LJNDawson

SelfPublishedAuthor.com

So, this blog has been sort of fallow these last 2 months because I’ve been working like crazy on another one. As part of my product management duties at Bowker, I’m heading up this new website: SelfPublishedAuthor.com. I’ve been writing like crazy for it – you’ll notice that, so far, all the content is mine. So this poor blog has been neglected.

It’s a cool project because it’s meant to be informational/educational, and just genuinely helpful. I’ve been talking with a lot of other organizations about ways we can work together, and the possibilities seem sort of endless at this point. At any rate, head on over there and let me know what you think! Comments on the site are not enabled, because…it’s a corporate site. But you can comment here. I’m building pieces of it every day, and it’s pretty exciting.

Tools of Change 2013: You Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

As usual, some themes grew out of this TOC conference – this seems to happen every year. And of course, it varies from person to person, so I can only speak from my own perspective, and perhaps there’s a little wishful thinking there as well.

But the fact that the World Wide Web Consortium not only had a concurrent conference about the Web and ebooks, but W3C members also attended regular TOC sessions (and gave a keynote) spoke very loudly to me. And it was a one-way conversation.

I do not see very many book industry people approaching the Web. But the Web is certainly approaching the book industry. It’s not enough to digitize text, wrap it in DRM, and sell it. The Web demands more than a silo’d experience. It demands interconnectivity. Links. Since the inception of the Web, content of all kinds has not simply been digitized, but contextualized by open-ended conversations with other content. An ebook is a closed system. The Web is open – and when it encounters a closed system, it tends to find ways to open it.

The question is whether that opening happens with or without publishers. And that is the elephant in the room.

That elephant was very firmly in the room during my “Open Book” presentation on Wednesday. It was a short talk, making some short points – that there has been explosive growth in published text over the last 14 years. That putting all that text on paper is not scaleable as a business. That digitizing it is scaleable, but invokes the problem of discovery. That discovery is best enabled by interoperability and structured markup. And if publishers are not making their own texts discoverable, someone else will.

Presumably publishers are publishing because what they are publishing has value. The fact that someone else perceives that value and makes the content more valuable is – again, presumably – a good thing.

The implication, however, is unnerving to traditional publishers. Opening up content – willingly or unwillingly – means a lack of control of that content. And dialing back “control” to mere “participation” is an idea that’s extremely tough for traditional publishers to get comfortable with. For 500 years, publishers have been broadcasting, not conversing. But the Web is a conversation.

The response to my talk was indicative of this discomfort. In a way, I was satisfied with the response because it confirmed for me the difficulties that traditional publishers are having. I was also saddened by it, of course. But those emotions don’t get us very far. What does get us far is simply putting one foot in front of the other, and continuing. It’s not romantic, but it’s movement. And it’s how real progress happens.

Tools of Change 2013: Some Fun

Tools of Change always starts out with Book^2, an unconference founded by Chris Kubica, Ami Greko, and Kat Meyer. Stewart Cauley captured the very best moment:

Why, yes, that is my Scamp sitting next to me. She stayed throughout the entire event, despite the fact that she had two weeks’ allowance burning a hole in her pocket and we were in Soho. And she had quite a bit to say:

Scamp is of the opinion that book publishing is now unnecessarily complicated. #Book2

— ljndawson (@ljndawson) February 10, 2013

And this:

@pablod @ljndawson My fave President Scamp quote is ‘I can’t believe you people think talking about this stuff is fun.’ #book2

— Kate Pullinger (@katepullinger) February 10, 2013

Things really got kicking the next day in the W3C Ebook conference, which I will write about in a bit. What really struck me about W3C’s involvement is this: Whether book publishing plays along or not, the web wants books. I felt very heartened after leaving the sessions on Monday.

Tuesday was Author (R)evolution Day – Kristin McLean’s all-day workshop helping authors understand the traditional publishing landscape as well as some of the disruptions the landscape is experiencing. I was really struck by the incisiveness of the questions – it’s apparent to me that authors have been kept in the dark about how publishing works for far too long.

And Pablo Francisco Arrieta drew this picture of me as an alien, which I immediately made my Twitter avatar:

On Wednesday, I gave a presentation about marking up ebooks with semantic tags, just to introduce the idea to the book publishing community. Amazingly, Ivan Herman, who directs the W3C’s semantic web efforts, attended – both he and Tzviya Siegman of Wiley were phenomenally helpful. Last night, Tzviya sent me a TOC photo, which India Amos immediately turned into a LOLLaura:

Thursday, Pat Payton, Carl Kulo and I led an “Ask Me Anything” session, which was great fun and a new twist on Bowker’s traditional presentation methods.

It may be the weekend before I can digest all my takeaways from this conference, but it was phenomenal this year.

Data Points And Spaces

In my resolution-keeping, I’ve been doing some data collection. As I mentioned, I’m using a program called “Perfect Diet Tracker” – ugh, how I hate the name, but the app is really good – to track what I consume and what I expend. I actually have “numbers time” every day where I also do Quicken – tracking is tracking, after all.

What has struck me, in all this extremely incremental data entry, is that any single data point is not all that valuable. What’s valuable is the relationship of multiple data points to one another. It’s a lesson I keep learning. And it’s a good thing to keep in mind as new sites launch before gathering a meaningful data set. To a certain degree, metadata’s a commodity. The relationship of one set of metadata to another is the product or service.

Of course, this is why I feel so strongly about the semantic web. It’s in its infancy – and toddlerhood is not much prettier – but over time it will prove meaningful. Helpful, even.

But what’s even more fascinating, in a way, is what’s NOT there. Yet. We can only gather data that’s been recorded. So much hasn’t. And when we finally do amass a corpus of data that we can blend with our existing data, the results can be surprising – even gratifying to some.

A Helpful Glossary of Identifiers in the Information Supply Chain

ISBN – International Standard Book Number. This identifies a separately tradable product in the book supply chain.

ISTC – International Standard Text Code. This identifies a piece of text. It does not identify tradable products.

ISNI – International Standard Name Identifier. This identifies a name – of a person or an organization.

SAN – Standard Address Number. This identifies a specific address of an organization in (or served by) the publishing industry.

DOI – Digital Object Identifier. By which is meant “digital identifier of objects”. This identifies a place on the web where a thing can be found. It is like a web-based SAN.

ISRC – International Standard Recording Code. This identifies sound recordings, and music video recordings. It is similar in many ways to the ISBN.

ISSN – International Standard Serial Number. This identifies serial publications – journals and magazines, primarily.

ISMN – International Standard Music Number. This identifies printed music products in the same way an ISBN identifies book products.

ISAN – International Standard Audiovisual Number. This identifies audiovisual products in the same way an ISBN identifies book products.

ISWC – International Standard Musical Work Code. This identifies musical works. It is similar to the ISTC in that it doesn’t identify tradable products.

ISCI – International Standard Collection Identifier. This identifies library collections.

What Darth Vader is Really For

Rick Smith, who (a) manages the MyIdentifiers and other platforms at Bowker (b) works next to me (c) is the other person in my foxhole…put this on the wall between our desks.

Because of this sign at my desk:

Check your kittens.

Control

Brian O’Leary had a fantastic post yesterday about book piracy and the ongoing insistence that it’s a categorically bad thing. The fact is, no one has any idea whether or not it’s a bad thing because only one publishing company in the history of publishing or companies has ever agreed to empirically test that assertion.

One is not a statistical sample.

Brian’s post was based on coverage of a session at DBW last week. One of the comments to that coverage came from Marion Gropen, a consultant to authors looking to “profit from your publishing.” Gropen says,

And the discussion about whether or not it hurts sales is utterly not the point. You can’t take anything else I own even if you think it would be in my best interest. The issue is control, not results.

I think Gropen has hit upon something absolutely critical when she says, “The issue is control.”

Traditionally, modern publishing has been tightly controlled for most of its existence. Publishers contracted with authors (with the help of agents), packaged manuscripts into books, and distributed those books to many disparate retailers. Publishers rarely interacted with their ultimate audience – they were strictly B2B.

The web has disrupted this significantly. The means of production and distribution are now in the hands of…anybody who cares to learn how they work. Tim Berners-Lee, on the stand a year ago in a patent trial in Texas, had the following exchange with Jennifer Doan, an attorney representing defendants Yahoo and Amazon:

After describing how Berners-Lee worked at CERN in Switzerland back in the 1980s, Doan moved on to the web. When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it, Doan asked.

“No,” said Berners-Lee.

“Why not?” asked Doan.

“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.”

Doan: “And who owns the web?”

Berners-Lee: “We do.”

We do. Just as Berners-Lee tweeted (on a Next cube, the machine on which he invented the Web) during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, “This is for everyone.”

Which is an absolutely terrifying thought if you are a traditional publisher. If anyone can say anything about anything, everyone will. What’s “authoritative” or “curated” loses its place. And distribution of content can happen at ANY point in the publishing process – the bulk of illegal distribution to P2P sites seems to happen in the manuscript or production phase of publishing. In other words, the leak is coming from inside the house.

If traditional publishers can’t even control that much, they will never be able to control the larger issues of P2P sharing and even content creation. The web is, because of its textual nature, probably the single most disruptive force on traditional publishing. Already the voice of the critic has dissipated into the audience itself.

And the concept of “control” as we’ve always known it is shifting dramatically.

Adventures in Product Management

The thing I like best about product management is that it requires you to be a generalist. And I really like knowing something about everything.

But today it was brought home to me that managing product development in this day and age is very different than it was even six years ago.

In this instance, we’re scoping towards a moving target. An emerging standard, which hasn’t yet been adopted by anyone, the efficacy of which is dependent on how much data is in the system. The more data that pours in, the better (and faster) the results are. Which makes sense, but it is very hard to program logic around this, particularly transactional logic.

With standards, too, you are mostly working in a non-commercial environment. Revenue upside is difficult to predict.

I’m pretty comfortable with uncertainty, personally, but of course business doesn’t operate that way. I find myself in the position not of reassuring the team – that would be pointless, since there’s no reassurance to be had – but of helping everybody understand that we’re all feeling our way together. That requirements may well change on the fly, as we find out more.

Disrupting comfort zones is hard work; and we’re only going to have more of that as time goes on.