Some folks at Stanford have put together a lovely online compendium of public domain work--art from Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls. In addition to the 8,000 individual images, it includes an overview of old printing processes for reproducing artwork.
While we're on the topic, a number of publishers use Lulu to sell editions of dimestore novels, including ERBvillePress (see also erbvillepress.com), Wild Cat Books, Dennis McHaney and Bircham Studio.
Kevin Kelly, the original editor of Wired, offers a bracing tour of how we saw the Web at its inception, and what it has really become, "We Are the Web" (Wired, August 2005).
The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.
How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan.
Does Kelly overstate the historic significance of the Web? I doubt it, as breathless as his account may seem. I love this essay even though he gets the number of books published last year wrong (using the 2003, rather than the 2004 Bowker figures), and seems to swipe the notion of, if not the term, authorgeddon without attribution. He affirms the fundamental strengths of the Web--its unpredictability and democracy and growth--and reminds us of the ways in which it dwarfs all previous mediums in its virtues and its potential.
A quick but important update to my post earlier this week responding to the NYT story on Amazon.com's purchase of Booksurge: Google has announced that offering a search engine for video is not the end of its ambitions; it also plans to allow the creators of video content to upload, and even sell, their work through Google: See "Google Preps Video Distribution Service."
Sounds awfully familiar, if you haven't been following the official Lulu blog lately.
Here's a link to the Google video uploader. On a side note, when I published the print version of the Gutenberg Project's Underground City, by Jules Verne, I also submitted it to the Google Print program using the Google book tool. So far it hasn't shown up in search results.
USA Today sticks a foot into the "long tail" fray today (without mentioning the long tail theory specifically, mind you) with this article on the revolution in independent publishing: "Making Mini-Spielbergs," which comes with a helpful infographic and mini-story that should be all about Lulu, but for some odd reason isn't: "Self-Publishing Made Easy."
I'm glad this topic has gained momentum recently, and I'm still waiting for Time or Newsweek to take note of the fact that Bob Young, the man who first rode the open source phenomenon to riches, is now applying the same principles to publishing. But on the other hand, the niche-publishing angle (see this recent piece on Noveau Niche in the newsletter Trendwatching) is not entirely new. One of the best reports I ever heard or read on this topic was a series that NPR reporter Rick Karr did three years ago called "TechnoPop: The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music."
By the way, Chris Anderson wrote an op-ed for the LA Times on the Grokster case this week that defended the interests that independent artists and publishers (whom he describes as "creative amateurs") have in open distribution systems like BitTorrent and Grokster:
The Amazons, EBays and iTunes of the world have broken through the distribution bottlenecks. Increasingly, their endless aisles of shelf space hold not just the manufactured hits of the traditional media and entertainment powers but also the remarkably diverse output of countless niche producers. Each may not sell a lot, but together they represent a cultural force that can rival the mass market.
Anderson also mentioned it in his blog, which as usual drew some good comments.
I am pleased to note that the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery went online today, although the servers are so hammered I haven't been able to view many images. The Gallery was
developed to provide free and open online access to thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of the Research Libraries. Spanning a wide range of visual media, NYPL Digital Gallery offers digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of the Research Libraries, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences. (link via OL Daily)
The site offers the ability to order "8" X 10" color Fujix prints - in glossy or matte finish - from digital captures between 300 dpi and 400 dpi are available for purchase at $30.00 per print," which makes me wonder who exactly will be reaping the profits from the sale of these images--presumably the NY library and its delivery & fulfillment partner. I wonder if it is Zazzle? I couldn't tell from the order process, although it seems unlikely in that Zazzle offers a much greater range of delivery options.
 |
The collection includes a section I plan to revisit often, Classic Illustrated Zoologies and Related Works, 1550-1900, and where I hope to find the inspiration for next year's Umstead Trail Marathon logo (an event I help coordinate each year). |
The NYT reports today on efforts by Evan Williams, one of the original Blogger founders, and Noah Glass to mount yet another attempt at creating a digital marketplace: "For a Start-Up, Visions of a Profit in Pod-Casting." Odeo arises out of the recent fad of podcasting, but has broader (and more strategically sound) ambitions as well. The article notes that companies like Audible (which is also getting into the Podcasting business) are already booming because of "the rapid proliferation of iPods and other handheld MP3 devices that are capable of playing digital audio files containing news, music and talk radio, as well as an increasingly diverse array of amateur productions that are more difficult to categorize."
Most tellingly (and for those of us at Lulu this sounds awfully familiar), Williams explains that:
Odeo plans to base its business on the premise that the explosion of digital audio content has created the need for a central place to find relevant material and that there will also be a need for a market to buy and sell "premium" content in much the style of the eBay online marketplace.
Odeo, noting that advertising is already an accepted component of conventional radio, also plans to embed automatically generated audio ads within the downloadable files.
Interesting that the gamble seems to be, once again, on free content with advertising (Google) vs. charging for content (iTunes, Lulu), although it's not clear to me whether or not Odeo plans to charge for downloading podcasts. When it comes to content, they seem to realize that people will create and publish it whether or not they make any money. In other words, creators care more about exposure than compensation, an observation that Chris Anderson echoes in his most recent Long Tail Post, "What About Producers?":
Finally, it's worth noting that commercial success is not the only (or even main) reason to be a Long Tail producer. Most authors write books not to get rich but to reach a readership, whether it be to enhance their academic reputation, market their consultancy, or just leave a mark on the world. The Long Tail effect may not pay their rent, but it will find them a bigger audience, and if what they're offering is really good it may be dramatically bigger.
Via Publishers Lunch comes this tidbit from The Roanoke Times: "Students lobby for more open textbook market ." Coincidentally, today is the day we sent out a press release on a new book written by St. Petersburg Community College professor Matt Basham, who became famous by giving away a book he wrote on Cisco certification for network administrators. Another article was posted by the Stanford Daily.
Google's big announcement about working with some of the world's largest libraries to scan their entire collections (Google page) has received plenty of attention (NYT piece) today, as well as a growing body of commentary far more erudite than anything I could come up with. But the two pieces that caught my attention this afternoon were John Battelle's entry in Search blog and the short piece in Publishers Lunch. Both note that Google is in a position to offer out of print texts--according to published accounts, Google estimates that 90% of the scanned books will be out of print material--in print on demand editions with the click of a button on your search results. It is, of course, a most provocative idea. Battelle suggests that he is aware of a company in a position to provide such a service. A company that is not Lulu? What does he know that I don't? Anyone?
Google's strategy at this point appears to be the "acquisition" of an infinite amount of virtual real estate for advertising space--what with the print program, gmail, and all the other content advertising initiatives. Their current revenue model supports this, but their ambition and vision suggest broader goals. They appear for example, with Froogle, to be competing with Amazon.com. I have seen various suggestions as to Google's possible future revenue strategies--subscription-based access, commissions on sales-- but nothing convincing. They think far enough in the future to be genuinely enigmatic, which is an enviable position.
Corante offers an exciting interview with Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and director of Advance.net, on the future of media. While there is an understandable skepticism in the world now towards big ideas like "the-death-of-media-as-we-know-it," I still get a thrill from this sort of thing. Of course I am fortunate enough to have a front row seat on the dissolution of the book publishing industry, via Lulu. Here's an excerpt from the interview with Jarvis:
So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the centralization of media -- the marketplace, the network, the monopoly -- is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the economics. It changes the power.
One tangible result of this is nichefication of media. Some would say that's a bad thing; they wail about the death of great shared experience of American media. But the truth is that the shared experience lived only from the '50s to the '90s as the growth of three networks resulted in the death of competitive newspaper towns and we lived in a world of one-size-fits-all media. That is over. Now you can find the content that suits your needs. And that's good. That's about control. Which leads me to...
I think, by the way, that he is dead wrong about the "shared experience" of media having had such a short life. He is deliberately downplaying the downside of the decentralization of media on the culture, but that's his schtick. He's paid to be optimistic.
Well, Slashdot finally got around to covering the on-demand software projects launched by Lulu on Halloween. Following the comment thread so far, opinions seem mixed.
When Amazon.com managers noticed in 1999 that eBay Inc. (EBAY ) was taking off, for instance, they launched their own auction site to tap into the same group of sellers -- and the high-margin stream of commissions. But eBay's momentum was too great, and Amazon's auctions largely fizzled. Amazon also opened zShops, a gallery of independent merchants on its site, but that attempt to create a marketplace didn't catch fire either. In late 2000, an Amazonian came up with yet another idea: Let other sellers offer their wares on the same page as Amazon's own products. "Inviting third-party sellers onto our prime real estate -- that made some palms sweat," Bezos admits.Lulu's challenge is enormous, of course.
But the Seattle-based company plowed ahead, and this feature has turned into a hit. Now some 26% of unit sales on Amazon.com are by other sellers, who like how easy it is to list items. "The Amazon-selling platform is second to none," says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp. in Research Triangle Park, N.C., which helps large merchants sell on eBay and Amazon. The 60%-plus profit margin on the commissions and fees it charges other merchants has overcome any cannibalization. Bezos says people who buy used books buy more new books, too. All that has helped the company to log four straight profitable quarters.
The ultimate in innovation, though, is not merely to come up with new products and services. It's to create entirely new markets where none existed before -- and better yet, to provide something that changes the way we live and work. Innovation was never just about new gizmos and gadgets. But in a service economy, innovations more than ever must transcend objects. Some of today's most successful companies, from Virgin Group Ltd. to eBay, create not only innovative products or services but also novel business models.Definitely worth reading.
Web 2.0 coverage in aggregate.On an unrelated note, Lulu co-sponsored the Sally Ride Science Festival in Raleigh this past weekend. A report has been posted in the official Lulu blog.
Jeff Jarvis' blog starting here.
Jeremy Zawodny's blog here, scroll for Oct 5-7 posts.
A master blog here. This one has MP3's of most of the talks. I highly recommend Brewster Kahle, Lessig, Doctorow, Gurley, Bezos, and sessions like “Music is a Platform”, “Media is a Platform” and “The Architecture of Participation.”
Lulu's own Jeremy Hogan is on his way back from the big Web 2.0 conference(see BBC News: Visionaries outline web's future). I'm looking forward to his reports, which will hopefully wind up on the Lulu blog.
The conference was mentioned yesterday, by the way, in a WSJ story about the collision course of the internet giants, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and Google (subscription required). Essential reading.
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, offers an essay on the diffusion of content markets. It's a terrific article and it makes all kinds of points worth noting, some of which I've excerpted below. Much of the essay reinforces the fundamental business model of Lulu, but there are cautionary notes as well. Anderson uses the example of MP3.com, which allowed anyone to upload and sell their own music. MP3.com became an undifferentiated mass of unknown content with no path into it for consumers. Lulu as it is today could accurately be described the same way. The world continues to need bestsellers--books, songs, etc.--for complicated reasons, among them the need for cultural touchstones.
The truth is that whether or not you believe that an open, unmediated marketplace for content like Lulu can succeed, it is a fact that the market for content is diffusing. What kind of business model will succeed under these conditions?
Anderson on the origins of our current publishing system:
Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.
. . . .
This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.
Anderson on the fallacy of the 80/20 rule (that no more than 20% of the content for sale will account for a profit):
We think that if something isn't a hit, it won't make money and so won't return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adibé, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the "misses" usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.
. . . .
A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.
How do we know this? That enormous laboratory of capitalism we call the Internet:
The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.
And last but not least, a summary that could well be worth adopting as Lulu's new tagline:
As a result, almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer. This is the opposite of the way the entertainment industry now thinks.
This is something Lulu planned to undertake way back when Creative Commons first launched (with Lulu as a partner, I should add), but in the jumble of competing priorities the task got lost, along with most of the other CC-related tasks we set for ourselves: Searching for Creative Commons on Yahoo!
I'm sure we'll come back to Creative Commons licenses at some point, although relatively speaking a small minority of the authors who use Lulu to publish their books, images, or music seem interested in alternative licenses. We support the idea. And demand will grow over time, I suspect.
Wired.com reports on a quixotic effort being launched to salvage for the public good all the works for which no copyright owner can be located:
These resources -- older books, films and music -- are often out of print and considered no longer commercially viable, but are still locked up under copyright. Locating copyright owners is a formidable challenge because Congress no longer requires that owners register or renew their copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and Rick Prelinger, a film collector, want permission to digitize these so-called orphan works to create online libraries for free public access.
In a suit filed in March, the plaintiffs in Kahle v. Ashcroft argue that multiple changes to copyright law have essentially made it impossible for works to return to the public domain. They want to have these changes declared unconstitutional.
Alongside books and music, another form of valuable intellectual property that has been revolutionized by technology is film. Affordable, easy to use cameras and editing tools have placed filmmaking within the grasp of individuals operating on their own without the backing of studios. And, as with books, the Internet offers the most powerful distribution platform in history. Some of the first earth-shaking efforts to emerge from this trend have been documentaries like the recent hit, Outfoxed. There is a bit of a parallel here between fiction and nonfiction books in the "self-publishing" realm in that it is very difficult to make a fictional film that is engaging and artistic, but it is slightly easier to dig up and present information that is useful or interesting to audiences.
Along comes Lulu.com's equivalent in the field of DVDs, CustomFlix, which gives independent filmmakers a powerful on demand tool for distribution.
It goes back very deep in the human psyche to the Library of Alexandria, which was in many ways the culmination of the Greeks' vision of knowledge as being worthwhile in and of itself. The idea is to take the Library of Alexandria another step further and make the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world. We hope that then everyone can add to this grand library. Current computers and the Internet are making this conceivable. This seems to be the opportunity of our time, in the way that the generation before got to lay claim to landing a man on the moon. That was something that humankind can point at for centuries as a worthwhile achievement.
His claim, and it's a bold one, is that this isn't just a good way of developing software, it's a new way of organizing businesses.Startling consequences indeed. I hear a lot of skepticism about whether or not Lulu.com constitutes a genuine challenge to conventional publishing. It does, but not so much because of the quality of particular pieces of content, many of which are indeed of dubious quality. If Lulu.com does threaten the industry at all, it is because it challenges the traditional organization of the publishing company. The open source principle alluded to above is, of course, the same principle that we are using to develop Lulu.com. Yesterday I received a call from a friendly woman who teaches classes on self-publishing and I had a chance briefly to chat with her about Lulu. What seemed to surprise her most was the fact that I talked about different ways that authors might want to offer their work--not just through Lulu.com, but through all the other means available to them. She seemed particularly taken aback when I mentioned that most authors probably shouldn't get ISBNs for their books (depending, of course, on how they plan to market the book).
In short, open-source software breaks the links between developing a product and owning a product, which is the way business has traditionally organized itself. That could have startling consequences.
Courtesy of Google News:
Personal
Technology Freedom Coalition Created
Kansas City infoZine, MO - Jun
24, 2004
... and companies representing diverse sectors of the
US economy has come together to form a new organization, the Personal
Technology Freedom Coalition. ...
Orlando,
Florida: Anarchist librarians at ALA annual conference
Infoshop News - Jul 5,
2004
... in general. There are new efforts underway to fight
back, including the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition
(PTFC). And there ...
Getting The
Big Things Right: Goals And Responsibilities In A ...
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - Jul
7, 2004
... set new benchmarks for information technology
skills ... Our unique Social Coalition approach recognises that
... is to reconcile a desire for personal freedom with
the ...
Digital Battleground:
From Congress to the Marketplace
TechNewsWorld - Jul 2,
2004
... D-Virginia) to fix these problems was in the news
last week as it drew new support from a coalition called the Personal
Technology Freedom Coalition (PTFC). ...
Hatch's
Induce act comes under fire
The Register, UK - Jul
6, 2004
... say some, including legal brains that support the
Personal Freedom Coalition. ... responsible for
contributory infringement because its technology has substantial ...
Suppliers
support change to US piracy law
ComputerWeekly.com, UK - Jun
24, 2004
The Personal Technology Freedom Coalition
is trying to get the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, introduced in the
US in January 2003, through Congress. ...
In what may seem a move too far to some, the computer software giant Microsoft has been granted exclusive rights to this ability of the body to act as a computer network. Two weeks ago the company was awarded US Patent 6,754,472, which bears the title: Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.If you write science fiction and you are not compelled to jot this down in your notes as the potential basis for a plot, then give it up--join a different genre. On a completely separate note, Nerve.com is running a promising short video contest with a first amendment theme.
According to his 2001 indictment, Councilman directed employees to write computer code to intercept and copy all incoming emails from Amazon.com to Interloc's subscribers, who were dealers seeking buyers for rare and out-of-print books. Amazon.com did not then offer used books, but offered customers help in tracking down rare books.Response to the decision from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Just ran across this, the Directory of Open Access Journals. As I've been speaking with journalists over the last couple of weeks, I continue to try to persuade them that there is, in fact, a social movement (NYT archives) that has coalesced around the issue of overly restrictive control of intellectual property. Some journalists seem to get it, and others don't. The hub of the movement, if it could be said to have one, is probably Creative Commons. And, being somewhat abstract as revolutionary causes go, most of the activity in the movement takes place in academia. One of the challenges for Lulu.com is to occupy the middle ground--we are a business, but we are a business being built on the premise of doing the right thing.
Along those lines, I heard an interview on Tech Nation the other day with Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List. He spoke about idealistic entrepreneurship, a theme he repeats in this LA Times article (registration required).
Instabook is the company that has managed to arouse a fair amount of publicity by putting on-demand book production kiosks in a couple of bookstores, but truthfully this is not progress. A good Kinkos with a binding machine provides the same service. The real story remains the marriage of affordable, fast, print on demand technology with the unprecedented distribution power of the Internet.
By the way, the in-store book printing kiosk was actually the idea at the heart of the POD patent suit that was lost a few months ago by Amazon.com and Lightning Source. Harvey Ross, the founder of On Demand Machine Corporation, originally requested a patent on the idea of an on-demand book kiosk that would produce out of print titles while customers waited. He didn't foresee the emergence of the Internet as a distribution platform for books. But the court upheld an interpretation of the patent that covered the essential system (database, book metadata, printing mechanism--very basic system) being described rather than a particular machine design. Stretching credulity even further, the court then found Amazon.com and Lightning Source--two completely different companies, mind you--to have colluded to create a system that knowingly infringed upon the core idea protected by the patent. This despite the fact that one or the other company on its own would not have risen to the level of infringer, and despite the fact that Ross himself never actually created a sustainable business model based on his idea.
Madness.
From Newsforge, an enthusiastic, if slightly misguided, article: Open source cracks publishing wide open. The author gets hung up on open source tools themselves, but misses the bigger picture (and, somewhat unforgivably in my opinion, completely omits Lulu.com from the discussion) about the knowledge industry itself. She does get the general message, however, about the change in the balance of power:
Once upon a time, publishing was the domain of large corporations. Then came desktop publishing and the tools to produce a book shrank from the cost of an aircraft carrier to the price tag of a PT boat. Now, small publishers on the bleeding edge of technology are fomenting a revolution that may change the publishing market forever. Open source publishing tools, long derided as not being ready for battle, are proving themselves in the trenches of small publishing.The tools used to format books, of course, are a pretty small piece of the picture. The fact that they are accessible to average people is important, but the truth is that proprietary software for formatting books is also affordable and accessible. I even use Microsoft Word (gasp) to format books sometimes (for example). The more important shift is the distribution power made accessible by the Internet. The successful authors using Lulu.com to distribute their books have purchasers in Australia, in Europe, in Asia--customers that are every bit as accessible to them as those in Ohio or North Carolina, albeit with higher shipping costs. Actually, that will change soon, too--Lulu is about to institue a $7 shipping option for anywhere in the world.
The Open Text Book Project --something to keep an eye on.
IBM requests judge throw out SCO suit.
“SCO refuses…to disclose its purported evidence that IBM’s Linux activities infringe SCO’s alleged copyrights, despite two court orders requiring it to do so,” IBM said in its motion for a partial summary judgment.High time. This is the same issue, of course, that Bob Young weighed in on a few months ago.
From the NYT: Permissions on Digital Media Drive Scholars to Lawbooks
An upcoming conference in NY will delve into the limitations of fair use for digital content: Knowledge Held Hostage: Scholarly Versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age The questions raised by these folks are, of course, very relevant. Essentially, all content is digital. But what's also on display in this article is the general temerity of academia. The likelihood of litigation for a use that could reasonably be argued might fall under the fair use doctrine is, as Professor Jaszi, a professor of law at American University's Washington College of Law, points out, quite slim.
Subscribe to Independent Publishing Discussion Group
