Finding the narrative: Links for 20 December 2013
I read too much.
In a different day-and-age, I likely would have subscribed to a half dozen newspapers and as many of the news weeklies as I could get my hands on. Unless I were exceptionally good about throwing things out (or only saving the clippings, not the whole) I’d quickly be buried under a mass of words.
On the internet, things are easier in some ways, but the base problem remains: I can quickly be buried under a mass of words. I still keep up with bookselling and new books, and new trends in books — but that also means I’m reading many “tech” blogs, too. I follow online streaming trends these days, as much as I do publishing or books.
Our World Of Books includes much more than slabs of pressed wood pulp, dirtied with a smudge or two of ink. For a little over four years, people have been talking about Barnes & Noble, bookseller, as a ‘tech’ firm, and there’s no way to talk about publishing anymore without considering both dot-com-boom-survivor Amazon and the growth of self-publishing — ebooks, sure, but also Instagram and Tumblr. [Yes, both count as publishing.]
Going back as a time-traveler to 1988, you might be able to describe YouTube to the pre-internet natives, but Facebook? Smart phones? How about cloud storage, software-as-a-service, hashtags, memes, and Rickrolling?
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Digital Book World has a list of 10 “predictions” for 2014. One is about trouble at Barnes & Noble (obvious), a point is made about libraries and ebooks (also looking fairly obvious as we know where the readers and demand are; the argument is about money), and of course there is the perennial prediction that Amazon will open up its own stores. The other seven items boil down to, “publishers will engage in business and attempt to make money”—which is now and has always been true—and those that do it well will, in fact, make money. Those that don’t will fail. I mean, it’s an OK list otherwise and it can occasionally be nice to see a itemized list, but I don’t think I saw any deep insight there, just a lot of 20/20 hindsight.
Ten Bold Predictions for Ebooks and Digital Publishing in 2014 : Jeremy Greenfield, 20 December 2013, Digital Book World
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The Library Designed Like a Bookstore : 19 December 2013, Book Riot
“Everyone knows about the popularity of eBooks and tablet readers. But mastering this brave new world is still a mystery to most small presses and indie self-published authors. So, let’s start with the most basic truth in this new world order of book selling: Amazon is a search engine.“
Amazon is a Search Engine : Ron Gavalik, 16 December 2013, Pittsburgh Writer Blog
“If you think hard about your experience purchasing a physical book from a bookstore, then opening the book to read it, you will not recall ever entering into a click-to-accept license. You buy the physical copy of the book, you don’t license it. The book is protected solely by copyright laws, not a license. Under those copyright laws, because you own the physical book, you can sell your copy. You’re not licensed to do that with ebooks downloaded through the Entitle service.”
Subscription Ebook Services Scribd, Oyster and Entitle Duke It Out For Early Dominance : 20 December 2013, The Passive Voice — commenting on Jeremy Greenfield’s blog post (of the same name) at Forbes
“We appear to still be somewhere in middle of the learning chute when it comes to addressing the new realities of book promotion. Authors and publishers are still readjusting expectations in a digital era where ‘what’s your platform’ has become a question of vital importance, and the ‘marathon, not a sprint’ mantra is still looked upon as an abject alibi, rather than a legitimate marketing strategy.”
Marketing for the Long Haul: The Shifting Ground of Book PR in 2014 : Rich Fahle, 16 December 2013, Digital Book World
“Readers don’t purchase books based on who the publisher is and don’t necessarily care. As a result, they might not even know if they’re buying a book that was professionally edited versus one that was self-published. Publishers are devaluing their own content as well by even adding to the confusion. All publishers will discount the first title in a series, and these get mixed in with the other less expensive books and just add to the clutter.” (Emphasis mine, and I’d counter that actually Readers Do Know when they buy self-published-vs-edited, if that distinction matters at all to us, but more often readers don’t care: the most avid readers who are driving the most explosive growth in the most e-prone genres are quite happy buying novels split into multipart dirt-cheap novellas—and lots of them—and the lack of editing is either quaint or beside the point.) (And quality will out, anyway.)
Self-Publishing: The Myth and the Reality : Steven Zacharius, 16 December 2013, Huffington Post : via The Passive Voice
“As I’ve said before, if today’s digital content designers were in charge back then we’d all be driving cars with steering reigns, not steering wheels.”
Our fixation on containers : Joe Wikert, 16 December 2013, Olive Software
“Many papers have had the same old-guard ownership and management for decades. These men are complacent, see no serious fault with their papers. They live in the past; in theory, they agree that to thrive a daily must present more and better local news but they hire no extra reporters. They still run columnists who are not even scanned by the present generation. And when questioned about their newspapers, they go off the record, as if publishing were the most sacred of cows.” … “Nearly 50 years ago, Newsweek lodged these complaints against newspaper bosses” [emphasis mine, quotes presented out of original order to make the punchline]
What Was Wrong with Newspapers in 1965 : Jim Romenesko, 16 December 2013, jimromenesko.com
“Today’s technology shift has many parallels with the arrivals of mass-printed books at universities. At the time, teachers at universities were horrified that the availability of books undermined their ability to charge students for reading aloud. There is something to learn from history here.”
Today’s Technology Shift Has Parallels To When Universities Were Threatened By… Textbooks : Henrik Brändén, 17 December 2013, Falkvinge on Infopolicy
Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow’s. : Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow, 20 October 2009, Seed Magazine
Between a quarter and a third of everything on the web is copied from somewhere else : Leo Mirani, 18 December 2013, Quartz
notational.tumblr.com : 17 December 2013
“How did I get all of that from one sentence? My immersion learning of Tumblr-Internet-speak was so gradual that I hadn’t even noticed it was happening. One day, scrolling through Facebook I happened to notice that this phrase, a fairly non-standard sentence, was itself a variation of another Internet expression. I was only able to understand it because of a wealth of reference points from other places on the Internet. The friend who posted the comment was tapping into a shared cultural knowledge that I understood. I was fairly certain that someone lacking this shared reference point would not only find the sentence jarring but also mildly confusing.” (Internet English as a new Language, I like that)
Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics : Tia Baheri, 20 November 2013, The Toast (the-toast.net)
“Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice.”
The blog is dead, long live the blog, subtitled “The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while.” : Jason Kottke, 19 December 2013, Nieman Journalism Lab — of course many will recognize Kottke as the blogger of epoynous Kottke.org; he posted a followup there as well. Read both.
“The overall problem here, of course, is that our social channels are trying to be the middleman, the same way as newspapers acts as middlemen for news. And as long as they keep focusing on that (which is in their best interest), we will experience this growing sense of friction between creators/ brands and the people who follow them. Social should not be a destination. It’s a connection. It should not be a platform that we rent. It should be a service that we add to enhance the connection.”
We Are Losing Control of Social : Thomas Baekdal, 16 December 2013, baekdal.com
5 Reasons Millennials Are Quitting Facebook : Taylor Casti, 16 December 2013, Mashable
“The News Feed is where Facebook users get updates on what family and friends are up to. The ads will begin playing as soon as they scroll into view, although they will be muted.”
Facebook Forces Video Ads on You Because Marketers Told It To : Ryan Tate, 17 December 2013, Wired Business
“There’s no way to stop or prevent an autoplaying video, and Facebook suggests that you simply scroll past it if you don’t want to watch it.”
Facebook Now Testing Intrusive Autoplay Video Ads In Your Newsfeed: This handwriting has been on your Wall for months now. : Selena Larson, 17 December 2013, ReadWrite
“What do photo sharing, social networking, and mobile payments have in common? They represent hot trends that VCs have piled onto in recent years without regard for how small these markets really are. Put plainly, there’s only room for a few (successful) photo sharing apps in the world. Yet we’ve watched it happen again and again. When Groupon took off, up sprang LivingSocial, then Bloomspot. Before you could blink, every VC firm in Silicon Valley had the ‘daily deals’ space checked off on its portfolio. We all know how that turned out. This herd mentality is siphoning capital from more promising start-ups and sandbagging the creativity for which Silicon Valley — and the startup scene more broadly — has long been known. Venture capitalists have become so risk-averse, it seems they’ve forgotten that risk-taking is the whole point of their jobs.”
Why VCs should stop investing in ‘Internet’ startups and start investing in ‘tech’ : Sergei Kouzmine, 17 December 2013, Venture Beat
“Perhaps most importantly, Foursquare has become the favorite way for mobile-app developers to add location as a feature. Everyone from Uber to Pinterest and WhatsApp uses Foursquare’s directory of places. So who ends up with this prize?”
2014: The Year Foursquare Will Finally Be In The Right Place At The Right Time: As an indispensable part of the plumbing of the social Web, someone will want to own it. : David Hamilton, 20 December 2013, ReadWrite — see also: The Brilliant Hack That Brought Foursquare Back From the Dead : Ryan Tate, 9 December 2013, Wired Business
“One of our favorite things to ask these executives was for their views of the American tech industry. Sometimes, the clearest view of your backyard is the one from the other side of the globe. The most interesting thought we heard was from an executive we met who visited Silicon Valley earlier this year. He said the over-riding impression he got from the visit was that Google is kicking everyone’s butt, and all of its competition is just rolling over.”
In China, They Wonder Why Everyone Over Here Is Letting Google Kick Their Butts : Nicholas Carlson, 28 December 2013, Business Insider
LG’s “Chromebase” : Ars Technica, The Verge, Geek.com, Engadget, PCWorld, SlashGear, The Next Web : Winner of the headline contest goes to ExtremeTech, “LG’s all-in-one Chromebase will bring Chrome OS, unfortunately, to the desktop.” (For three years now, I’ve advocated for ChromeOS tablets – as the always-in-web-broswer restriction of Chrome seemed well suited for a nice, big lap tablet to, um, web on the couch with. With the success of the Nexus tabs, though, I know the answer to that is ain’t-never-gonna-happen.)
“Tech companies are scrambling to move into cities — there are rumors that Google is going to move here, to San Francisco, from Mountain View. VISA and Akamai have ditched the suburbs to come here. Tech tenants now fill 22 percent of all occupied office space in San Francisco — and represented a whopping 61 percent of all office leasing in the city last year. But they might as well have stayed in their suburban corporate settings for all the interacting they do with the outside world. The oft-referred-to ‘serendipitous encounters’ that supposedly drive the engine of innovation tend to happen only with others who work for the same company. Which is weird.
“There’s been no shortage of published laments on the changing nature of San Francisco over the past several weeks, so I’m loath to add another complaint to the list. And yet… I keep coming across instances where the tech sector flocks to the city and talks of community yet isolates itself from the urban experience it presumably couldn’t wait to be a part of.”
What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning : Allison Arieff, 13 December 2013, New York Times
“At 68 dense pages, SPUR’s work is detailed and substantive, with many of its recommendations and reminders familiar to students of urbanism. Short blocks are better than long ones. Buildings should face the street whenever possible. Make this human-scale at every opportunity. Enforce minimum density requirements. Focus on building up the areas around public transportation. Hire in-house designers and use government buildings and land as demonstration sites for how a city should look. This hammer-to-the-head approach makes sense when you consider that SPUR is of the mind that Silicon Valley has forgotten — or perhaps more to the point, never learned — some of the now-conventional wisdom about city-making.”
San Francisco City-Makers Say the Tech Sector Is No Good at Urbanism : Nancy Scola, 17 December 2013, Next City
“‘All over America, communities are failing.’ It is this claim of failure that dominates Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone story “Apocalypse, New Jersey”, which positions Camden as that claim’s most vivid depiction. Taibbi is right to note that Camden cannot support itself. The city depends on massive subsidies from New Jersey in order to stay out of the red. He calls these subsidies ‘life support,’ but if he’d have taken a step back, he would have seen them as the natural result of a history of predatory practices toward the region’s most vulnerable population. State subsidies are not signs of Camden’s failure, but of its exploitation. Camden’s story is one of the surrounding region dumping its waste, its trash, its drugs and, yes, its poor into a city and then looking the other way. Whose failure is that?”
Letter from Camden: Who Is to Blame for “America’s Most Desperate Town”? : Stephen Danley, 20 December 2013, Next City (nextcity.org)
“We all know what happened next, unfortunately. Nearly every American city, along with most small towns, hollowed out in the decades to follow. Except for cities with a long history of multifamily residential buildings downtown such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, walkable central districts lost their shopping pizzazz along with their department stores and high-end retail (and a lot more).”
Is the ‘Traditional Downtown’ Dead? : Kaid Benfield, 18 December 2013, The Atlantic Cities blog
“Too often, after years of neglect, depopulation, crime, and disinvestment, cities have viewed recruiting richer residents as the essence of successful renewal. But a revival of urban America as a whole means that more people, from all walks of life, should be able to live safely, affordably, and comfortably in our cities.”
Pushing Poor People to the Suburbs Is Bad for the Environment : Ben Adler, 16 December 2013, Mother Jones
A Whole Foods Grows in Brooklyn : Elizabeth Greenspan, 17 December 2013, The New Yorker Currency Blog
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Will 2014 Be the Year the Tech Bubble Bursts? : Marcus Wohlsen, 16 December 2013, Wired Business
For most headlines that end in a question mark, the answer is “no”. In this case, the article is a bit more nuanced — the tech bubble coming is a different one from the 1990s. The companies are smarter, the tech ecosystem is bigger, the business models are more realistic, and the old scars from the last bubble still hurt. That said, investors who are seeing little to no gains elsewhere in this recession will pile on like lemmings—all together and at the wrong time—so there will be some sort of correction and reckoning. The chumps and marks will get taken, again, and the smart/lucky will cash the checks and start planning the bubble after that. 2028, anyone?
Tech is different this time, though. And much more thoroughly integrated with the rest of our lives.
“Guys like William Gibson knew this before the rest of us, and his fiction reflects that. He doesn’t even consider what he’s doing now to be science fiction now, because the present has become absurdly sci fi.”
We’re Living In The World Cyberpunk Tried To Warn Us About : Matt Staggs, 16 December 2013, Suvudu.com
