Choose your affiliate program wisely and do not be overwhelmed. According to my opinion, it is better to choose that product in which you have interest rather than those products in which you do not feel interest at all.
3. Not Testing
Whenever you choose to promote your product on a website for example http://StealthSecrets.com, Clickbank, ClickSure,shareasale put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and opt in to test the vendors follow up sequence.
Actually, nothing breaks a reader's belief more than being led to a promotion that will blow up their inbox.
Tips: Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and see what will happen if they track your advice?
4. Not Tracking
This was a serious mistake that many more beginners do very often. For example, if you are fond of promoting Amazon (one of the most popular websites) products on your page, but do not use exclusive tracking links on each page, then it is a mistake.
But why this is a mistake?
Because, when you make a sale, you want to know WHERE the sale came from. If you do not use an exclusive tracking, affiliate link, then it disables you to know which pages are converting well. Consequently, you can't grow and scale that campaign.
How to create a unique tracking ID?
Well, it is very easy to create a unique tracking ID for an Amazon link. You have to follow the following steps to do this:
Following the above 3 steps, you can create a new tracking ID. Now you can track web page/campaign very easily.
Tips: Create a unique tracking ID on your most used website.
5. Not Comparing
One of the best converting tactics that skilled affiliates use to increase their sell particularly physical products from Amazon or http://www.stealthsecrets.com is to compare the main product with two other similar products. Customers get an opportunity to judge the products and buy according to their need. By following this strategy, you can make sale for more than one product.
Tips: Compare between two or three products as comparison brings a better profit.
6. Not Targeting Keyword Tools
Targeting keyword tools is very important so that customers can find your website easily in the search engine. To target specific affiliate programs, it is very necessary to know what keywords you have to target, especially when you are creating websites, or even pages. Here is a list of popular websites which will help you to investigate keyword.
Tips: Open an account in a keyword investigating website to find keywords relevant to your content.
7. Not Connecting With Affiliate Marketing Forums
Forums are online communities where likeminded people exchange insights and ideas. Many starter affiliates are not aware of affiliate marketing forums. Actually, it is very helpful to increase your knowledge. So it is wise to be connected with affiliate marketing forums to get benefit from advice shared by other newbies. Many of these forums are free. Here is a description of some free affiliate forum.
Digital Point Huge: Digital Point Huge is an excellent place to learn tactics of affiliate marketing program. About 25,000 members are active here. From this forum you can know not only affiliate marketing tips but also other techniques such as link building and SEO.
aBestWeb: aBestWeb is another forum which is very popular with nearly 100 sub-forums. It covers a large range of affiliate marketing subjects with a great contribution by numerous go-getter merchants and serious affiliates.
Warrior Forum: Warrior forum is a killer networking forum for both of beginners and advanced affiliates.
You can also join in the following forums:
Tips: Forums are the best places to get real feedback about your campaigns and to talk about the latest affiliate marketing news. So join at least one affiliate forum without any delay.