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Ryan Holman

Understanding Users of Social Networks - HBS Working Knowledge - 1 views

hbswk.hbs.edu/6156.html

shared by Ryan Holman on 30 Sep 09 - Cached
  • "No one uses MySpace" To continue on the issue of online representation of offline societal trends, Piskorski also looked at usage patterns of MySpace. Today's perception is that Twitter has the buzz and Facebook has the users. MySpace? Dead; no one goes there anymore. Tell a marketer that she ought to have a MySpace strategy and she'll look at you like you have a third eye. But Piskorski points out that MySpace has 70 million U.S. users who log on every month, only somewhat fewer than Facebook's 90 million and still more than Twitter's 20 million in the U.S. Its user base is not really growing, but 70 million users is nothing to sneeze at. So why doesn't MySpace get the attention it deserves? The fascinating answer, acquired by studying a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users, is that they largely populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country. Piskorski rattles off some MySpace hotspots: "Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida." They aren't in Dallas but they are in Fort Worth. Not in Miami but in Tampa. They're in California, but in cities like Fresno. In other words, not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas. "You need to shift your mindset from social media to social strategy." "MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don't have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others. Other than that, there is really no difference between users of Facebook and MySpace, except they are poorer on MySpace." Piskorski recently blogged on his findings.
    • Ryan Holman
      Ryan Holman on 30 Sep 09
       
      This I find interesting: if I read this right, it would mean that if you had something that was of a more local interest and away from the major cities -- the biography of a local football player, a history of local landmarks, a self-published book by a local political figure, etc. -- it might be effective to have a MySpace strategy as well in the mix, which wouldn't necessarily be the first strategy to come to mind.
  • Women and men use these sites differently.
  • Piskorski has also found deep gender differences in the use of sites. The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don't know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.
    • Ryan Holman
      Ryan Holman on 30 Sep 09
       
      I'm not entirely sure I agree with their broad characterization of the gender differences in how social networking sites are used, but my evidence to the contrary is also anecdotal and the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." :-)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • To continue the earlier analogy, "You should come to the table and say, 'Here is a product that I have designed for you that is going to make you all better friends.' To execute on this, firms will need to start making changes to the products themselves to make them more social, and leverage group dynamics, using technologies such as Facebook Connect. But I don't see a lot of that yet. I see (businesses) saying, 'Let's talk to people on Twitter or let's have a Facebook page or let's advertise.' And these are good first steps but they are nowhere close to a social strategy."
Ryan Holman

The Answer Sheet - Going back to college at 59 - 0 views

voices.washingtonpost.com/...-back-to-college-at-59-yo.html

textbooks online supplement education e-publishing

shared by Ryan Holman on 20 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Ryan Holman on 20 Oct 09
     
    Possible generation-gap-type issues for digital educational publishing for colleges: "Today, the college assumes all students not only have computer skills but a plethora of high-tech devices and services. The class schedule and registration procedure is entirely online-even if you're in the registrar's office....In the first class, the professor handed out her e-mail address and the URL where the syllabus could be found--instead of her office phone number and a copy of the syllabus. Unfortunately, the college sites are full of graphics and animations and download very slowly on my dial-up connection. (Even if I could afford a broadband connection, my ISP doesn't provide it in my area.)" "At least one exercise in each chapter requires accessing the publisher's textbook Web site. Many of these exercises could just as easily be put on the computer disk also sold-at an increased profit (I used to work for a textbook-preparation company)-with the text....Again, a dial-up connection won't download the videos. The audio files are .mp3; I can't open them, don't have the skill to know what program I need, and have no access to free technical support....So once every chapter I head for either the heavily used public library or the equally heavily used computer lab in the college's suburban learning center (branch campus)--and hope that a computer is available."
arnie Grossblatt

Library Inc. - - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124915

libraries education books publishers e-books

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Yet libraries, the intellectual heart of universities, have become perhaps the most commercialized academic area within universities, with troubling implications for the future of higher education.
  • Through innocuous incremental stages, academic libraries have reached a point where they are now guided largely by the mores of commerce, not academe.
  • Over the last decade, however, as the number and cost of journals have soared, most libraries have decided to forgo purchasing hard copies. The shift from owning a journal to merely providing access to its digital incarnation has, of course, saved some money. But those savings come in tandem with detrimental changes both to the content of library collections and the ways those collections are used.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • According to both the professional literature and information-vending companies' usability studies, a library's chief task is to meet the information needs of its patrons
  • For university libraries, retrieving what is known should be only the beginning. They are laboratories of the mind, unique places where questions that have never before been asked can be formulated and answered; they are centers of teaching where patrons can learn about the organization and the production of knowledge
  • or universities, the libraries' experience is a cautionary tale. Commercial practices, technologies, and innovations often seem to benefit and support the academic mission of universities. But commercial innovations are not value-free, and it has proven very difficult for libraries to embrace some components while rejecting others.
  • arnie Grossblatt on 04 Nov 10
     
    Interesting, if a bit unbalanced, about the corruption of university libraries by commercial publishers and the pressure of "good enough" information in a Googlized world
arnie Grossblatt

The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...sifton

books publishing business model e-publishing

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • hree centuries ago, John Locke agreed that we shouldn't base our freedom to read books on the proclaimed good offices of the business itself. "Books seem to me to be pestilent things," he wrote in 1704, "and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind."
  • arnie Grossblatt on 04 Jun 09
     
    Book publishers have always predicted that the end was nigh. When it does come they will have only themselves to blame.
Ryan Holman

Writers Need To Stop Complaining About Amazon Making Books Cheaper - 1 views

www.slate.com/...d_three_cheers_for_amazon.html

ebooks amazon pixels versus paper

shared by Ryan Holman on 04 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Ryan Holman on 04 Sep 13
     
    Amazon started life as a book retailer, and as a book retailer they made books cheaper. Then they were pioneers in the e-book industry where they made books cheaper. Their recently announced plan to give readers free e-book copies of books they buy in physical form doesn't make books cheaper per se, but it does give readers greater value for their book-buying dollar. This is all great stuff. But not everyone agrees. Emily Gould complains that "When ebooks and pbooks are bundled, the ebooks are sold at a loss. That's authors', publishers' and, associatively, non-AMZN retailers' loss" and "frustrating we have to keep explaining that ebook production is not free. digital objects are not made by elves."
arnie Grossblatt

thedigitalist.net » Skills in the Digital Era part two - 0 views

thedigitalist.net/?p=235

e-publishing ebooks publishing

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 02 Oct 08 - Cached
  • in my view there is no need for a digital editor as such in a trade publishing house, rather an editor who understands the digital world:
  • it’s marketing that will have to continue to change the most to find new readers and new ways of reaching readers.
  • Writing that uses new media by incorporating visuals, sound, movies and so on in different delivery platforms such as the new Sony Reader, Alternate Reality Games mixing narrative and interaction by readers and contributors, self-published material, collaborative wikinovels and other kinds of informal, or extra-formal creativity, are exactly the kind of material that a traditional trade publishing house such as Pan Macmillan, however innovative, finds it very difficult to use, or even acknowledge, in a publishing process, and it’s unlikely to be seriously practical in the short term, which means until someone can think of a way to make money out of it, not least because digital projects are typically seen by customers and authors as free or very low-cost, when in fact they’re often more expensive than traditional ones because of the high set-up and development costs
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • two key issues: accuracy of conversion, which we set at 99.999999%, instead of some competitors’ 99.95%, and attending to the reader experience by providing accurate and appropriate metadata, which is one of the points I want to illustrate later on to show why I believe editors need new knowledge not new skills
  • What it needs to do instead is create a new post-publishing process, a sort of après-lit, which makes clever and effective use of reader involvement through websites and with social-networking tools, but that is familiar Web 2.0 material and outside the scope of this answer.
  • How much is digital going to change the way I work?’
  • arnie Grossblatt on 02 Oct 08
     
    One editor's take what endures and what changes for publishers and editors in the digital world.
arnie Grossblatt

The Newspaper of the Future - 0 views

www.ajr.org/Article.asp

newspapers publishers

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 28 Oct 08 - Cached
  • It is now clear that it is as disruptive to today's newspapers as Gutenberg's invention of movable type was to the town criers, the journalists of the 15th century.
  • The Internet wrecks the old newspaper business model in two ways. It moves information with zero variable cost, which means it has no barriers to growth, unlike a newspaper, which has to pay for paper, ink and transportation in direct proportion to the number of copies produced.
  • And the Internet's entry costs are low.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • These cost advantages make it feasible to make a business out of highly specialized information, a trend that was under way well before the Internet.
  • specialized media had been enjoying more growth than general media.
  • A metropolitan newspaper became a mosaic of narrowly targeted content items. Few read the entire paper, but many read the parts that appealed to their specialized interests
  • Sending everything to everybody was a response to the Industrial Revolution, which rewarded economies of scale
  • Newspapers "keep offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of content, and keep diminishing the quality of that content because their budgets are continually thinner," he said. "This is an absurd choice because the audience least interested in news has already abandoned the newspaper."
  • The newspapers that survive will probably do so with some kind of hybrid content: analysis, interpretation and investigative reporting in a print product that appears less than daily, combined with constant updating and reader interaction on the Web.
  • But the time for launching this strategy is growing short if it has not already passed. The most powerful feature of the Internet is that it encourages low-cost innovation, and anyone can play
  • Clayton Christensen has noted, the very qualities that made companies succeed can be disabling when applied to disruptive innovation. Successful disruption requires risk taking and fresh thinking.
  • One of the rules of thumb for coping with substitute technology is to narrow your focus to the area that is the least vulnerable to substitution.
  • What service supplied by newspapers is the least vulnerable?
  • I still believe that a newspaper's most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence
  • The raw material for this processing is evidence-based journalism, something that bloggers are not good at originating.
  • Newspapers might have a chance if they can meet that need by holding on to the kind of content that gives them their natural community influence. To keep the resources for doing that, they will have to jettison the frivolous items in the content buffet.
  • But it won't be a worthwhile possibility unless the news-paper endgame concentrates on retaining newspapers' core of trust and responsibility
  • arnie Grossblatt on 28 Oct 08
     
    Argues that newspapers will need to get smaller and more focused on establishing trust-based influence. Interesting.
Kristen Iovino

Kindle Fire will 'vaporise' Android - IOL SciTech | IOL.co.za - 2 views

www.iol.co.za/...ill-vaporise-android-1.1193913

android fire books

shared by Kristen Iovino on 07 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Kristen Iovino on 07 Dec 11
     
    Is the KindleFire really that great? Has anyone used one yet?
  • Matt Mayer on 08 Dec 11
     
    I haven't played with the Fire yet, but I'm always very dubious of the "tech analyst". Let's face it, dominating the Android tablet market isn't all that difficult right now, as there is a dearth of poorly built, poorly performing Android tablets on the market today. My own personal opinion is that the OS offers a lot of promise, but ironically the real value of the Fire is its connection to Amazon's own "walled garden" of products and services, which flys directly in the face of Android's selling characteristic of "openness".
  • Matt Mayer on 11 Dec 11
     
    Randomly, my friend won a Kindle Fire at an office holiday function and I got to play around with it last night. Here are my impressions: First, it's very simple to use though it has that same noticeable lag that all Android tablets seem to have, though I will say not as pronounced as others. It has a rubber-like backing in the same style that the NOOK Simple Touch employs, so it feels good in your hands and won't slide around. Here's one thing that I was surprised about; it's a bit of a brick, meaning it's a lot heavier than I expected. For an eReader, weight seems like a big deal, so I would definitely take one for a test-spin before buying if you can, especially if you're going to use it for long reads. My friend only had one copy of a book, and I thumbed through pretty quickly, and the Fire seemed to handle it well. It had a lot less lag page turning than it did starting apps. On the web, the Fire did pretty well, it downloaded and ran pages smoothly for the most part. Though I will say I went to one of my favorite sites (arsenal.com) to watch some video highlights of yesterday's game, and even though it has a 7 inch screen, the video "wasn't optimized" for the Fire, so the playback size was smaller than it would have been on my iPhone (postage stamp size). On ESPN.com though it seemed to handle video there much better. My other complaint was that the Fire didn't seem to recognize page widths very well, so you have to do a lot of pinching to get the right view of a page in portrait view. So, I'll put down my pocket-protector, ease off the dork-pedal a bit, and just say for the price it's a solid tablet that runs pretty well.
Ryan Holman

Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-compete-with-e-books.html

print design production values book culture books pixels versus paper

shared by Ryan Holman on 05 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Ryan Holman on 05 Dec 11
     
    Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions - deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.
arnie Grossblatt

Markets Declare Truce in Copyright Wars - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB122688619008032339.html

copyright google e-publishing books publishers

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 17 Nov 08 - Cached
  • But content owners also belatedly realize that simply suing consumers who find new, convenient ways to access content online is not as good as finding new business models to profit from customer interest that technology makes possible.
  • his shift by Google led Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs books, to wonder if the book settlement could have lessons for other owners of content. "Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free," Mr. Osnos wrote for the Century Foundation. "This leads to an obvious, critical question: Why aren't newspapers and news magazines demanding payment for use of their stories on Google and other search engines? Why are they not getting a significant slice of the advertising revenues generated by use of their stories via Google?"
  • arnie Grossblatt on 17 Nov 08
     
    More on the Google-AAP settlement. Key take-away ""But content owners also belatedly realize that simply suing consumers who find new, convenient ways to access content online is not as good as finding new business models to profit from customer interest that technology makes possible."
Ryan Holman

Prince George's considers copyright policy that takes ownership of students' work - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story.html

copyright copyright law education

shared by Ryan Holman on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Ryan Holman on 05 Feb 13
     
    A proposal by the Prince George's County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual. The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.
arnie Grossblatt

Ebooks Don't Cannibalize Print, People Do - 2 views

www.blackplasticglasses.com/...9t-cannibalize-print-people-do

ebooks cannibalize publishing ebook reader books

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 03 Oct 10 - No Cached
Brian Suszek liked it
  • The most important lesson I can convey to book publishing professionals is that they must understand that those of us who have made the transition to ebooks, buy ebooks, not print books. Ebook reading device users don’t shop in bookstores and then decide what edition they want; ebook device readers buy what is available in ebookstores. Search an ebookstore for a title and if it doesn’t come up, it doesn’t exist – no matter how many versions are available in print
  • arnie Grossblatt on 03 Oct 10
     
    Publishers need to recognize that readers are shifting to ereading, and for this group if it's not in e-book format it doesn't exist.
Thelisha Woods

Book Publishing -- Is Your Child the Next Best-Selling Author? - MSNBC Wire Services -... - 0 views

www.msnbc.msn.com/28794269

Children Childrens Books Book Publishing Child Author MSNBC

shared by Thelisha Woods on 23 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Thelisha Woods on 23 Jan 09
     
    An interesting and cute story on the trend of children becoming published book authors. After reading, I really feel like I have no excuse for not finishing my book - enjoy! :-)
arnie Grossblatt

Getting Google to notice your ebook - 0 views

radar.oreilly.com/...-that-google-editions-has.html

publishers ebooks Google metadata ONIX SEO

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 20 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • but Google eBookstore suddenly gives booksellers a reason to at least wade into SEO.
  • But what about new books and ebooks? How does Google determine which new titles, and the more than 15 million books that have been scanned, float to the top of its search results pages: in the web search box and in the ebookstore. The challenge, for Gray and other Google engineers on the Books project, is that the best known component of Google's algorithm for determining the the value of a web resource -- the number of links to it by others -- does not apply to books and ebooks. Although it is possible to link to a selection in certain books on Google Books (here's a hyperlink into the aforementioned Galbraith title) people don't generally create links to the contents of a book or ebook. So linking is not a reliable indicator of quality.
  • One strategy that Google employs is to tap into the book industry's "rich tradition of metadata.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Google also looks at what Gray referred to as "market signals:" how often a book has been reprinted, web searches, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the book, etc.
  • 2. Create quality content outside the book
  • 1. Use descriptive titles and chapter headings
  • 3 best practices for getting Google to notice your book
  • 3. Book covers matter
  • arnie Grossblatt on 20 Dec 10
     
    With the opening of the Google Bookstore, it's time for publishers to start thinking about search engine optimization (SEO)
EPublisher Confesses

Race, Culture, and the Digital Divide - 0 views

www.thefreemanonline.org/...culture-and-the-digital-divide

ebook reader publishing web 2.0 publishers

shared by EPublisher Confesses on 22 Nov 11 - Cached
  • EPublisher Confesses on 22 Nov 11
     
    Prior to the September 11 attacks and the stock market slump, one of the hottest policy issues debated by technology scholars was the so-called racial "digital divide," a term concocted to portray "haves and have nots" in the world of the Internet.
arnie Grossblatt

The best report ever on media piracy | Felix Salmon | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com - 1 views

blogs.reuters.com/...st-report-ever-on-media-piracy

piracy copyright WPO pubishers

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 07 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • he big forces driving media piracy in developing countries are real and powerful and will not be changed, no matter how many western politicians get on their moral high horses and insist that countries like India and China build a “culture of intellectual property.” But the irony is that if governments and corporations really wanted to build such a culture, then they would encourage companies to set their prices low enough that the populations of those countries could actually afford to buy music, movies, and software at the full legal retail price. It turns out that domestic companies are quite good at distributing media at low prices, and can build profitable businesses by doing that. But foreign companies have different incentives in the short term, and don’t do that.
  • arnie Grossblatt on 07 Apr 11
     
    Data-grounded research on the costs of media piracy developing economies.
Ryan Holman

Without ready access to computers, students struggle - washingtonpost.com - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009120501746.html

digital divide education access washingtonpost technology internet haves and have-nots

shared by Ryan Holman on 08 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Ryan Holman on 08 Dec 09
     
    The digital divide is still alive and well....highlighted in an article centered in Fairfax.
arnie Grossblatt

Color E-Readers Open Way for Picture Books - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...15ebooks.html

ebook reader iPad nook children's literatture publishers ebooks

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 17 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • But converting image-heavy books into digital form has not been easy. Authors are careful to monitor how their work appears on a screen, and publishers have struggled to replicate the experience of reading a print book
  • The prices of e-books with pictures be generally in line with print prices.
  • Some publishers have also had success breaking into the digital space by turning books into applications for mobile devices
arnie Grossblatt

Stephen R. Covey Grants E-Book Rights to Amazon - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15amazon.html

copyright e-publishing Amazon Kindle business model

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Amazon, maker of the popular Kindle e-reader and one of the biggest book retailers in the country, will have the exclusive rights to sell electronic editions of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and a later work, “Principle-Centered Leadership.” Mr. Covey also plans to gradually make other e-books available exclusively to Amazon, which will promote them on its Web site.
  • The move promises to raise the already high anxiety level among publishers about the economics of digital publishing and could offer authors a way to earn more profits from their works than they do under the traditional system.
  • Many authors and agents say that because the contracts for older books do not explicitly spell out electronic rights, they reside with the author. Big publishing houses argue that clauses like “in book form” or phrases that prohibit “competitive editions” preclude authors from publishing e-books through other parties.
arnie Grossblatt

Reading Dickens Four Ways - 0 views

chronicle.com/...39b01601.htm

ebooks reading books

shared by arnie Grossblatt on 12 Jun 09 - Cached
  • I'm not gloomy, though. We will still find our way to quality.
  • I love books as much as anybody. But I love reading more. It is the sustained and individual encounter with ideas and stories that is so bewitching. If new formats allow us to have more of those, let us welcome and learn from them.
  • arnie Grossblatt on 12 Jun 09
     
    A book lover recounts the experience of reading a single book on paper, on an iPhone, a Kindle and by listening to the audiobook version.
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