From Quartz:

How do you make a machine write like a human? Narrative Science, an artificial-intelligence company that can computer-produce analytical reports, has one answer. Imagine an organization has just hired a new writer. Her boss discusses the topic of coverage with her and passes along a style guide. She writes a bunch of samples. She gets feedback. She writes some more. At some point the feedback stops because she knows what she’s doing. According to Kris Hammond, Narrative Science’s technology head, that’s exactly how his company’s technology, called Quill, works. ”It just happens to be the case that it’s a machine,” he says.

Quill achieves this through a series of logical steps that in a human would be called clear thinking. “Who is going to be reading this story? Why? What do we want to communicate? That gives us a snapshot of what information you need in order to tell the story,” Hammond told Quartz. It’s a method that any writer—human or machine—would do well to follow.

. . . .

The CIA, for instance, produces vast quantities of intelligence that its human analysts would take eons to analyze. Large companies can use existing technology to gather sales data but they need people to sift through all of it. . . . With existing technologies, “you can export a spreadsheet or see some charts or graphs. But we can write the performance review. For each individual sales person, for their management, for upper management,” says Hammond.

It’s a seductive idea. As is the notion, espoused by Narrative Science, that infographics and fancy charts pose no threat to a succinct, well-written piece of language. Hammond gives the example of an analyst who digests information from charts and spreadsheets and translates it to natural language for his bosses. That’s the job done by Quill.

Link to the rest at Quartz and thanks to L for the tip.

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

One of the things that has characterized books for me is the incredible diversity of markets they reach. Trade publishing has always had remarkably low barriers to entry compared to other media. It has always been easier to publish a book and make it work on some level than to launch a newspaper or a magazine, or make a movie or a TV show or a record. It costs less and the distribution channels have always been relatively democratic and accessible to outsiders. The cash comes back slowly, and profits are often elusive, but you don’t need a fortune to publish a book.

Because books inherently require a small number of sales to make money (the breakeven point gets raised by big advances to authors, but, if the author guarantee is low, most books will recover core production costs on the sale of a few thousand copies and, in some cases, less than that), they frequently target what any other industry would consider mini-markets. A publisher that mines a niche can profit on something incredibly esoteric. For example, the chances are that Osprey, a military history publisher, has made money on books about wars you’ve never heard of. But their audience has and, because they know their audience, everybody wins.

The giant general trade publishers have built big and expensive machines that can make a book a mass sensation and put it in front of the public in a big way. Other publishers have pursued other models. HarperCollins or Simon & Schuster might pay big money to an author and build an organization that can maximize marketing impact on pub date. Other companies have specialized in a market like craft books or art books or computer books, not paying the same advances and necessarily having a different emphasis in their distribution and marketing strategies.

But what has united all the business models was the commitment to make and market a book, which meant printing inventory. The minimum investment to publish a book was much less than the minimum investment to publish a magazine or a newspaper or to make a film or a record. But there still was an investment.

And that brings us back to something that made books special for their authors: the prestige conferred by somebody (preferably somebody highly professional with a brand name like some publishers have) making a unique investment in their content. That’s an investment that’s not sold as part of a magazine, or on the back of a star’s name, but in one person’s work: the author’s. When the subject of what a book was came up at our conference, one observation from a publisher of books about public affairs was how much the speaking fees of their authors went up when a book of theirs was published. The mere fact of the book conferred credibility on the author that raised their value in the marketplace, regardless of how the book sold. (Or didn’t.)

This is something inherent to the definition of a “book”. This is, also, likely to change.

The core change in publishing economics that will ultimately change the shape of the commercial industry is that the already-low investment required to publish a book has plummeted even further. As printed books become less important, then the investment required to fund them becomes less important too. Already we have seen many authors — I’ve written about John Locke and hosted Hugh Howey on the Digital Book World stage, but there are scores of others — build a career as an author without any significant print sales. We have seen other authors with long backlists, some who had only achieved modest success for publishers, turning the opportunity for higher margins and direct audience contact into financial bonanzas in digital publishing.

Repeated demonstration of the fact that it is totally possible to achieve fame and fortune as a writer without a publisher does not escape the attention of any author.

. . . .

In fact, nobody in the value chain in between the author and the reader of a book can be complacent about their position: not the agent or publisher or library, but also, quite obviously, not the bookstore, online or physical. The printer and warehouse operator must expect a shrinking share of the book business. No-inventory publishing, by lowering the barriers to entry for a written book of narrative text nearly to zero, is assuring that an ecosystem built around the reality that book inventory was the industry’s greatest cost will change profoundly.

. . . .

We’re going to see a lot of change as players of all sizes, in all parts of the publishing value chain, adjust to the “weightlessness” of a business shedding and shifting its biggest capital requirement: inventory cost. Picking on one tactic or another by one player or another, particularly from the perspective of preserving legacy behavior, is not likely to be very illuminating or helpful.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

From Brave New World, a blog of the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland:

Offered below are just three arguments that force us to question what we publish today and what we should publish tomorrow. Individually, the arguments may not pass the ‘so what?’ test, but taken together they should ring alarm bells in every publishing building.

. . . .

Our possessions often reflect and describe who we are, or who we aspire to be. Unlike yesterday many rooms may not be filled with shelves of books, music, films, magazines etc. On demand instant access to very large ’libraries’ starts to question the basics need for ownership and opens the market to models such as rental and subscription, which were not attractive in the old analogue world.

. . . .

The vast majority of ebooks today take the content developed for the physical container and merely pour it into a digital one. Is that logical? Are we presuming that’s what consumers want? Imagine we could take the text and create a perfect audiobook at a click, would we really expect that to be good enough or just a lazy quick fix. Today audiobooks are adapted from books and professionally read to fit the medium and consumers’ expectations. It’s true that they no longer are restricted by the digital media but just how long would it take to listen to ‘War and Peace’ with a synthesised voice? Screenplays of books adapt the content to fit the format, consumers’ expectations and budget. We do not have many 5 hour films and most fit within 180 to 240 minutes and may only cover a fraction of the book content. We don’t have many 15 minute music tracks and again these are no longer restricted by the media.

So why are ebooks so wedded to the 75,000 word or 256 page economic physical book model?

. . . .

We have been fixated on the end form, the finished book and not the creative process itself which for many has changed very little. We have remained locked to the physical book economics and presumed that the chicken will always lay the ebook egg. We have continued to be obsessed with units sold and largely ignored other models which may cause contract friction. We have continued to pour the same content into a similar digital container without thinking. We continue to view the book as the start and not the book as a potential subsidiary.

Link to the rest at Brave New World and thanks to Lizzy for the tip.

From Digital Book World:

Unlike other media businesses, trade publishing was insulated from the ravages of digital distribution of content until a distribution system arose that could disrupt traditional channels. But in the six years since Amazon’s Kindle hit the scene, trade publishers have transformed their revenues, staffs and workflows to represent the new ebook reality of the industry.

STM publishers (that is, scientific, technical and medical publishers), however, have been dealing with digital distribution for decades, having to service its early-adopting, technology-friendly audience as early as the 80s and 90s.

As a result, STM publishers have learned a lot about digital adoption and workflows. Here are four things trade publishers can learn from STM publishers*:

1. Culture. An organization has to want to change before it can actually do so.

“You have to believe things are changing and make appropriate investments to harness those changes,” said Chet Ensign, director of standards development at Oasis, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and adoption of open standards in information industries. “The people and their attitudes are usually the biggest problem.”

. . . .

4. Own the future. While publishers may feel they’re at the whim of the big ebook retailers when it comes to driving technology, that may not be entirely true. In fact, publishers may be in the driver’s seat.

“As long as you control the content, you can, as new models emerge, begin to experiment,” said Trippe. “Will they pan out? We don’t know, but you can try them.”

The big caveat is that as long as publishers want to continue to do business in established channels, they have to continue to play ball with those who own those channels.

“Publishers’ future is being driven by device manufacturers,” said Ensign.

Trippe suggests experimenting with selling directly to consumers and with print and ebook bundles.

“You could come up with some offerings that are more attractive [than those offered by retailers],” said Trippe, who added some initiatives that his own employer, MIT Press, will be experimenting with, “We’re shortly to be bundling print and ebooks off of our website. I wouldn’t recommend everyone do that. It’s very hard but we have a brand advantage.”

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From Stephen Page, CEO, Faber & Faber, an ebook distribution service for UK publishers that is a subsidiary of a publisher:

In 2006 Tom Coates wrote the following: “My sense of these media organizations that use the argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!”

7 years on you’d have to say that the industry has yet to be out run by the snail. Plenty of change has come but you’d be hard-pressed to make the case of widespread failure, or failure by publishers to find opportunity in the new market. So have we outrun the snail?

. . . .

The snail of technological change has not outrun or eaten publishing yet. It will though if we fail to continue to be our own greatest challengers and become the prime disrupters in our market.  Many commentators expected us to fail, but we haven’t not least because it is possible to cope. We have to continue to cope, not rest or pause by the roadside.

Link to the rest at Faber Factory

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

First of all, let’s not blame Amazon for two things: being really good at what they do and the natural impact of network effects. The “network effect” is that the more people are on a network, the more valuable it is to each person on it. In the first two decades or so of the 20th century, phone companies could only reach their own subscribers. A person who wanted to reach all their friends in an area might have to have several phones with different companies. Most wouldn’t, so even with a phone, communication was minimized. Gradually, the “roads got paved” and the phone systems were knit together.

. . . .

Amazon and Facebook and Twitter have more value than any possible competitors because they have more people actively engaged with them every single day. B&N can’t compete with Amazon around reader reviews because it has far fewer of them. Amazon tells you that X people out of Y found this review helpful. You need numbers to do that. Only one person in many writes a review. Only one person in many reads any posted review. And only one person in many bothers to post that they found a review helpful. That’s one in many cubed. The denominator is one enormous number. Amazon’s book customer traffic is probably 10 times or more what BN.com’s is. So it is possible for Amazon, and for nobody else, to tell you that X out of Y found this review helpful with meaningful numbers. (Even if Jonathan Franzen and others aren’t impressed with the provenance of the reviews. And even if some of the reviews have been deliberately gamed.)

. . . .

It is true that Amazon is the pointed spear of change in the world of communication (although they are not alone). From the moment they made a massive database of books available online, they challenged the core proposition of bookstores and the biggest ones with the biggest selections were the most challenged. It isn’t really Amazon’s fault that buying books online is so attractive to so any people, it is the nature of the beasts: the book choice beast and the Internet database beast.

But Amazon takes advantage of this opportunity better than anybody else. This is where their superior execution comes in. I am very close to somebody who vastly prefers to buy her books from Barnes & Noble for reasons that would probably appeal to Jonathan Franzen. But, over many years, she has found that their search engine just doesn’t work effectively. So she finds what she wants at Amazon and then goes over to BN.com to purchase it! Most people won’t do that; they’ll just buy where it is easiest to shop. Is it Amazon’s fault that they’re cleaning BN’s online clock through a better service?

I spoke this past week with the communications director at a think tank who has their publishing arm reporting to him. He’s new to the world of books. He reports that his team keeps portraying Amazon as the enemy; from his perspective, they are “the answer”. Yes, he’s worried about whether their increasing hegemony over the book-buying public could ultimately result in some nasty cuts to his margins. In fact, probably they will. Amazon is likely the most profitable account for almost every publisher because their sales are massive and their returns are minimal. Some publishers report that even their demands for co-op spending are less onerous than Barnes & Noble’s. Of course, they will probably push the envelope over time and claw back more of that margin from publishers. Most retailers would.

. . . .

Amazon is probably smart enough not to want a world in which, as Franzen fears, they publish everything that isn’t self-published by an author. They know they benefit from the investments publishers make and they’re probably even detached enough to know they benefit from books being in the marketplace because they’re supported by sales Amazon doesn’t have the breadth to make. And let’s remember that book sales are probably down to a low double-digit percentage of Amazon’s business. They have bigger fish to fry than building their market share or their margin at the expense of publishers.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files and thanks to Big Al for the tip.

From Publishing Perspectives:

“I don’t give a damn about the future of the book,” was Argentine writer Hernán Casciari’s dramatic statement to a surprised audience at the 3rd International E-book Symposium in Mexico City last week.

. . . .

And while many of the roundtable discussions focused on the rising popularity of ebooks in Spain and Latin America, and the importance of embracing electronic publishing for writers, booksellers and libraries, the novelist and blogger’s message was simple: the advent of the Internet and our increased connectivity have ruined our attention span as readers and present new challenges to creative writing.

Increasingly sophisticated gadgets and ubiquitous Internet access mean that we are ever closer to information and knowledge, and yet our ability to glean that knowledge, by reading uninterruptedly, has been irrevocably stymied, he said.

“I don’t care if people read ebooks or traditional books, or about the relationship between both, or about the death of either. What’s important right now is our lack of concentration, our inability to be able to read, listen or write for more than 20 minutes,” he said, while readily admitting his own guilt at such a shortcoming.

“Back in the 20th century I used to read voraciously, and could sit and write for hours. Something happened at the beginning of the 20th century, a gradual change I liken to a frog in a pan of water coming to the boil. By the time the frog realizes that the water is going to boil and it’s time to get out, its muscles have atrophied and it’s too late.”

“The digital era has made us lazy and apathetic, and our stories, our literature, are losing their shine,” he said.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From GeekWire:

Jeff Bezos talks a lot about Amazon focusing on customers, to the point that it has become a cliché. But in a new interview debuting tonight in the Seattle region on the Four Peaks TV show, the Amazon CEO explains why that approach beats focusing on competitors, which is a common trap for many tech companies.

. . . .

“If you have a customer-centric culture, that cures a lot of ills,” responds Bezos. “Let’s say you’re the leader in a particular arena, if you’re competitor-focused and you’re already the leader, then where does your energy come from? Whereas, if you’re customer focused, and you’re already the leader, customers are never satisfied.”

He continues, “If you’re customer-focused, you’re always waking up wondering, how can we make that customer say, wow? We want to impress our customers — we want them to say, wow. That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.”

. . . .

“I don’t think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you’re willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, and if you’re going to experiment, you’re going to fail, and if you’re going to fail, you have to think long term.”

Link to the rest at GeekWire and thanks to Randall for the tip.

From Patricia C. Wrede:

I have officially been in the book business since the late 70s, when I started work in the finance department at B. Daltons; I’ve been selling my writing since 1980, when Ace books bought my first novel, Shadow Magic. So that’s a bit more than thirty-three years, or slightly more than half my life.

And one of the things that has bugged me about the book business, right from the start, is the way business decisions and business discussions are driven by emotions and rumor, often to the exclusion of facts, logic, and common sense. And I don’t mean just among people who desperately want to become writers, either; I’m talking about everybody, up and down the chain, from writers to editors to booksellers to readers.

. . . .

What got me off on this was a discussion I saw a few months back on a writer’s forum, bemoaning the horrible effect that the Borders bankruptcy has had on book sales and worrying over whether Barnes & Noble will be going the same way soon, and how horrible that will be for book lovers everywhere if it happens. And I had one of those do-I-laugh-or-cry moments, because for at least the first ten years of my book business career, from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, all I heard from “book people” – especially authors – was how evil the chain bookstores were, how they’d been driving traditional independent bookstores out of business, how much better independent bookstores were, and how great it would be if the big chains like Barnes & Noble would disappear.

. . . .

The real problem, as I see it, is that people don’t like change. They don’t like not knowing how the system works, and they really don’t like not being able to find anyone they trust who is willing to explain the new system to them (even if the explanation is wrong).

. . . .

Change is inevitable, and so, I suppose, is complaining about it. Not everyone is going to like the New Thing that’s replacing their beloved Old Thing, whether that Old Thing is paper and pen being replaced by a typewriter, a typewriter being replaced by a computer, one’s local indie bookstore being replaced by a cookie-cutter chain store, or one’s local chain store going the way of the dodo because they can’t compete with the online retailer.

Still, one doesn’t have to like something in order to cope with it. One does, however, have to admit that it has to be coped with. Continuing to do business-as-usual while complaining bitterly that nothing is like it used to be is not coping. Neither is waiting for someone else to come along and explain it.

Link to the rest at Patricia C. Wrede and thanks to Suzie for the tip.

Here’s a link to Patricia’s books.

From Paid Content:

Despite her successful track record at magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, editor Tina Brown was incapable of making The Daily Beast work. Her failure there says a lot about how the media landscape has changed.

. . . .

Tina Brown, the legendary former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, is stepping down from her latest attempt at reinventing magazines: she announced on Wednesday that she is leaving as editor of The Daily Beast, the online media outlet that she started in 2008 with the backing of media mogul Barry Diller and later tried unsuccessfully to merge with Newsweek.

. . . .

Michael Wolff . . . argues in a piece for The Guardian that Brown shouldn’t have to shoulder all the blame for the (almost) demise of the site, saying she is “a representative figure of the struggles of modern media life, rather than the person who should be blamed for it.”

“Magazines – knowing, insidery, cruel, fawning, beautiful, upscale (remember that word?) magazines – died, leaving her without a profession… and then, without warning, she had to learn the methods and sensibility of the new digital publishing world, which must have seemed like another country to her.”

. . . .

Brown’s approach to the Beast — and to Newsweek as well when it was still part of the operation — was very much taken from the good old days of print magazines, when advertising revenue was still flowing like a mighty river, and no one had to worry about aggregators or competition from upstart online publications like BuzzFeed or Perez Hilton. Brown used all the tricks she had learned (and taught others) and yet they failed to work their magic. As Wolff puts it:

“She shortly recreated… an ever-expanding publishing operation in the old style. In a digital world of strained circumstances, she hired editors, paid writers, killed pieces, rethought and revamped and redesigned… and generally conducted herself as much as she possibly could as though the world was still recognizable, even comfortable.”

. . . .

More than anything, Brown’s failure seems to stem from a lack of understanding about how the publishing game has changed, not just in terms of revenue, but in the fundamental ways in which content and the marketplace intersect. The old model, where an editor like Brown could be the queen of a tiny magazine empire and shape the coverage and impact of stories almost single-handedly, has given way to a future driven by readers — a demand model rather than a supply model, to put it in economic terms.

It’s not just algorithms: what people want to read becomes the guiding principle, not what editors decide they need.

Link to the rest at Paid Content and thanks to Matthew for the tip.