From Business Insider:

The TV business is having its worst year ever.

Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, “The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.” All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.

. . . .

Time Warner Cable, for instance, lost 306,000 TV subscribers in Q3, and 24,000 broadband web subscribers, too.

And Tom Rutledge, CEO of Charter Communications, told Wall Street analysts he was “surprised” that 1.3 million of his 5.5 million customers don’t want TV — just broadband internet. “Our broadband-only growth has been greater than I thought it would be,” he said.

. . . .

This is the macro problem: Ratings are falling across the board. They have been for years.

It’s not too surprising that broadcast TV ratings are down. The major networks have faced increasing competition for years from niche-interest cable channels and the better-quality programming on places like AMC and HBO.

But ratings for both cable and the broadcast networks are down.

Link to the rest at Business Insider and thanks to Kris for the tip.

Big Publishing isn’t the only business being disrupted by Internet competitors and new ways of consuming content from new content providers.

From GigaOm:

Musicians who blame digital music services for declining income are lashing out at the wrong target, according to folk singer Billy Bragg.

. . . .

Bragg suggests that an outdated music model — and not technology — explains low payment rates:

“[R]ailing against Spotify is about as helpful to their cause as campaigning against the Sony Walkman would have been in the early 80s. Music fans are increasingly streaming their music and, as artists, we have to adapt ourselves to their behaviour, rather than try to hold the line on a particular mode of listening to music.”

Bragg also takes issue with analog-era record deals that have carried over to the digital era. He notes that such deals, which give the lion’s share of revenue to music labels, no longer make sense in the digital context where labels don’t do any of the distribution or other “heavy-lifting” that once justified their cut of the proceeds.

Link to the rest at GigaOm and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

From Digital Book World:

The environment in book publishing today is ripe for start-ups: New technologies have emerged that have changed the way money flows in the industry and what traditional players need to do to succeed. Yet, very few book publishing start-ups seem to make any headway. Why? And how can this be fixed?

I sat down with Mike Shatzkin to discuss.

Jeremy Greenfield: Publishers and start-ups seem to not get along. Why?

Mike Shatzkin: Publishers sometimes say, “these start-ups come in, they don’t know what they’re talking about and they don’t know about our business,” and start-ups say, “these publishers are hopeless. They don’t want to change; they don’t want to experiment. We came and we offered them an opportunity to experiment for free and they claim they don’t have the time and that they are doing experiments already.”

You have these two constituencies — established publishers who know they need to change but are frustrated by start-ups and the start-ups who can help with change but don’t have the know-how and the relationships. We’re doing a survey of the start-ups and the business development people at publishers to understand what they expect out of each other and what their beliefs are themselves.

. . . .

JG: Do publishers need start-ups? 

MS: I don’t know if publishers need start-ups. What I do know is that if you’re a “big five” publisher, you can always wait.

For example, HarperCollins has thrown itself in with Scribd and none of the other major publishers have. If Scribd makes this work, they’re not going to tell Simon & Schuster, “you’re not going to get to come in now because you didn’t at the beginning.” So, big publishers know that they don’t need to move now.

The only thing that Scribd can do later [to reward or punish publishers that did or did not play ball early] is put their thumb on the scales [give more exposure on its platform to certain publishers]. Not all exposure is created equal. The risk for a smaller publisher is that you give up the opportunity to be special to a start-up and the benefits to having been special.

In most cases, publishers don’t need the start-ups and when they meet with them really all they’re doing is due diligence to keep themselves informed on potential disruptions in the marketplace. Occasionally start-ups come up with things that publishers want to use.

Inkling is developing tools that people are using. In that case, the start-up has immediate value.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From FutureBook:

Hachette’s August e-book bump appeared to come as a surprise to some. The group reported earlier today that August was a “record-breaking month” in e-books for Hachette UK, with digital sales up 80% year-on-year.

. . . .

Hachette UK also told us that e-book sales accounted for 30% of the adult trade market in the UK in the third quarter, up 10 percentage points on last year. That represents growth of about a third.

Both figures suggest what has been well reported for most of this year–that, statistically speaking, the rate of e-book growth is slowing down, even if growth of 30% remains a strong compensatory number.

. . . .

E-book growth has largely sustained trade publishers during the latter years of the big recession, and even if they do now, as some say, ‘plateau’, profit margins may continue to grow as publishers learn to better manage their inventories and working capital across the rest of their business.

Whatever the look of it, digital is more than just a growth curve. It is a complete re-wiring of the system. In this context the word ‘plateau’ is not inaccurate, but if it is taken to mean everything stops moving or that we are reaching a stable period, it is an unhelpful term. Nothing stops from this point onwards.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

Disruption 101 For Self-Publishers

By Suw Charman-Anderson, Contributor, at Forbes.

The publishing industry is undergoing significant disruption. Amazon is pushing down book prices and controlling the point of sale. Self-publishers are flooding the market with cheap books, producing some very high quality work that competes with traditionally published books, and proving a new business model that may well lure authors away from traditional deals.

The level of disruption cannot be underestimated, and it’s going to have a significant impact on publishing as we currently know it.

“Across industries, only 9% of disrupted organisations ever recover,” found Clark Gilbert and Clayton M Christensen in recent research into innovation in digitally disrupted markets.

“Of those, 100% created a separate digital unit to take on the disruption. Not one company […] succeeded trying to develop digital inside the existing company.”

***

Gilbert has produced six principles for how media companies must deal with disruption, which should be of interest to all publishers. I also think that it’s important for self-publishers to understand these principles as well, even though we are part of the disruptive force. The landscape is changing and will only change more as the the disruption truly takes hold.

Whilst some of these principles apply mostly to traditional businesses, there are some that are relevant to self-publishers.

1. Create a separate digital unit
Gilbert’s first finding, that only companies which created separate digital units survive disruption, is the one that he gets most push-back on. But, he says, the evidence is so compelling that to argue against it is “like arguing against gravity”. However, while having a separate digital unit is essential to survival, by itself it is not sufficient to guarantee success.

***

6. Don’t underestimate the magnitude of the disruption
Finally, Gilbert says that “magnitude of the disruption cannot be ignored”, and that’s just as true for books as it is for news. The publishing industry has multiple challenges facing it and is simply not going to triumph by nibbling around the edges with digital-only imprints, outsourced workforces and collapsing advances for midlist authors.

For self-publishers, this means accepting that change is ongoing. What works this year may not work next year, and visa versa. We have to keep on top of the transformations that our industry is seeing and not allow ourselves to be blindsided by future disruptions that alter the foundational assumptions upon which we have built our careers and businesses.

See the rest here.

I feel this is one of the best articles I’ve seen covering the changes in the publishing world. If you’re a self-publisher looking to do well in this landscape a good question to ask might be; “Have I set myself up from a business standpoint to take advantage of these changes?” I feel that the writers who have taken the extra steps to incorporate, own your own ISBN’s, and have their work available through multiple distributors, in every format, will be the ones who will thrive in the future.

From Guest Blogger Randall

From The Digital Reader

A reader has brought my attention back to MadeFire. This is a 2 year old digital comics startup that has been getting a lot of attention lately, and according to FasctCo they plan to reinvent the comic book:

They’re hoping their new touch-publishing platform Motion Books will help artists and creative types fully embrace the power of mobile devices to create immersive reading experiences.

According to Madefire CEO Ben Wolstenholme, it’s not about throwing technology at digital publishing for technology’s sake—it’s still all about storytelling and the user experience. “Everything should serve the story. With traditional print, readers are pretty much limited to turning a page for a surprise or unexpected reveal. But with mobile devices and e-readers, it’s possible to do so much more” said Wolstenholme. “You can create a specific mood and atmosphere. You can use movement, sound, and visuals to enhance a story without taking away from it” he added.

***

Madefire produces a storytelling platform that incorporates the full range of a mobile device’s hardware to create a new form of digital storytelling that isn’t limited to turning pages — which is the universal method for advancing a story with books. Unlike the majority of digital comic books that were simply converted from print, motion books provide for artwork on a single page to move and interact with the reader (like swiping or tapping a touchscreen or moving the device to have artwork on a page shuffle around). A motion book’s story unfolds through layers of art, word balloons, and captions that unfold in sequence, which is sort of like reading a book that slowly fills a blank page with text as you read.

***

My opinion, in short, is that if I want moving images I will watch a movie. If I want a soundtrack I will load an mp3. And if I want interactivity in my novel I will play a computer game. But if I want to read I will open an ebook.

A book is not any of those other types of content, and trying to make a text into something resembling a game or movie misses the point of what a book is supposed to be.

See the rest, including the demo, here.

From Guest Blogger Randall 

From Media Bistro:

“Want to add a sound track to your self-published book? Check out, Booktrack, a new app that will let you add music or sound effects to your eBook.

“The application is available for iOS devices and as a Chrome app. You can use it to record audio tracks and then insert them into your text. Once you do so, you can export the files to sell the title within the Booktrack community where you can also shop for books with sound effects.”

Read the rest here:  APPNEWSER

Julia Barrett

Chris McCrudden on Publishing:

“I want to talk about self-publishing. In particular the self-published pornography that found its way on WH Smith’s website via the retailer’s partnership with Kobo, which was spotted by The Mail on Sunday and has since led to a virulent press and social media campaign against ‘vile trade’.”

***

“For me this episode highlights a fundamental tension within the eBook selling industry which is all about why being a platform is different to being a retailer. The success of platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and Kobo’s Writing Life are quality neutral at the point of entry. They exist to scoop up a critical mass of content because they believe consumers want to deal with the platform with the biggest inventory.”

Read the rest here:  If Self-Publishing is the new Wild Wild West, Who’s the Sheriff?

Julia Barrett

You hardly have to wait in line at Barnes & Noble anymore. The cashiers stare into the middle distance, while on the sales floor, space for books steadily erodes. Instead: toys, magnifying glasses, doodads for the desk. Also: Nook devices, which are supposed to represent the future. Except the Nook division is actually doing worse than the stores themselves. Independent booksellers still have not recovered from the last decade’s brutality. And five major publishers just learned that, as part of their settlement of a price-fixing suit, they’ll have to refund about $3 for every electronic copy of a New York Times best-seller that they sold over a 25-month period. Reasons to fear for the fate of publishing are not difficult to find, and neither are the prophets of doom.

What has really made a difference for publishers is that e-book revenue has skyrocketed—by more than 4,500 percent. Just as important, the boom has come at surprisingly little expense to higher- priced hardcovers and paperbacks, sales of which are only slightly down.

 
Read it all Who Said

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.