« Le numérique ne tuera pas l’édition traditionnelle, mais il va la changer », dit Hugh McGuire. Cet ancien ingénieur en mécanique âgé de 35 ans lançait en 2007 un autre collectif, Earideas, qui recense les balados (podcasts) de l’heure sur le Web. Et voilà qu’il vient de créer The Book Oven, un nouveau type de maison d’édition. « The Book Oven offrira une plateforme d’autoédition, qui permettra à un auteur de collaborer avec des rédacteurs, des réviseurs, des recherchistes, des photographes, des maquettistes », dit Hugh McGuire. [more...]

Digital Debut Tool Time
An insider’s presentation of new and soon-to-be-mainstreamed web-based entities providing innovative digital services and tools to authors, publishers and readers.

Moderator: Mike Shatzkin – Founder & CEO, Idea Logical Co, Inc
Presenters:
Peter Clifton – President & Ceo, FiledBy, Inc.
Mark Coker – founder & CEO, Smashwords, Inc.
Hugh McGuire – co-founder, BookOven
Neil Jones – founder, Cooler Reader

You can catch us pontificating between 9:30AM and10:30AM on Friday morning, May 29, 2009 at the Jacob Javitz Centre in New York City.

This episode, an intimate trio performs for your pleasure: C.C. Chapman, Mitch Joel and me.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 6.

Or: Mp3 download.

What was striking: the execs from the music business, including Michael Nash, Warner’s SVP Digital Strategy and Business Development, finally cottoned on that the real challenge of the music business is not to fight a lost battle against P2P, but rather to find ways to make it easier for listeners to listen to their music. Check this quote:

“These types of social media are highly competitive with illegal file-sharing,” said Michael Nash, Warner’s executive vice president of digital strategy and business development.

Sites such as Spotify allow users to access the music for free rather than searching for it on BitTorrent and downloading it illegally, Mulligan said. Spotify and the Comes With Music mobile-phone music service by Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest handset maker, “are the two strongest tools that people have to drive a genuine alternative to piracy,” he said. [more...]

That is, the music business has finally understood that suing listeners who want to listen to their music isn’t a very sensible long-term business strategy. The better strategy is to figure out how to provide more music to those people.

P2P isn’t going away, and the music business’ success will depend on doing a better job of serving their customers than Pirate Bay does.

LISTEN HERE: Media Hacks: Episode 4

Maybe the problem is not so much online news sources killing off business for print newspapers; maybe the problem is the continued existence of print newspapers is stifling innovation in the online news space.

Since so much (local) advertising dollars are still going (being wasted?) on dying print news outlets, there isn’t enough left over to properly fund a leaner, profitable online alternative.

If print newspapers are gone, then local advertisers are going to start wondering how to get people to come to their stores; radio/TV, OK, but if the eyeballs are online, and there are no more papers distracting the advertisers, then …well there is an untapped market there for the online news sites to figure out. And since online can do a better job (in theory) of matching ads/marketing to reader preference, thru cookies, browsing habits, tracking sales (Facebook Beacon notwithstanding), then the death of the traditional news business might be exactly what it takes to kick the online news business, and online content, to real innovation, and real profitability.

I’m back from TOC and still mulling over the problems, and maybe some solutions to problems in the publishing business. There are lots, but a fundamental problem seems to be that most publishing houses have never had much to do with their readers. Their clients, traditionally, have been book stores. And outsourcing relationships with the people who are your reason for existence is a bad idea.

If you look at the talk around the perilous state of the publishing business, and the challenges of ebooks and DRM and digital and the web, it ends up being this old sad story of: “How do we maintain our financial viability when fewer people are reading?” And not, “What do readers want and how can we best provide it?” [more...]

Allentrepreneur: Welcome to Allentrepreneur Hugh and thanks for taking the time to talk. You’ve got quite a start-up resume to your name. LibriVox.org, earideas.com, datalibre.ca and your latest one, The Book Oven, which has me particularly curious since I’m a book junkie. Could you give us an introduction?

Hugh: The book business is going through massive changes, there are cutbacks all over the place in publishing houses, bricks and mortar booksellers are in trouble, and there’s angst everywhere about how digital and ebooks will upset business models that have been entrenched for 100 years. But books are still a $50 billion business, and there are passionate readers and writers all over the world. The book business looks a lot like the music business did 10 years ago, with these huge companies knowing things are going to change, but having great trouble adjusting.

One really exciting thing is new technologies that make publishing a book cheap and easy: print-on-demand and ebooks. In some sense these technologies can take the publisher out of the picture – in the same way that musicians can now make and distribute their music online, writers now have the same abilities.

But making a book is an arduous and collaborative process. Book Oven will help bridge the gap between writing, and publishing a finished product. [more...]

The federal government has announced plans to spend over $10 million to establish a “Corridor for Advancing Canadian Digital Media” from Stratford to Kitchener. Coming on the heels of the Nortel bankruptcy, this initiative reinforces the tech shift westward from Ottawa to Waterloo. While tech leadership once resided with Nortel, JDS, Corel, Newbridge, and Cognos, the shift to RIM, Open Text, etc. has a direct effect on the location of future tech iniatives in Canada.