Making 2020 Hindsight: Reflections, Recommendations and Running

For the first time in probably 40 years I did not have a seat on an airliner in 2020. Each year, I'd expect to travel to the UK at least once to see family and trips to Europe and other sundry trips in the US would round out my normal travel schedule. In December 2019, I had just returned from a trip to London not realizing it would be a long time before I was back, and I already had firm upcoming travel plans for Florida and Seoul. I've had years where I've overdone my travel, such as the three years I commuted to Oxford (which turned out to be a complete waste of time), but I realize now how much I miss air travel even if to places I have visited frequently. Of course, perspective is important: The planes and the places will be there in the coming months (and years) and it's a small consideration given the plight we are in due to COVID. The PND household's circumstances are hardly catastrophic and I am more than comfortable with the restrictions and it is stunning to me how many people believe they are above even simple sacrifices. Even the people making the rules!

As a by product of the above I took perhaps a quarter as many photos (400) in 2020 than in a normal year. Notably many fewer photos of New York (and none of London). I spend decent amount of time in arm chair travel looking at my past photo collections.

When gyms closed in March I was still of the mind that COVID wasn't a big deal and I was at the gym the day before they all closed. Within days, my attitude radically changed as the NY news reported on the body bags being carried out to mobile refrigerator trucks. So the gym was off limits which meant outside exercise was the only viable option and I upped my running game. I track my running activity and in a normal year I usually run between 1000 and 1100 miles. In the past 24 years of diligently tracking my running, I've run as much as 1,200 miles and as few as 500. 

In 2020 I ran 1,400 miles - which is a lot! My goal next year will be a little less but if I do it I will have run 25,000 miles in 25 years. But don't be intimidated because I get slower and slower as the years go by and each year more and more other runners pass me. Occasionally, I'll get a friendly wave from a cute girl who I know is thinking that "it's nice to see the old guys out here." Cold bothers me less than when I was younger but as you get older it is harder to deal with the heat. Bodies can't cool down as quickly as you get older. I am not entirely sure if I will ever go back to New York Sports Club.

As a consultant, working from home is often the norm but had it not been for COVID I would have been spending some time each week in a client office. I miss this more than I would have anticipated and the casual conversation, connections and serendipity that are always part of the work environment is very difficult to create in Zoom. I do think workers will continue to adapt and evolve to this new model but I don't see businesses continuing to be fully online once the restrictions are lifted. COVID will have a lasting influence on work conditions and experiences leading to more flexible arrangements and benefits for both employers and employees. I think it will be more incremental than revolutionary. Dry cleaners will struggle though.

Despite the lack of commuting, there wasn't a lot of extra free time. Placing a m/in/law in care and fixing up her house for rental in the middle of a pandemic didn't help. Mrs PND also spent a lot of time saving democracy with phone banking and writing postcards. I think it helped.

In most years I will read 20+ books a year and this year was similar; however, I read more non-fiction in 2020 than in other years. In December 2019, I was wandering around Politics and Prose and resolved myself to read more political history during 2020. I achieved this and read about Henry VIII, FDR, Grant, Carter, Churchill and others. I interspersed these books will my more normal roster of espionage and crime books. My five favorite books this year were:

About the first year of Churchill's prime ministership, the book interested me because it added in a lot personal history about the personalities and relationships of the people surrounding WSC at this time. I've read some of Martin Gilbert's biography of WSC but this book - by no means as detailed - filled in some gaps. I have many mixed feelings about Churchill and see the American infatuation with him as distinctly odd. Later in the year, I read FDR (below) and it was interesting to read about the same time period from FDR's perspective.

Alter's book is engaging and really well written. He clearly likes Carter but he is also critical about the President which leads to a balanced and interesting narative. My family came to the US in 1977 and we had watched news reports and election news during 1976 from an external perspective. Carter to me was the peanut farmer and little more. As the late seventies progressed my impressions of Carter as a failed leader were cemented and like many others I saw the comparison with Reagan a stark. As it turns out, Carter by many criteria, was one of our most effective Presidents with many initiatives which were either (or both) ahead of his time or long in impact. By chance, one of my last 2020 books was a fictionalized espionage story of the Shah's downfall which also played large in Alter's book.

I read a review of this book in The Economist and as a fan of Conrad, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Jasanoff places Conrad in context which adds scope and perspective to many of the titles he wrote.  Later in the year, I also read King Leopold's' Ghost about how the King of Belgium carved an empire out of central Africa. In the latter book, there are many references to Conrad and Heart of Darkness which aided my understanding of both stories.

This book is long and while comprehensive and well written I thought it was a light read. JE Smith is well known for this book and while I enjoyed it, I thought it was more an appetizer than a full blooded investigation of one of the most successful US presidents. As a side note, as outrage grew over trump's supreme court appointment and calls to pack the court accelerated, one of the more interesting sections of this book concerned FDR's court packing scheme and how it torpedoed his mandate. What a powerful personality. It was a tragedy how his doctors ignored is health issues. With better care he would have lived far longer.

The last in the Cromwell trilogy, I hope Mark Rylance comes back to film this book as well. I enjoyed this book but found it labored at times. Mantel is such a master of language that it is difficult to criticize but I thought the first two titles seemed to flow easier than this one. Perhaps it was because of the inevitable outcome. It is still a compelling story.
 

 

If interested, here are my books on Librarything.

The ability to binge video and tv shows has been one of civilization's greatest inventions. To be untethered to the network schedule and eliminate advertising in the process is real progress! Some highlights this year included:

Call My Agent - Based around on the offices of a french film star agenting business. (Netflix) 

Better Call Saul - Possibly the best written show on tv at the moment (AMC)

Marvelous Mrs Maisel - Housewife turned comedienne (Amazon)

Rake - Australia show which follows the antics of an unconventional attorney (Netflix)

The Queen's Gambit - About chess (Netflix)

After Life - From Ricky Gervais about a widower. (Netflix)

 

 

 

 

For more see my year end newsletter.

Looking forward to a better 2021.

*******

Michael Cairns is a publishing and media executive with over 25 years experience in business strategy, operations and technology implementation.  He has served on several boards and advisory groups including the Association of American Publishers, Book Industry Study Group and the International ISBN organization.   Additionally, he has public and private company board experience.   He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 9: ISBNs, Books & Commuting, Course Guides, Music Money + More

The Economist readers in the group may have seen that the lowly ISBN made it into the newspaper this week. It wasn't a particularly good article and I said so. (Economist):

This is a curious article: In some cases, it misses the point and, in others, it misinforms the reader about how the publishing industry currently works.

There is no doubt that the ISBN--as a global standard for the identification of physical product--is facing, or will soon face, a challenge as physical books become eBooks but its irrelevance is still a fair distance off. A mix of formats (electronic and paper)is likely to exist for many years (particularly with the variability in markets around the world for adoption of the eBook) and the use of the ISBN is long and deeply embedded in all significant publishing systems from editorial to marketing to royalty accounting.

Further, it is hard to agree with your statement that the ISBN hampers small publishers when the past ten years have seen the most significant growth in small- and medium-sized publishers in history. Both Bowker and Nielsen report these numbers each year for the US and UK markets. One circumstance you allude to is that in 'olden times'--when we had more than two significant bookstore chains (in the US)--there was no question as to whether to obtain an ISBN; however, a publisher today could make a perfectly valid decision not to acquire an ISBN and simply sell their book or eBook through Amazon . . . and they could do okay with that. But why would any publisher with a book offering legitimate sales potential want to exclude all other retailers? That would be hard to understand.

Assigning an ISBN to a book never guaranteed 'mainstream' publication - it's not clear what you mean by that. Certainly, retailers would not (do not) accept a book without an ISBN but, by the same token, B&N won't accept your book simply because it has an ISBN. There's a little bit more to it than that. I wrote about the prospects for the ISBN back in 2009 and reflected on the ASIN situation. It's not new and it was never altruistic. Here it is, if interested: http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2009/08/isbn-is-dead.html

The other identifiers you note are interesting but don't really apply or fit with the requirements of the book (e- or p-) supply chain. There's no question the industry needs to think differently about identifiers but I don't think that's a point you end up making. Even if a book can be easily downloaded and paid for, someone still has to do the accounting and make sure the right publisher gets the right payment so they can the pay the author and contributors their share. Individuals and small publishers could possibly do without an ISBN but, in doing so, they may only be limiting their opportunities.

Commuting on the Underground: John Lanchester rides the London Underground (Guardian):

This is an academic finding that hasn't crossed over into the wider world. I've never seen a film or television programme about the importance of commuting in Londoners' lives; if it comes to that, I've never read a novel that captures it either. The centrality of London's underground to Londoners – the fact that it made the city historically, and makes it what it is today, and is woven in a detailed way into the lives of most of its citizens on a daily basis – is strangely underrepresented in fiction about the city, and especially in drama. More than 1bn underground journeys take place every year – 1.1bn in 2011, and 2012 will certainly post a larger number still. That's an average of nearly 3m journeys every day. At its busiest, there are about 600,000 people on the network simultaneously, which means that, if the network at rush hour were a city in itself, rather than an entity inside London, it would have the same population as Glasgow, the fourth biggest city in the UK. The District line alone carries about 600,000 people every day, which means that it, too, is a version of Glasgow. 

There are quite a few novels and films and TV programmes about Glasgow. Where are the equivalent fictions about the underground? New York has any number of films about its subway – The Warriors, the John Carpenter movie from 1979, is one of the best of them, and explicitly celebrates the network's geographical reach across the whole city, from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to Coney Island. New York also has Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham 123, an all-subway-located thriller, among many other cinematic depictions. Paris has the Luc Besson film Subway, and plenty of other movies. London has next to nothing. (Let's gloss over the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors – though not before noting that the crucial moment when she either does or doesn't catch the train is on the District line, at Fulham Broadway. Spoiler alert: in the version in which she rushes and successfully catches the train, she dies. A District line driver would call this a useful reminder that this isn't the national rail network, and there will be another one along in a minute.) There's a wonderfully bad Donald Pleaseance movie from 1972 called Death Line, set entirely in Russell Square underground station; there were some episodes of Doctor Who in the 60s, which seemed scary at the time, about the tube network being taken over by robot yetis. To a remarkable extent, though, that's it. London is at the centre of innumerable works of fiction and drama and TV and cinema, but this thing at the heart of London life, which does more to create the texture of London life than any other single institution, is largely and mysteriously absent.

American Public University and their course guides is an interesting project (CampusTech)

The online course guides project is an award-winning academic technology initiative to match every one of APUS's online courses with an online library course guide, a new approach to offset the high cost of traditional print text books. Now that the project has successfully completed guides for a little over half of the university's course offerings, further practical metrics may be applied to the initial statistical analytic framework to widen the project's focus from course guide completion rates to higher levels of quality assurance and sustainability.

Analysis on data reported on the music industry indicates that some music artists can make money (Atlantic):

Last month, Northwestern University law professor Peter DiCola released the results of a fascinating survey that tried to discern exactly how much income most working musicians make off of people actually paying for their recordings (or in some cases, their compositions). His very broad answer was between 12 and 22 percent, depending on whether you counted pay from session playing (shown as "mixed" below). If that doesn't sound like real money to you, consider how you'd react if your boss suddenly said you were getting a 10 percent pay cut tomorrow.

DiCola's study isn't perfect. It analyzes answers from roughly 5,300 musicians who volunteered for the survey, meaning it lacked the element of random sampling that most social science work strives for. The participants were overwhelmingly white (88 percent), male (70 percent), and old (the largest demographic was 50-to-59-year-olds). Almost 35 percent were classical musicians, and another 16 percent were jazz artists. In short, this isn't going to offer a crystal clear financial portrait of your up-and-coming Pitchfork darling.

Nonetheless, the results do offer insight into how workaday guitarists, saxophonists, singers, songwriters, and timpani players -- 42 percent of the group earned all of their income from music-related work -- earn a living. And music sales (or streams) are usually a small but by no means insignificant piece of the picture.

Do we own our eBooks? Covering old ground at Salon:

Switching devices presents another headache for readers. Late last year, independent booksellers made a deal with Kobo, an e-book retailer that also sells its own e-reader devices. The indies now sell both the devices and Kobo e-books. People who want to support their local independent bookstore might contemplate switching from the Kindle to the Kobo, but if they do they’ll have to leave their (DRM-protected) Kindle books behind on their old device. If you are an early e-book adopter who wants to keep and reread the books you bought for your Kindle, you’re locked into the Kindle platform.

Tablets like the iPad are slightly different. The tablet’s owner can install numerous proprietary apps to read a variety of e-book formats, but the titles have to stay in their own walled gardens. You can’t move your Kindle books into your iBook library, for example. This is a minor annoyance, but annoying all the same! When I got my first iPad, I mostly bought Kindle e-books because Amazon’s app was more versatile. Since then, iBooks has outstripped the Kindle app, especially when it comes to working with books used for research, and I would much rather read and organize all my e-books in iBooks. I can’t. Given such restrictions, it’s debatable whether or not I truly own them.

From my twitter feed this week:

PressBooks Goes Open Source To Let Authors Create Book Sites In Seconds Techcrunch

Not the Same Old Cup of British Tea NYT Watch. 
RR Donnelley results hit by $1bn impairment charge http://ow.ly/i6Qkk
OCLC and ProQuest Collaborate to Enhance Library Discovery. PRNewswire 
What the Library of Congress Plans to Do With All Your Tweets Time 

In sports:
Lancashire County Cricket sign path-breaking 10-year deal ESPNet PND Senior in the news - Congrats & Great News!
 

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 8): TV Serials, Data Profiling, MOOCs. Wood + More

Serialization - Megan Garber in The Atlantic.

The cliffhanger has an obvious narrative value, but it also has a significant social one. And this is part of the debt television now owes to the Internet: services like Facebook and Twitter and their counterparts—not to mention couch-friendly devices like smartphones and tablets—make watching television an increasingly collaborative experience. Trendrr.TV, which tracks TV viewers’ use of social media, reports a whopping 800 percent growth in commentary about first-run TV shows from 2011 to 2012. Social viewing rewards synchronicity: it’s much more fun to tweet about True Blood when your friends are tweeting about it at the same time. Even with our ability to watch a show after it’s aired, using DVRs or online streaming, 43 percent of all time-shifted viewing still occurs on the day of a show’s original broadcast—suggesting once more that, whatever flexibility technology allows, we still prefer to consume our stories as a group.

Why, though? Why choose to be constrained by programming schedules when so much digital life can be lived on demand, shifted to fit our needs rightthisminute? Part of it, certainly, is social: simultaneous viewing gives us something to talk about. Schedules are one of the compromises we make for community.

Long article in The Nation about data profiling (The Nation):

Big Salesman is engineering a far grosser violation of our privacy than most people suspect—not a single incident, but a slow, unstoppable process of profiling who we are and what we do, to be sold to advertisers and marketing companies. Information that we reveal about ourselves constantly every day in our online and offline actions has become valuable to those who collect and amass it. Because the value does not lie in any one piece of data but in its unification and aggregation, the data in sum is worth far more than its individual parts. Ticketmaster may know which concerts I’ve attended and Amazon may know which albums I’ve bought, but each company would benefit if it had the other’s file on me. It’s a slow death by a thousand clicks: thousands of people see you on the street every day and it does not feel like an invasion of privacy, but if one person follows you everywhere as you work, read, watch movies and do myriad other things, it becomes stalking. And so we are stalked in the pursuit of marketing optimization.

Experimenting with the MOOC business model (Chronicle):

The first, called the "university self-service model," essentially allows a participating university to use edX's platform as a free learning-management system for a course on the condition that part of any revenue generated by the course flow to edX.

The courses developed under that model will be created by "individual faculty members without course-production assistance from edX," and will be branded separately in the edX catalog as "edge" courses until they pass a quality-review process, according to a standard agreement provided to The Chronicle by edX.

Once a self-service course goes live on the edX Web site, edX will collect the first $50,000 generated by the course, or $10,000 for each recurring course. The organization and the university partner will each get 50 percent of all revenue beyond that threshold.

The second model, called the "edX-supported model," casts the organization in the role of consultant and design partner, offering "production assistance" to universities for their MOOCs. The organization charges a base rate of $250,000 for each new course, plus $50,000 for each time a course is offered for an additional term, according to the standard agreement.

Norwegian Wood isn't just a Beatles song it's also a TV show (NYT). Isn't it good?

“My first thought was, ‘Well, why not make a TV series about firewood?’” Mr. Moeklebust said in an interview. “And that eventually cut down to a 12-hour show, with four hours of ordinary produced television, and then eight hours of showing a fireplace live.”

There is no question that it is a popular topic. “Solid Wood” spent more than a year on the nonfiction best-seller list in Norway. Sales so far have exceeded 150,000 copies — the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, to 9.5 million in the United States — not far below the figures for E. L. James’s Norwegian hit “Fifty Shades Fanget,” proof that thrills come in many forms.

“National Firewood Night,” as Friday’s program was called, opened with the host, Rebecca Nedregotten Strand, promising to “try to get to the core of Norwegian firewood culture — because firewood is the foundation of our lives.” Various people discussed its historical and personal significance. “We’ll be sawing, we’ll be splitting, we’ll be stacking and we’ll be burning,” Ms. Nedregotten Strand said.

From my twitter feed this week:

Why Do Publishers Hate Us? | American Libraries Magazine AmLib
David Bowie and Me. Guardian
Coursera Adds 29 Schools, 90 Courses And 4 New Languages To Its Online Learning Platform Techcrunch
An academic press sues a librarian, raising issues of academic freedom | Inside Higher Ed InsideHigherEd

Larry David Cautions: It Could Have Been Worse

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Hope and Change 2 - Barack Obama: It Could Have Been Worse
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Only Fools and Horses

There's news this week the the long running and well loved UK TV show Only Fools and Horses may be adapted for the US.  Personally, I think this is an impossible task mostly because the show is so culture based and the two actors, David Jason  and Nic Lyndhurst, who play the lead characters Dell and Rodney work so well together.

Here's what the Independent said:

A pilot episode is said to be in the pipeline, written by Steven Cragg and Brian Bradley, writers and producers of the US hit series Happy Endings and Scrubs. The adaptation is sticking closely to the basic premise of the hit BBC 1 comedy, centring on "the misadventures of two streetwise brothers and their ageing grandfather as they concoct outrageous, morally questionable get-rich-quick schemes in a bid to become millionaires".
As most Britons can confirm, it's an accurate description of Derek and Rodney Trotter's hapless money-making antics. The question is whether a US audience will appreciate the nuances of this peculiarly British hit programme. That will depend on how skilfully the makers can adapt David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst's unique comic blend for an audience unlikely to have heard of Peckham.

And to give you a taste of what this show was about here is a clip:

DOI To Become Backbone of New Entertainment Content Registry

I have long believed that entertainment media is begging for a uniform identifier system and collaborative database approach and a recently announced coalition may be bringing us closer to this eventuality. Led by MovieLabs, CableLabs(R), Comcast and Rovi Corporation a non-profit group has been formed that will provide a uniform approach to cataloging movies, television shows, and other commercial audio/video assets with unique identifiers (IDs).

The system is being developed as an open, standards-based effort built on the established Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system, created by the International DOI(R) Foundation and based on the widely used Handle System persistent identifier technology. In addition, it uses the open-source registry software from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). The DOI framework will not be unfamiliar to publishing professionals especially those in the journal business and the related (non-profit) entity CrossRef. It appears this coalition in the entertainment business will attempt to mimic the successful CrossRef application of DOI technology.

The press release was long (and I've summarized some above) but here is more:

Backed by a broad group of industry players, including Deluxe, Universal Pictures, Neustar, Paramount Pictures, Sonic Solutions, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc., Civolution, Vobile, INA (L'institut national de l'audiovisuel), and others, the registry is set up as an industry resource to help streamline digital commerce and simplify consumer transactions. The consortium is actively looking to expand with new partners and participants internationally.

Each year, millions of new entertainment assets from many sources and distribution channels are being added to the massive amount of content available in the marketplace. With the growth of digital and other alternative distribution channels, keeping track of all of these content products, especially videos, is becoming an increasingly complex task for many businesses in the entertainment supply chain. EIDR has been developed to address a critical need for a universal ID system for all types of audio/video assets in the entertainment industry, making it easier for businesses to search, track rights and report revenue based on an assets' unique ID. The expected results are increased accuracy of information flowing to consumers, and lower cost and more efficient back-office processes.

"Most companies today are either using proprietary or disparate organic systems to catalog their entertainment assets, making the process of tracking content across multiple systems very difficult," said Steve Weinstein, president and CEO, MovieLabs. "EIDR can provide the missing communication link between businesses. We look forward to expanding EIDR membership to companies throughout the global content ecosystem, which we think is critical to the success of the effort."

Members of EIDR will have open access to the registry and/ or be able to supply their content to the registry for identification. For content distributors, access to unique IDs will help eliminate confusion between assets with same name or different cuts of the same video, helping to ensure that the right products are being distributed to the consumer. For content producers, the ability to register all of their assets will help simplify their post-production process and potentially lead to greater distribution of their products. Other companies in the supply chain can benefit from a streamlined communication process between their suppliers and distributors.

Hat tip @MJHealy

Technology and Sport 2000-2009

On the Sports Blog at the Guardian they intertwine who did what over the past ten years with a look at how technology has redefined how we interact with live and broadcast sport events (Guardian).

It would be a mistake to think of Wetzel's new buddy from Arizona as the geek at the gate: a pauper disenfranchised by exorbitant ticket costs. This was a lesson in fan empowerment. The non-live spectator is now a kind of Willy Wonka in a paradise of instant-thrill-availability. "In 1999 the vast majority of Americans didn't know how to send or receive a text message on their cell phones," Wetzel wrote. "Now we watch TV on the thing. The biggest story of the decade wasn't what Pacquiao did but where you could watch him do it."

This is one revolution that will be televised. The old models of image and information dispersal have been demolished. For all the dramas on the field of the play technology is the real story of sport in the so-called Noughties. At Premier League football grounds now it is common to sit behind a fan who is watching Jeff Stelling in the Sky Sports Soccer Saturday studio while also observing the game on the turf below.

For some, text alerts, hot clip downloads and breaking news are now part of the package of being a supporter. Sensory overload is available with a few prods of a phone screen. In the United States sports pages fight a losing battle for immediacy against NFL and NBA clubs who broadcast their post-match press conferences straight on to their own websites. Why wait for the next day's paper when you can hear what they said, right here, right now? A newspaper man will answer: because Pravda was not the best source of insights into Kremlin politics, but no one knows how much spectators value the objectivity that an independent media bring to analysis.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 19): Newspapers, BookClubs, Television, George Orwell

Frank Rich in the NYTimes shares his opinion the state and possible future of newspapers:

In the Internet era, many sectors of American media have been re-enacting their at first complacent and finally panicked behavior of 60 years ago. Few in the entertainment business saw the digital cancer spreading through their old business models until well after file-sharing, via Napster, had started decimating the music industry. It’s not only journalism that is now struggling to plot a path to survival. But, with all due respect to show business, it’s only journalism that’s essential to a functioning democracy. And it’s not just because — as we keep being tediously reminded — Thomas Jefferson said so.Yes, journalists have made tons of mistakes and always will. But without their enterprise, to take a few representative recent examples, we would not have known about the wretched conditions for our veterans at Walter Reed, the government’s warrantless wiretapping the scams at Enron or steroids in baseball.

A few months ago I made a similar observation (PND):

Last week, I was discussing this topic with an acquaintance who lives in a fairly affluent part of Central New Jersey. He noted that, in a wide swath covering eight to ten townships and a number of counties, he wasn’t aware of more than one journalist assigned to that market from the larger state-wide newspapers. In Hoboken (regional HQ for PND), where mayoral and city council budget incompetence has seen our property taxes increase 50% in the past six months, there is rarely any local media coverage nor any attendance at city business meetings by traditional media. And forget investigative reporting - even in a state where you could throw a rock in any direction and hit a shady politician. The lack of journalistic attention means that one of the mainstays of democracy (the fourth estate) is eroded and this is seen starkly in Hoboken, where private citizens are forced (on their own initiative) to file freedom of information requests to gain access to basic public interest materials such as meeting minutes and financial statements.

And Rupert Murdoch was vocal this week becoming the self-interested shrill for paid newspaper content (Guardian) Nature Publishing is launching Nature Education and their first project is something named Scitable (ZDNet)

The first deliverable from the Education group is Scitable, an incredible combination of social media and a vast library of articles “commissioned, edited, and reviewed by NPG editors.” While Nature Education intends to expand Scitable’s offerings to include cellular and molecular biology and ultimately tackle the physical sciences, their initial focus has been on genetics. Exploring Scitable makes it very clear that this strategy of sticking with a single area of expertise and dealing with it expertly and in-depth makes a great deal of sense. I’m not a geneticist, but I spent enough years in the publish or perish world of biomedical research to know that they nailed this. The content is accessible, deep, relevant, and understandable. Entire college courses could be taught around this material and there is more than enough content to keep high school students digging deeper into their Advanced Placement Biology courses or to build introductory genetics curricula.

Watch the first series of Wallander stories on PBS happy in the knowledge that there will be a second series - and they won a BAFTA. (TheBookselller) Publishing Trends took a detailed look at Book Clubs (PublishingTrends)

Online retailers’ deep discounts, however, have lured away readers who might once have joined book clubs because they wanted cheap books, and any book can be found online, so today’s book clubs must offer something beyond price and selection. For PBC, that means an active online community; in fact, the club is online only. To expand its reach, PBC has linked with 37 “Alliance Partners,” including the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, and e-mails these organizations’ members about new books once a month. “Those people may buy books through us or may go on to Amazon,” Rosen says, claiming, “We just want to help these books sell, the books to do well, and the authors to do well, and this is our mission.”A look at how in failing health

George Orwell was able to finish 1984 (Observer)

This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."And he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all.

Fears of new technology on incumbent businesses - in this case television - are often found to be unfounded. The Economist notes the impact of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) that we supposed to destroy the television advertising model but have had nothing like that impact. In the words of one interviewee, DVR's have become "a hit saving machine" (The Economist)

Far from being revolutionary, in some ways DVR has made television more stable. With the exception of live events it is broadly true that the most popular programmes are recorded the most. Mr Wakshlag describes it as “a hit-saving machine”. Broadcast television receives a bigger boost from DVR playback than cable television. The device has made it harder to introduce a new television programme, particularly at 10pm when people are likely to be playing back shows they recorded at 8pm or 9pm.

Macrovision Buys Muze

Muze, a company that supplies data information products supporting entertainment products such as music, video, books and games has been acquired by Macrovision for $16.5mm (all cash). Macrovision has been acquiring data companies (notibly TVGuide) and building its data products portfolio to support its business of "connected middleware, media recognition, interactive programming guides, copy protection and rich media, data and metadata on music, games, movies and television programming." From the press release:

Consumers' options are increasing as entertainment becomes digital. They can now enjoy their movies, music or other digital content in more ways, including numerous options online and on portable devices. All of these choices lead to an increased need for enhanced search and discovery capabilities to help consumers find entertainment content that matches their personal preferences. This process is powered by entertainment metadata.

"Macrovision believes that professional entertainment metadata is required for our customers to provide best in class consumer facing products," said Fred Amoroso, President and CEO of Macrovision. "The addition of the Muze assets will complement Macrovision's data solutions. It represents continued execution on our vision of delivering solutions that power a uniquely simple home entertainment experience."

Muze, which has been around since 1991 and is headquartered in NYC, has had a troubled history and was purchased in 2005 by a a private equity company that sought to establish more strategic focus, better cost containment and more professional management. In the years since 2005, Muze has acquired or allied with several companies and purchased the the assets of Loudeye for $11mm in cash in 2006.

In 2005, there was some excitement around the financial prospects for companies like Muze and AMG (another data supplier) and the multiples asked in sales prospectus' were relatively high. While terms were not disclosed on the 2005 Muze sale, some in the industry put the number at north of $30mm.

Ewww, There're All Old

I went to a book reading and signing last week. I don't go to these often but this was an author I really like and I took along some older titles for him to sign. The room at the Lincoln Center B&N was full - about 150 people - and I was the one of the youngest people in the room. Now, maybe at 7:30pm other younger people are out on the town or still at work but I think here in a microcosm is the publishers problem. All the readers of books are getting on a bit and there is less and less interest in the product from the younger generation. I don't believe this is news to most of us, what with the steady stream of official reports suggesting that reading books is going the way of the dodo and I wouldn't have thought the above worthy of comment except I saw the following news report from Variety.

According to a study released by Magna Global's Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets' average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That's the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago -- and the first time the nets' median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo. Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS -- the oldest-skewing network -- has remained fairly steady. "The median ages of the broadcast networks keep rising, as traditional television is no longer necessarily the first screen for the younger set," Sternberg wrote.

I guess the news on CBS proves every cloud has a silver lining. Young people spend money and buy stuff. Why would anyone be trying to reach them via the networks. Are they smoke?

Millennials, Screenagers call them what you will are not bound by tradition or habit or convention. Those characteristics are not necessarily unique to new generations. It is the insertion of the power of personal choice into the mix - the ability to select from a far wider range of activities, options and/or content (with no diminution in quality or access) than was ever the case in years past - which has undercut the appeal of traditional media to the 'youth of today' (...said grandad).

In publishing, as I noted a few weeks ago, I think the traditional method of telling a story in book form is dead. It has no future. Telling stories has a future but the vehicle for that may be more a kin to the holodeck on the Enterprise than print on paper. For example, what if as an introduction to Shakespeare I get to read King Lear with Ian McKellen interactively on stage (and never leave my bedroom). What if I don't know who Ian is and decide Cordelia should be 'played' by Miley Cyrus. What if I decide to set up my own theater program and invite my friends to participate online/in game? All of this is going on now. Some of this content is the same as the stuff we struggled through in book form but not so the milennials. Question is where are the publishers?

Broadcasters Unite!

What if CBS, NBC and ABC launched a joint web-based broadcast portal? Highly unlikely you say? Well, in the UK pundits might also have dismissed out of hand the notion that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 could ever agree on anything let alone jointly developing a web portal for distribution of their content. Today these three companies announced they would launch such a web site in the early part of 2008. All three have existing web content portals and both BBC and ITV intend to keep theirs going in the short term. Earlier in 2007, the BBC launched their i-player client which has not been as successful as the hype that presaged its launch would have suggested. Residents outside the UK are unable to use the i-player and it is assumed the tri-company web site will be off-limits to non-UK users.

The web activities of BBC and ITV place them significantly ahead of the network broadcasters in the US. One aspect of their business model which has made their experimentation with web distribution possible is that the UK companies generally own the content they broadcast. This is not the case in the US although in recent years the networks have built production capability.

The collaboration in the UK will be watched closely and while it may be spun as a consumer bonus - having one location to access the content from the nations' primary broadcasters - the reality could be more prosaic. The costs of building and maintaining a portal for this content could be extreme and each would ultimately be in a race to augment their content with content from other providers. Why not join forces, pool resources and reduce the market for third (fourth) party content? It makes a lot of sense especially in a market that isn't that large to begin with.

In the early 1990's Sky beat the traditional broadcasters into new distribution territory and the broadcasters had no solution. As a result, they lost out on a vast expansion of the consumer broadcast market (satellite). In developing this new collective content portal they could be setting themselves up to be meaningful players in a potentially much larger market place for distributed content.

When Newscorp launched Sky these players were warming the bench but this announcement may enable them to have a role in the future of television.