Topic: The Future is Now

August 2009

Book Publishing Goes South. By Southwest.

Those conversant with this site may recall the drama of That Panel at SXSW Interactive wherein a small unsuspecting group of folks from publishing ran into a brick wall of an industry reality check. Part of the larger cultural problem this revealed is that few industry insiders had ever attended the damn conference.

Based on the very healthy submission of panel proposals surrounding the topic of books, publishing, and whither both, I’m feeling rather optimistic that we might turning the corner in terms of participation. (And, as Kirk Biglione observed on PubCall last night, perhaps books/narrative might even get a little informal subtrack within the conference one of these years!)

Kassia Kroszer of Booksquare and Quartet Press has again done us all sterling service by aggregating all the related panel proposals she could find, so that you, Dear Reader, can go review them and vote for (or against) them. As I’m involved with a couple, described below, I rather hope you’ll vote for them of course but more important is that you go vote—effectively these panelists are this industry’s representatives and you should participate in deciding who represents us at SXSW!

The arty one is The Novel in 2050 with me and Joanne McNeil of The Tomorrow Museum and a couple more folks to be named later…The spiel is “Research shows reading a book for as little as six minutes may cut stress levels in half. But have Twitter-length attention spans decreased demand for novels? What is the future of the “non-networked” book? This panel will debate the relevance of novels in a networked world.” Questions to be asked include:
Will novels exist in 2050? What will they look like?
Have modern Twitter-length attention spans decreased interest in novels?
How might crowdsourcing and collaboration contribute to the creation of a novel?
What are some recent examples of networked books?
Are young people reading novels?
Does a novel communicate differently on a Kindle, iPhone, or other electronic device?
Is the Internet more of a threat to publishing than film or television were in the 20th century?
Why is technology mostly absent in the plots of contemporary novels?
How might novels use games and cross-platform storytelling?
What about novels should be preserved? What needs to change?

The businessy one is A Brave New Future for Book Publishing with me, Kevin Smokler of Booktour.com, Jared Friedman, Founder of Scribd, Kassia Kroszer herself, Jeff Seroy, SVP, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, and Debbie Stier, Associate Publisher, Harper Studio This spiel is: Call SXSW 2009’s infamous “New Think for Old Publishers” (aka “Geeks School New York”) a missed opportunity. How did book publishing become the last media industry to embrace digital and how will this change? New publishing models, strategy and a brave future for books and we who love them. And questions ot be asked include:
How is the traditional book publishing model broken?
How did book publishing arrive at this point in its history?
What new book publishing models are already out in world?
How successful are they (Scribd, Book Oven, Stanza) thus far?
In what ways have traditional publishers embraced/made use of new publishing and marketing models?
How will publishing collaborate with other cultural industries (Film, Music, Video Games, Online Entertainment) going forward?
How has the role of the author changed and how will it continue to?
How will books be sold in the future and what will this portend for booksellers?
How will the publishing recruit young talent going forward?
What will a book publisher have to look like in 10/20 years to survive?

And, if I may recommend a third, my wife has a proposal! How I Learned To Love the DMCA. She’s an intellectual property lawyer and is offering to update us all on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a piece of legislation which appears to be turning out to be much more helpful to online free speech that had initially be feared. Or, as she put’s it: “The DMCA strikes fear in the collective heart of the Neterati. But the way courts have interpreted the DMCA has been, in many ways, friendly to expression on the Web — dancing babies have prevailed over capricious takedown notices, and “circumvention” has been narrowly construed. This presentation will review recent case law and its implications for online speech and fair use.” Questions to be discussed include: What is the DMCA?
How did the DMCA alter the Copyright Act?
What are the DMCA “Safe Harbors”?
How does the DMCA protect content owners?
How does the DMCA recognize fair use?
What is the procedure under the DMCA for objecting to the use of content online?
How does one respond to a DMCA objection?
What are the key cases that have interpreted the DMCA?
Is the DMCA the enemy of free speech on the Web?
How might courts construe the DMCA to actually protect speech on the Web?

Richard Eoin Nash, Aug 19, 2009

futureisnow
sxsw

July 2009

My start-up: Cursor

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an editorial for Publishing Perspectives and got a rather dynamic response, including small group of commenters who were particularly exercised that I had not offered guidance on how to move forward.

In this week’s Publishers Weekly cover story, I offer exactly that guidance, although I couldn’t help but include some anecdote and sundry color. The article describes what I want to do, why I want to do it, and how I came to it. It’s not yet the perfect business model for the writing-and-reading community but it is I believe the right place to start, and critically it is designed to have powerful feedback loops, so whatever we’ll get wrong, we’ll be able to fix.

If you’d like to be a part of it, let me know. Here’s an excerpt from the Publishers Weekly piece.

Cursor…represents a new, “social” approach to publishing. To call [it] “niche” or another “independent” publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet.

My business plan is now out with investors—I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees. Yes, I envisage Cursor obtaining a larger basket of rights than is the industry standard, but that will be in exchange for shorter exclusive licensing periods. Our contracts will be limited to three-year terms with an option to renew.

The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community’s staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better.

Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. I believe especially strongly that the model must be viable in a world where the effective price of digital content falls to zero, and paper becomes like vinyl records or fine art prints. After all, the world is littered with things that people won’t buy at the prices their producers want to charge—like, say, the contents of remainder bins.

If recent experience is any guide, there is little reason for me to think that people, given so many other options for their leisure time, especially in the wired world, will continue to give up hours and dollars for the sake of our industry, any more than they will for big cars or daily newspapers. We are going to have to find new ways to earn those hours and dollars, and at the prices our readers—and writers—set.

I believe Cursor’s communities are a new way forward.

Richard Eoin Nash, Jul 27, 2009

Diagram of a Panel

Another take on what Russ Marshalek, Ami Greko, Ryan Chapman and myself had to say at the Twitter conference…

Richard Eoin Nash, Jul 12, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. Here's why I left. I'm now consulting on how to reach readers (details here) and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade. read more »