Are Characters Possible in a Fragmented World?

Interesting article in The Economist on Stan Lee the graphic artist and creator of many Marvel comic characters. The article explores how characters ended up on screen but also looks into how markets are fragmenting thus making the ability to be successful as Marvel was far more difficult. (The Economist):

But there is a hitch. Mr Lee’s most celebrated creations appeared at a time when comic books were widely read. The heroes were honed over many years by other writers and artists. As a result a great many people of diverse ages are familiar with them and will happily spend $10 to sit in a cool cinema and renew their acquaintance. Blockbuster audiences are built not of enthusiastic fans—there are never enough—but of people who are vaguely aware of a character or a story and want to see what a studio does with it.

These days it is extremely difficult to propel new characters or stories into broad public consciousness, and therefore hard to mobilise a mass audience for films based on them. Take Alan Moore, a revered writer of comic books. His works have inspired five ambitious films (the most recent is “Watchmen”), none of them hugely successful. And what goes for comic books also goes for television shows, computer games and other fodder for summer blockbusters. As audiences fragment, there is simply less mass content to throw into the Hollywood recycling machine.

About Being Semantic

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has just published one of their periodic Technical Reports where they discuss and forecast the impact of the semantic web on business operations. This report is readable - although the concepts are complex, and there are several examples that elucidate the practical implications of adopting some of the theory (BBC).

Fundamental to the development of the semantic web will be the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which builds on the experience of xml and improves on the benefits provided by relational data. Central to RDF are Universal Resource Identifiers (URI) which are 'supersets' of URLs - your garden variety web address. In a semantic context, URIs are more specific than URLs and on page 7 of the report, the authors explain how this interplay works.

There are three key themes noted in this report:

1. Establishment & Use of Ontologies and Taxonomies. Increasingly anyone in data and information management is going to understand and recognise what these terms mean. In the publishing business, far more attention is now being paid to the the way data can/should relate to other data (Ontological) as well as how data can be structured hierarchically (taxonomy). As hierarchical classification schemes, taxonomies can/are limiting - although this factor may not be apparent until an organization considers utilizing one advantage of ontologies which is that they can be linked to other ontologies.
   
   
2. The ability to link your data with data from any third party will ultimately create better business information and support both more accurate and faster decision making. The Linked Data Initiative is a standards based approach to try to make this happen. In a linked data environment data can be shared and the interrelationships between data understood within the confines of a shared understanding of a common ontology. In the report, PWC examine how establishing a new retail location using complex data from a variety of sources can be aggregated and made actionable all using a linked data framework. As the report says, linked data is about both 'supply and demand': Accessing the data you want but also allowing others to access your data as well.
   
   
3. The report also addresses SPARQL and SQL. Theres much more in the report but SPARQL supports interpretation of graphical data representing an improvement over SQL. This discussion challenges the upper reaches of my pay grade so you will have to read this yourself.
   

I would have liked to quote directly from the report but ironically the pdf is disabled for copy and paste. However the report is free and runs about 50pages and I won't spoil the ending for you.

Also of relevance are two presentations I made at the Frankfurt supply chain meeting. Digital Age and Intelligent Publishing Supply Chain.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 22): University Press, BookExpo, BordersUK, News Corp

If you are on Twitter you will have seen these. Apologies. Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed takes a look at some of the University Presses at BookExpo and their comparative investments in eBook formats:

Many people take it for granted that the economic downturn amounts to a a tipping point in e-publishing, at least for scholarly presses, and perhaps especially for them.But even the publishers moving steadily deeper into the digital terrain are doing so watchfully.

The expression "tipping point" (with its implication of "point of no return") hardly seems to apply, to judge by this year's Book Expo. A more fitting term might be the one used by Ellen Trachtenberg, a publicist for the University of Pennsylvania Press. "We're at a tension point," she told me. "We don't have any e-books, but our board of trustees is keen on doing them, so we are looking into it."

PW's BookExpo content is here. Elizabeth Eaves took a walk around BookExpo last weekend (Forbes)

Why write books? The compulsion to try to entertain, persuade or make meaning is irresistible. At the very least, the industry appears to be handling technological change more gracefully than the music business or ink-on-paper newspapers, in ways that are reassuring to an author. Publishers will automatically make new books available in a digital format, suitable for the Kindle or other e-readers--though mid-list authors may have to ask, or arm wrestle, publishers into digitizing their older books. Nobody knows whether sales in the still-tiny digital books market will cannibalize print book sales or add to them, nor whether margins on e-books will be enough to keep publishers in business. It seems wisest, though, to give the people what they want, how they want it.

Borders UK denied they are facing critical financial issues rather that they need some external help to rightsize their retail space. Nevertheless, the appointment of a financial adviser raises speculation about the company's future. The Bookseller

More from News Corp - this time newly hired Jonathan Miller - on developing a paid content model. (Hollywood Reporter)

Paid digital media services are the wave of the future for media giants, and the only question is how fast they will become reality, News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller said here Tuesday evening, adding that the conglomerate will push to develop new business models that work for the industry overall. "We will see a return to multiple revenue streams," Miller predicted after his chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch recently hinted more of his empire's digital content offers may carry a price tag in the future. "Free versus pay is one of the really big issues out there," and this is the time the industry seems ready to find answers, he said. We want to see a (business) model established.

Also on The Twitter, there was a publishing boot camp in Toronto over the weekend and here is the link An interview in The Observer magazine with crime novelist Martina Cole:

I've run down the batteries of not one but two tape recorders. My note-taking hand is aching. And when I finally arrive home, I have to spend some time sitting quietly in a darkened room. It's not unlike being kidnapped, interviewing Martina Cole, although if you've read any of her novels, you're probably thinking a claw hammer through an eye socket, or a shank in the neck and a severed artery or two, whereas in actual fact it's a constant, non-stop stream of stories, opinions, homilies, exhortations and offers of tea, coffee, wine, cake, ham salad, water, coffee. Ah go on, a little glass of wine. And when I come to transcribe it all, I manage 29 pages, or 16,000 words, or to put this into context, roughly a fifth of a novel, before I simply give up, overwhelmed. God, she can talk, Martina. It's non-stop. The stories just keep on coming. She doesn't even need to pause for breath. I begin to suspect that she might have gills. Or that she breathes through her skin like a frog. But then she's written 16 novels, all bestsellers; in fact she's far and away the bestselling British author today, translated into 28 languages, trumped in the charts only by the likes of The Da Vinci Code, so it really shouldn't be surprising that she knows how to spin a yarn, although somehow it is.

Simple Analyst

Robert MacMillan over at Reuters MediaFile observes some facile 'research' from Moody's on the future of newspapers (which he cites) and then concludes with this:

This seems to leave managers with only one way to stay in business for now. If you want your credit rating not to fall further, lay off a few hundred or thousand more employees and make sure the newspaper features a bunch of under-edited news, lame stories and mostly wire copy. Repeat process as often as possible until shareholders and bondholders have a chance to cash out. Then look for another job, maybe as a McKinsey-style efficiency consultant.

Well done. It's no wonder these rating agencies contributed to the mess we are in. I do hope no one pays for this report.

Google on Orphans

On their public policy blog, Google addresses how the Google Book Settlement will increase access to 'out of print' works and also aid to decrease the number of 'orphan' works by enabling a comprehensive process for identification of rights owners. (Google):

As “parent” rightsholders claim their books through the Book Rights Registry, we think it will become clear that most out-of-print books are not actually “orphans.” Books that were once difficult for anyone to license will become books that are very easy for everyone to license, either through the Book Rights Registry or directly from their owners. Furthermore, many books that some think are in-copyright orphans (including a large percentage from 1963 or before) are actually out-of-copyright, and Google is working to make more information available that can clarify their copyright status.

Of course, some rightsholders may still be too difficult to find. Under the settlement Google will be able to open up access to truly orphaned books, but we still think more needs to be done to allow anyone and everyone to use these works. Any company or organization that wants to open up access to this untapped resource should be able to do so. The settlement is not a panacea, since it only covers a subset of orphaned works, provides only certain uses, and is not able to extend these uses to other providers. The need for comprehensive orphan works legislation is not diminished.

Australian Territorial Copyright

The Globe and Mail has the text of a speech given by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan (Sound of One Hand Clapping) during the Sydney Writers Festival two weeks ago. In this speech he makes and impassioned call to the Australian government to abandon their review of the policy of territorial copyright retention of which Flanagan believes is essential to the continued vibrancy and health of the nations written word.

Here are several samples from this long speech:

The battle to understand this world in our own tongue that Tyndale's Bible represents, to make the universal particular, the sacred secular, and the secular in its turn sacred, is a battle that has strangely resurfaced here in Australia this year.

For it falls to us to once more to defend the right – our right and our deepest need – to our own stories in our own voice, which is also, historically and perhaps inevitably, that same battle between truth and power.

At this moment, as many of you would be aware, the Australian government is giving serious consideration to a proposal that would see the ending of territorial copyright for Australian writers.

This dullest and dreariest of phrases – territorial copyright – is the drab motley thrown over a measure which will do untold damage to Australian culture. I cannot begin to convey to you the destructive stupidity of what is being proposed, nor the intense sadness and great anger that so many Australian writers feel about this proposal.

.....

But Australian publishing over the last four decades is an extraordinary cultural achievement. In an era when national cultures suffered greatly from globalization, ours grew stronger, in no small part because of our book industry. We read Australian stories from cradle to grave, and the best of our writing is judged around the world as globally significant.

....

Writers and books that matter will become like an endangered species with no habitat left to support them. The fate of most of them in the large chain and discount mega-store culture will be that of marsupials in new outer suburbs, dicing with death on freeways, not knowing until that short moment of blinding light dazzle that this is no longer their home.

That is but a small sample.

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 21): BookExpo, Newspapers, China,

We are lagging behind this week due to BookExpo and the resulting back log of work; nevertheless, here are some of the news stories I found interesting over the past week. Many (all) of my twitter feeders (is there such a thing) will have seen most of these. From PW describing the seminar "Stupid Publisher Tricks"(PW):

Among the more provocative proposals were one from Miller that booksellers start publishing and Madan’s request for a good clean data feed, or virtual catalog of all publishers' books, so that independent booksellers could effectively sell books online. Fifteen years after the rise of Amazon, he said, there is no such catalog, and independents have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ingram or Baker & Taylor for data that should be free.

Peter Preston points to some stats that suggest all is not doom and gloom in newspapers - perhaps though only where we notice (Guardian):

Cue those WAN statistics one more time and find that 81% of American online users also say they read a printed paper at least once a week. In sum, for the moment, it's not one or the other: it's both. And transition from one to the other, where it's happening, comes unpredictably and patchily from city to city and country to country. Gurus with web fish to fry sing a different tune, sure enough. Burgeoning tycoons who got their debt mountains wrong (like David Montgomery at Mecom) invoke broken old revenue models. It all seems so obvious boiled down to a ritual sentence or two in some TV script.

But too much "doom and gloom", according to O'Reilly? Absolutely: and perhaps he should look at his own Independent web figures - up 63% in a year - for some added personal cheer. But it's still a melee of hopes, dreams and disappointments out there - and, certainly, too many glib simplicities.

Paul McGuinness the manager of U2, isn't satisfied with copyright protections despite the Pirate Bay case and service providers required to do more (CNET):

I would really like them to willingly go to the movie studios and the music companies and say this is how we can collect money from the people who are listening to your stuff and watching your movies. We acknowledge that it's the fair thing to do and we have some responsibility for doing it. Let's do it together and let's make some money. I've heard the estimates that half of traffic across the Internet is technically illegal non-paid-for content. That can't go on. It's such a waste. Future generations of artists will face a vacuum where payment used to be. Artists are entitled to get paid, whatever kind of art they do, the same way technologists are entitled to get paid.

But if the technology you develop prevents artists from being remunerated then there's something wrong with it. I'd like to get a moral tone into the discussion. I think there is a big moral question for civilization. It's not good enough to say that the Internet is free to all and there should be no restrictions on its use. I had the experience last year of making a speech to a group of (Members of European Parliament) in Brussels and they were very hostile to the idea of any kind of monitoring or regulation of the Internet, which they regarded as the precursor to a form of taxation. And of course, as politicians, they were against any kind of increased taxation. But it's not taxation. It's paying for something that people are consuming.

NYTimes is becoming its own ad agency (Forbes)

In the past month, the Times has unveiled a real-time news wire feature wrapped in ads for software outfit SAP ( SAP - news - people ), as well as a Web campaign for the AMC series Mad Men, which includes a mini-archive of Times articles about the show within the ad unit. The Times' recent efforts demonstrate a realization that newspapers and magazines can't wait for Madison Avenue to create lucrative new ad models online. J.P. Morgan estimates newspaper revenues will decline 20% this year to $30 billion. Last year, the digital arms of newspapers only contributed an estimated $3 billion. Along with experimenting with new ad mechanisms, the Times has said it is considering various plans to charge users for access to NYTimes.com.

Days after BookExpo you may recognise the truth in research that suggests that Publishing and Media professionals lead all industries in binge drinking (Independent):

People working in media, publishing and entertainment sectors are the heaviest drinkers, according to the Department of Health. They consume an average of 44 units a week, almost twice the recommended maximum amount of three-to-four units a day for men, and two-to-three for women.

Plans for the Plastic Logic reader device were discussed at the All things digital conference (FOX)

A big highlight from the event is Plastic Logic’s new e-reader that is bigger and thinner than Amazon’s (AMZN) popular Kindle and targeted at business users.

This device measures 8.5 inches by 11 inches, the same as the standard letter size for the paper you load into your printer at the office.

Plastic Logic CEO Rich Archuletta told FOX Business in an interview the device will be available at the start of 2010 and that it will be able to handle all different types of content, including PDFs, Word, and Excel files. He showed a working prototype of the device displaying a cover of Fortune magazine as well as a couple of documents.

Very interesting (and generally off the radar) article about publishing mergers in China (Economist):

At a recent industry forum Liu Binjie, the director of China’s General Administration of Press and Publication, the industry regulator, said China would like to see such partnerships between studios and publishers lead to a massive consolidation, leaving half a dozen giant companies capable of spreading Chinese words internationally. Small firms not swept up in the various deals would be able to auction manuscripts. Instead of indirect censorship through publishers, there would be a government clearing house.

The result would be a better organised industry, somewhat similar to what already exists for Chinese films. Production is largely done by government studios, censorship is overt, productions have a global audience and there is strong consumer demand. However, much of that demand is met not by Chinese films but by black-market consumption of foreign films blocked from entering China legally because of tight controls.