Holtzbrinck Online

A Long Way Gone

This compelling memoir by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, is on sale today. I’ve been keeping close tabs on this book since early January, when the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, asked us to develop the website for the book. Since then, A Long Way Gone has received a huge amount of advance praise and very strong reviews. As Belinda Luscombe of Time Magazine says, “Ishmael Beah doesn't realize it, but he's about to become a [literary-humanitarian] rock star … (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.)” Beah, now 26 and living in New York City, recalls his journey in and out of the madness of the civil war in Sierra Leone. He fled attacking rebels at the age of twelve, was picked up by the government army at thirteen, and after years experiencing and committing unspeakable acts, released to a UNICEF rehabilitation center. His story is poignant: shocking, and often extremely violent, but also touching and hopeful. It’s one of those books that has stayed with me; that I think about at random moments. Importantly, as Beah continues to point out in interviews and speeches to non-profit and humanitarian organizations, his story represents the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the world. Poised to become a huge success, the book, which is also the current Starbucks Entertainment featured book, is well worth the time.

For more, visit www.alongwaygone.com

The literary stars of tomorrow (and the closing of bookstores today)

Chris Powers writes on the Guardian book blog about the demise of the independent bookstore, and wonders about the literary scenes of tomorrow (he cites as past examples the City Lights store in Calfornia and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris where, in the photo, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are amiably chatting). However, as sad as it is, a number of these venerable bookstores are going out of business, and the next wave of literary scenes will revolve not around bookstores (or even one geographical location, such as Paris in the'20s), but these scenes will instead revolve around online, virtual locations such as websites, blogs and wikis. The Internet has flattened the world to such a degree that a writer no longer needs to hitch a ride across the country to go "on the road"; they can instead explore the world from their laptop. Nor do they need to frequent a physical place in order to meet other writers; instead writers get together in chatrooms, message boards and the comments sections of litblogs (not mention in Second Life). Whether or not this will make them better or worse writers than the Beats or whoever will remain to be seen, but there can be no arguing that the era of the bookstore as the center (or creator) of literary scenes in over, and the dominance of the Internet has arrived.

From the blog: “The question that arises now is whether today's crop of independent bookshops - Bloomsbury's the London Review Bookshop, say, or St Mark's in New York's East Village - can become nests for new literary schools. Do cyberspace's virtual communities obviate the need for a bricks and mortar space to meet, read and exhange ideas? Or, as with books themselves, is their physical presence still an essential part of the process?”

Guardian: The bookshops that shook the world

A Wiki Novel

Back in November, Meredith wrote a post on We Are Smarter Than Me, an anticipated Pearson publication that is a collaborative effort of thousands of authors registered on WeAreSmarter.org. Today, Penguin UK launched a similar effort - its first wiki novel A Million Penguins.

Using MediaWiki technology, anyone who registers on www.amillionpenguins.com is able to edit and/or add onto this web-based tale for the next 5 weeks. Already, there are 500 posts (some by return users), four chapters, and an interlude. While there are no definite plans to publish a print version, the site has quickly developed a decent web community during the first day of launch. By opening registration to any willing participants, it’s questionable whether the material spawned will be quality ficiton, but this is surely beneficial to Penguin’s brand recognition, site traffic, and their entry to social networking.

Read about Penguin UK's wiki novel in this Reuter article.

Yahoo's Flickr Snafu

You may have heard about this already, but if you don't then the Wired article will get you up to speed.   The crux of it is that Yahoo, in building a portal page about the Nintendo Wii decided to stream Flickr photos tagged with "wii" onto the page.   

Flickr users got snarky and decided to tag a bunch of photos "wii" photos that have nothing to do with Ninendo's game console (e.g. the "I'm with stupid" image to the left, which points at Yahoo's logo).   

Yahoo can't filter out the non-Wii photos because tagging is obviously the only metadata they are using to parse through Flickr's photos and since Flickr's license allows users to retain copyright over the photos they load on to the service Yahoo can't get the tags themselves changed.   

I feel some sympathy for Yahoo here.  It is unbelievably tempting to try to tap into the popular web2.0 sites (such as Flickr, YouTube and MySpace).   Doing so grounds a corporate project in the lives of real people and quickly generates content that should be appealing to users.  And having your photo featured on a Yahoo portal is pretty much the definition of 15-minutes of fame. 

One can't help but wonder, if it had been a small internet start-up that chose to use Flickr this way, would they be getting lauded by users for their innovative idea? Or would they be harassed for the temerity of using someone else's content? 

Amateur Night

No, I’m not talking about New Year's Eve … just one of the biggest nights of the year for American marketers and advertisers: The Superbowl. After years of coming up with those clever, snazzy (and sometimes not so much) ads to fill million-dollar time slots between a sporting event watched by nearly half of U.S. television households, advertising heavyweights are passing the torch to the wannabes. As the AP reports, 30-second advertising spots during the Superbowl have a “reported average price of $2.6 million,” so counting on amateur advertisers to conceive and produce worthy commercials “isn't for the faint of heart.” But major advertisers are taking the plunge into territory pioneered by MySpace, YouTube, and American Idol. Doritos, Chevrolet, and the NFL all ran contests this year for creating ads or ideas for ads that will appear in Superbowl spots. The advertisers’ strategy appears to be based on two “buzz” topics in the marketing, media, and entertainment industries. First, like MySpace and YouTube, and even sites like Wikipedia, the commercials tap into the presumed (or perhaps proven) appeal of “user-generated content.” Other companies have made even more substantial investments in consumers’ thirst for user-generated entertainment, e.g., News Corp.’s purchase of MySpace and Google’s purchase of YouTube. Second, the Superbowl advertisers counted on the "wisdom of the crowds" to choose the commercials, or commercial ideas, they will run. For example, the five finalists in the Doritos commercial contest were posted online for a popular vote. The winner will be revealed when it airs on game night. Sound familiar, American Idol fans? As Carey pointed out last week, other companies are achieving success by relying on user submissions and the judgment of a community or consumers. And still others, such as Simon & Schuster, are sponsoring contests inspired by these consumer trends. So the question is, what will get the biggest buzz on February 4th – the professional football or the amateur commercials?

The Deep Backlist: Its Rise & Influence

I've heard mixed reviews about Tom Stoppard's three-parter, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Part 1, is now playing at Lincoln Center) in papers, on TV, online, in elevators, but I am desperate to see it nonetheless. Herzen, Belinsky, Bakunin--- you don't get a chance to see these superstars of 19th-century Russian intellectual history depicted on the stage every season. You could, of course, have read prior to the play's arrival, A Sportsman's Sketches (recommended under What We're Into) or historiographies such as Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance to get yourself in the proper "Russian" frame of mind. If you tried hard enough, you may even have been able to get a copy of Isaiah Berlin's 1978 Russian Thinkers, but not any more. An innocuous list of suggested readings in Utopia's playbill has triggered a "Berlin craze" (see the NYT article). Russian Thinkers (a work for which Berlin had "fairly low expectations," according to Wolfson College fellow Henry Hardy) is currently out of stock, and Penguin, its publisher, has ordered two reprintings of 3500 copies. It's come rushing out of the Penguin backlist from nowhere like Chichikov's carriage, destined, I imagine, to return to its modest place in that backlist once the love affair with Utopia fades. Now, if you could only get Russian Thinkers in ebook (can you?). Then, if Stoppard writes something else that pushes Berlin back out of the ivory tower and into the limelight (or there's a Utopia revival in future years), any corresponding rustlings in the backlist can be more promptly managed. Or so, that's the theory.

Paid Wikipedia?

Wired has an AP article today about companies paying for Wikipedia articles. From the article:

When a blogger revealed this week that Microsoft Corp. wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online slams and a rebuke from the Web encyclopedia's founder for behaving unethically.

The initial controversy was about this incident, but the bulk of the article deals with MyWikiBiz, a company that exists to write wikipedia entries for businesses, a practice that Wikipedia founder James Wales was extremely unhappy about.

While I can completely understand the reason for not allowing a company to request specific changes to their article (a clear violation of Wikipedia's neutrality goals), I can not help but feel that Wikipedia is hobbling itself by not allowing a company like MyWikiBiz to have other companies commission neutral articles.

The only way to be featured on Wikipedia is to have an article that the editors feel is an exemplary piece of work - neutrality being one of the most important aspects of this consideration.  Therefore, an intelligent business will not want a paid writer to put up thinly veiled advertising content, but to write a genuine, factual, and unbiased article.  If anything I feel that this might result in higher quality content than usual as the people writing the articles will be quickly gain experience in sticking to Wikipedia's standards.   

Google keeps a strict line between its paid content (advertising) and non-paid content (search results), but it still places both kinds of content on the same page.  Perhaps accounts for paid Wikipedia writers should tag all of their articles so that readers are aware that the content was solicited and editors can pay extra attention to make sure that neutrality is not compromised, but putting a blanket ban on such articles is almost certainly turning away some perfectly acceptable content in areas that have so far been thinly covered by Wikipedians.

The Corporate Free Music Movement

There is change afoot in the music industry, and it centers around the debate whether to release digital music files in the MP3 format without copyright restrictions (see more in the NYT article). Some independent companies already offer free digital content as a means of creating hype (the logic being that hype will lead to eventual sales). EMI has linked up with Baidu.com in China (where music piracy runs rampant) to provide free streaming music on the latter's site. Yahoo intends to offer more unrestricted digital music files in '07, and Sony BMG and EMI are looking into the unrestricted model as well. Some European governments are assessing consumer-driven demands for legislation on interoperability between formats and platforms (gasp!). I spent a LONG day at a symposium last week intended to create a bit of similar change in the publishing industry. Looks like the momentum is building for more free stuff online, right? Well, the point really isn't about free digital content; its about making profits using free digital content. We're all scrambling to find the right digital business model that incorporates some free content that will make users want to buy. I'm sure many are scrutinizing what the music industry is doing now for lessons on what (not) to do.

The Power of Community

Featured as the Entrepreneur of the Week on Yahoo finance is Threadless.com.  I first heard of Threadless.com when a friend mentioned it on Facebook a few months ago. I paid no attention to the fact that it attracted a huge web following, all I focused on were their laid-back, yet fashionably hip t-shirts. If I had to describe the website in two words, it would be “T-shirts galore”. 

Threadless.com is a retail business that heavily relies on consumer judgments. A majority of t-shirt designs are submitted by registered users via the website and are voted on to determine which designs will go into production. Every registered user has a blog and posts or comments on shirts for sale are cross-referenced on the respective product page. The brilliance of it all is that the community built by this website ensures a constant supply of fresh and original merchandise and then sells it to the same crowd. By passing on production decisions to the site users, calculating the equilibrium on the pesky supply & demand graph is probably avoidable.

Creators of Threadless.com, Nickell and DeHart, have accredited their success to the intricate web community they’ve built. Where else can one reach an international audience and bypass the dilemmas of assorted time zones? Nowhere.

NetFlix Watch Now Program

Netflix recently unveiled their "Watch Now" program that is available to some subscribers already and should be available to all subscribers within six months.   

The details?   It's pretty simple - you get one hour per month of online video watching for each dollar of your subscription plan.   So if you have the $17.99 / month plan you get 18 hours of online video watching.   It is currently limited to people running Windows XP and only streams from a browser - so you are unable to burn it to a DVD or put it on your iPod.  With a good enough connection quality can approach that of a DVD.  The service currently encompasses only about 1,000 movies and TV shows (out of Netflix's collection of 70,000), but that will grow over time.

What is beautiful about the program is that it does not limit how many videos you watch, only the amount of time you spend watching them.   So in addition to watching a full length video you can use this service to sample movies you are thinking about renting, or catch the last few minutes of something you just didn't have time to finish last week.

The New York Times article about the Watch Now program is rather gloomy, pointing out that Netflix is in a crowded marketplace and that their most likely competitor, Blockbuster, has finally rolled out a working subscription plan that seems to offer everything Netflix does plus the ability to exchange movies in-store rather than waiting for them by mail.

Despite pessimism from the Times, I can not help but feel that this program is a grand-slam for Netflix.  It provides an electronic content model that offers an unbelievable amount of flexibility for users, the content scales with current plans so that there is incentive to increase to a better plan without  users feeling like they are being forced into paying more money for an additional service.  And most importantly of all, it paves the way for Netflix to change business models once the infrastructure and demand for digital distribution of movies is firmly in place.   

The result?  A somewhat limited but still very useful addition to an already popular service, and in the background Netflix can work on the legal and technical difficulties behind removing those limitations so that they can eventually offer truly unfettered digital downloads.  That sounds pretty good to me.