Amazon, Apple and Google

John Naughton has a terrific column Amazon's new Cloud Drive Rains on everyone's parade in yesterday's Observer:

"Impetuosity and audacity," wrote Machiavelli, "often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve." If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word "Amazon".

.......

Behind the scenes in the US, though, there has been frenetic activity, with Apple, Google and Amazon racing to get into the streaming business. Apple has cloud services, customers who are used to paying for music, a good range of mobile devices but no licensing deal for streaming. Google has terrific cloud services and millions of Android devices but no music store customers and no licensing deal. Amazon has cloud services, a music store, paying customers, a terrific e-commerce operation, and access to Android devices. But it also had no licensing deal with the record labels. John Naughton Observer, 3 April, 2011

This last sentence is not exactly right. Both Amazon and Apple already have digital distribution deals with the record labels; its just that Amazon's existing digital distribution deal is in crucial respects rather better and more permissive than the Apple deal. Ironically, and again crucially, Google does not have an agreed license, though it has been negotiating hard for months and the Amazon chutzpah may well make it harder for Google to get the deal it badly needs. Amazon has been selling digital music since 2007, so it does have a licensing deal with the labels and the Amazon deal is actually rather more favourable to streaming than the digital distribution deal that Apple was granted some years earlier. The crucial point about the music distribution deal that Amazon has, is that it allows Amazon to sell and deliver 'unencrypted' MP3 files to consumers -- and Amazon's new Cloud Drive is just allowing consumers to store their files in the cloud, rather than on a hard disk. Amazon already has a license to distribute (most) music to consumers through the web in a form in which music can easily and simply be stored in an individual consumers 'music locker'. Amazon's license with the record labels, is not ideal, but it is workable for streaming music and gives Amazon good leverage. It is not ideal because, Amazon's rights are currently restricted to the US (or in practice restricted to the US where individual content shifting is explicitly approved by the courts), and because without more leeway from the licensors Amazon may have to maintain individual Cloud Drives for each consumer (it would be more efficient to have individual libraries where common tracks were represented by 'tokens' rather than full copies). Apple, on the other hand, has distribution deals with the music labels which are explicitly tied to Apple's commitment to encrypting music in the way that is proprietary to Apple, and which limits music to devices recognised by the Apple DRM. Apple, we should assume is still significantly hobbled by these agreements. Having to encrypt all 'streaming' music in the DRM specific to iTunes is the major factor delaying Apple from introducing the 'cloud based' iTunes that it knows that it ought to be offering. A music streaming service needs the freedom for music to be delivered to a device as many times as it may need to be played, but Apple being lumbered with 'Fairplay', its download-tracking, DRM for iTunes clearly needs some permission, some wiggle room, from the music companies for this to happen. Amazon came along much later with its request for a music distribution deal, and the music companies were so desperate to have some competition for Apple that they agreed to Amazon's terms which give them more scope for internet-based distribution.

One irony of this situation is that the roles are reversed when it comes to books. For books, the Amazon distribution rights are more clearly dependent on their commitment to DRM and to a proprietary format. Amazon was the innovator in the ebooks space and Apple was playing catch up, so the publishers were less insistent in their negotiations with Apple on the requirements for DRM. The Apple iBooks standards are less proprietary, more open to industry standards than the Kindle. Apple seems to be cast (perhaps unwillingly) in the role of bad cop for music, whereas Amazon is looking like good cop in the music sphere and 'bad cop' for books. Google would love to be playing the role of good cop in both markets, but it is not clear that it has the necessary leverage. It needs to come up with a proposition for the record labels, that is good for consumers and wrong-foots both Apple and Amazon. That may not be easy.

Amazon tackles Apple

"Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Amazon Cloud Player for Android. Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free." from Amazon Press Release 29 March, 2011

This is going to be a protracted and complex tussle and Google will join in. Doesn't look as though there is going to be an iPhone app, but the Amazon Cloud Player for Web will presumably work fine through any web page...... Safari has a role.

Are we laying odds on the outcome? I think of the web as the mat on which these wrestlers are having their match. Chances are that the web wins in the end. The audience are the audience.

World Military Wrestling Championship (via Wikimedia commons)

P.S. The man in blue may look like he is going to lose. But that was not the outcome.

iPad Usage is Shooting Through the Roof

We yesterday introduced a straightforward way for our publishing partners to access Google Analytics reports for any of the individual titles that we host for them. Data is available in the amazingly atomic detail supported by Google Analytics, for each title, issue, and page. Also, Google makes it very practical to select specific date ranges, whereas the data we had previously collected from our own logs was lumped together in coarse monthly buckets. The traffic data is aggregated for each magazine, so there should be no privacy issues. Furthermore, each publisher has access to his own data, and stuff that is generic or 'cross publication' is not reported via the Google system. The data spigot for each magazine can be switched on as soon as a publisher sends us their Google Analytics code.....

I love the way Google Analytics can provide flexible geographical breakdowns of the data it aggregates:

















33 visits from Bari and 71 from Bologna.

Whenever we collect data on our users we are surprised by the extent to which the iPad is making such a big difference to the digital magazine business. Here are a few data points:

• In the last year we have had more visitors to our website from iPad users than from the iPhone (this time a year ago there were no iPads anywhere outside Apple)
• These iPad users read/access twice as many pages as iPhone users
• The iPhone usage has also shot up in the last year. Six times as many visitors this year as in the previous 12 months.
• iPod usage is also significant and is at about the same level as Android usage. Much smaller than iPhone use but, surprisingly, slightly more sticky (both Android and iPod are slightly stickier than the iPhone)
• Blackberry and Symbian use is low, and Windows barely registers (guess that is Windows 7?)
  
• Our aggregate visits from mobile users (March 14, 2010- March 14 2011) have increased more than 10 times from the previous year (1000%+)
  
• Looking at one particular magazine which has been quite popular on the iPhone/iPad, it has had over 20,000 freemium app downloads in the last year and roughly one in 6 of those freemium downloads has led to a sale.
  
• We regard 1 in 6 as a good conversion rate. The conversion rate for different magazines varies enormously.
• Price is a big factor in the conversion process.
• iPad sampling has marginally outdistanced iPhone sampling. This is really surprising since there must be at least 10 times, perhaps 20 times, as many iPhones as iPads in the market for this particular magazine (which has mostly a UK circulation).
  
• We do not yet have relative conversion rates but we would expect the conversion rate to be significantly weighted to the iPad -- we know this from smaller samples.

I guess it is possibly worrying that Google know so much about our system, our traffic and the usage of our publisher's digital assets. Google know so much about all of us. But they do make it easy for web site owners to find out what they know! Apple must have just as much detail on the use of the apps we provide for iTunes, but like all other Apple developers we have access to very little of what Apple must know about the usage of apps.

On the other hand our publishers are now in the position that they have access to what Google know about the digital distribution of their magazines and something of what Apple know. Google and Apple are pretty much ignorant of the other guy's data. At Exact Editions we see it as our task to help publishers get their digital magazines on as many platforms as possible and to maintain an overall control of that distribution and data. That ultimately gives publishers a position of some strength.

Google goes into Culture Commerce

The rumour mill has it that Google will launch a Chrome netbook, cloud-based, computer before Christmas or early in the New Year. When you put this rumour alongside the others coming from the Googleplex you get an interesting picture

1. Is Google going to buy a big package of movie rights? Is that why it has hired the former Netflix executive George Kynci?
2. Google is possibly quite close to signing a deal with the major music labels for its cloud-based music-streaming service.
3. For a couple of years, Google has been apparently on the brink of releasing a digital books service in collaboration with book publishers. Most recently Dan Clancy told us that Google Editions will be launching very soon ("très bientôt")

The rumours about the Chrome netbook suggest that its really all about the web, cloud-based productivity and web browsing, but if its launch is accompanied by, or closely followed by, a Google distribution and e-commerce solution for books, films and music, the market place for publishers and entertainment companies may change very fast. Google will be a formidable competitor if it becomes an information publisher and an e-commerce platform for film, music and books. Competitor primarily for Apple and Amazon, Google may well be seen as more of a 'friend', because more collaborative and more open than either Amazon or Apple, by the big incumbent publishers and media groups. Knowing, as we do, the way Google works (quiet launches, 'beta' services, and something of a scatter gun approach) I think its unlikely that Google will launch a fully fledged, cloud-based, Chrome-machine, with a multi-channel, multi-media dashboard in place in the first quarter of next year. It is surely more likely that this hardware platform and this constellation of media services will each emerge in their own good time. But if the plans come off and Google has these publishing partnerships in good order, it is highly likely that Google will be selling a lot of consumer products next Christmas. And I do not meant via Groupon; a commercial solution that can stream all kinds of media stuff from your locker in the cloud to Android and Chrome platforms, will be a dazzling consumer attraction

Google Books Search over the Summer

Judge Chin is still considering his decision in the case of Google ..... His ruling may come this week, next week, or in a few months. Only he and his team have a good idea of that. Meanwhile Professor Pam Samuelson has produced a very thorough, balanced, somewhat critical review of the proposed Settlement and of Google's efforts in a 60 page paper for the Minnesota Law Review. If you haven't been following GBS too closely, this is an excellent place to get an insightful review and summary of what has been going on. If, like several hundred lawyers and digital library experts you have been following GBS too closely for years, you will already have read her piece and it will have reminded you of stuff that you had forgotten. Her conclusion:

The future of public access to the cultural heritage of humankind embodied in books is too important to leave in the hands of one company and one registry that will have a de facto monopoly over a huge corpus of digital books and rights in them.
Google has yet to accept that its creation of this substantial public good brings with it public trust responsibilities that go well beyond its corporate slogan about not being evil. Google Books Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace

I have been a 'qualified' supporter of Google Books Search from the beginning. The qualifications are coming more to the fore. Whatever Judge Chin decides, we can be sure that Google Books Search is going to be mired in legal complexities for years to come. The international ramifications of the venture are hopeless and will sap energy and innovation. Google Books Search, if it is approved, will work badly and too patchily for European literature and libraries, and it will be especially rough and unsatisfactory for British literature, libraries and universities. It will be a mess of conflicting and irresolvable copyright regimes for years. Google itself seems to find it hard to innovate or roll out new services. A clean and direct implementation of Google Editions has been 'promised' for this summer, or this year, but it has been promised before. Several times. No doubt part of the reason that it is being held up is that its roll out may have unpredictable or unwelcome legal consequences (or unwelcome splash-back from the court of public opinion). Google Editions when it comes should be a very useful and popular service, but Google have to get it out of the door before it can properly grow and bed itself into the array of digital books that is now mushrooming.

Pamela Samuelson points to the lack of substance in Google's mantra 'we will not be evil'; but its arguable that Google has failed in a more fundamental and troubling way. It has failed to sacrifice the idols of its founders; it has failed in corporate governance. Page and Brin met and worked together in a project for digital libraries. The Google Books Search proposition was clearly motivated in part by Page's promise to digitize the libraries of his alma mater the University of Michigan. The two big leaps in the Google Books enterprise, were first to dream of digitizing millions of books in one universal searchable index (the original project, defended by an appeal to 'fair use' and the transformative effect of a large database of books) and then secondly to aim for a commercial settlement to the 'class action' suite, through which Google, the authors and publishers would effectively enclose, exploit and privatize millions of copyrights for which they cannot claim ownership. I suspect that the Google Books project, and especially the Library component, has always been too close to the goals and aspirations of Google's young founders. The big and aggressive steps that the company has taken to stake out its claims have been part of the founding DNA, the dreams that brought Brin and Page together. The third 'founder', Erik Schmidt joined the company in 2001. At about that time the initial steps for the Google Books enterprise may have been taken, perhaps Schmidt may have been too much the 'new boy' to question the goals of the original founders. Schmidt should have spotted that there were copyright problems, he should have noticed that there were at least issues of politesse involved in digitizing and then using for profit, stuff that did not belong to Google or to the Universities with which they worked. I bet that he has since then wished that the aims of the Google Books undertaking were more clearly understood within and without the company. And more cautiously and generously drawn. At some point Google has to take a much more humble view of its role, and at that point things might start to work in its favour.

Stone, scissors, paper: and the Digital Book Race

It sometimes seems that Google, Apple and Amazon are engaged in a three-way fight over the digital books space. They each have a very important area of strength: Google dominates search (and search-based advertising), Apple leads and designs the very best consumer devices, Amazon has amazing strength in consumer transactions (logistics). And the three fighters are subtly trying to manoeuvre the struggle into the terrain where their particular strengths dominate. So Google is building a massive library that will interact and benefit from Google's supremacy in search, and a lot of stuff should be free and any hardware device can access its service. Amazon is trying to build individual consumer accounts fed by their logistic strength and transactional breadth, obviously not limited to books, physical and digital, and Amazon care more about managing transactions in the consumer's account than they do about owning the device. Amazon only cares about consumers, so -- unlike Google -- they do not offer anything much to libraries. So Kindle books are readable on the iPad. Apple is trying to establish a superior hardware platform in which their range of interoperating devices cannot be matched: desktop, phone and tablet format working together. If Apple owns the superior hardware platform they will control vital pinch-points through their app store (so far limited to Apple hardware for apps and books). They are all fighting on several fronts at once. So Apple, is erecting a system of apps and phone-based demographics which will be immune to Google search. Google will be blocked in Apple's mobile domain, and Apple has built an e-commerce system that certainly rivals Amazon's, though it does not have anything like the breadth of the Amazon offering (yet). Amazon attempted to get into Apple's patch with a hardware device, the Kindle, which now appears to be completely outclassed by the iPad. Google does not want to be boxed-out by the Apple iOS, so it has launched its Android system which it hopes will attract the collective ingenuity of all the consumer electronics companies who are concerned that Apple might eat their lunch. With retaliatory ingenuity Apple is building an advertising system iAds which may seriously limit the Google advertising dominance. So the battle is three way and in deadly earnest.

Is it a game of stone, scissors and paper? Perhaps one being played in several dimensions. If so, Apple is the 'paper', they were always going to be on top of the rather dull 'Kindle' from Amazon: stone-coloured if not yet quite sunk. But Apple appears to be threatened by Google's incredible scissor-like sharpness in search. Perhaps the analogy breaks down with Amazon contra Google. Is there a way a battleground on which Amazon is beating Google? Amazon does appear to have the beating of Google in one area: third party, cloud-based, web services -- Amazon S3 etc. Perhaps this is the area in which Amazon might ultimately have the beating of Google's over-centralised approach to building a universal library. Amazon needs to build a digital book service which is more collaborative and de-centralised and which attracts libraries, authors and publishers as effectively as they have attracted book buyers.

Is there something that could change the dynamics of this three-way tussle? Lots of things. One development that would certainly change matters would be if Facebook entered the fray. Suppose that Facebook, live up to its name and did a deal with Amazon? We might then see an Amazon that really could outsmart Google in the relationships game. Cloud-based book networks.

Do you think that the Google Book Search judgement will come tomorrow? One of these days....

What is Apple's Mission Statement?

We all know Google's mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (Google: Company Overview). Amazon has a vision statement that you may have encountered: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online." (Amazon: Corporate FAQ's). I bet you did not know that Apple has a 'sort of' mission statement on its investor relations pages:

"Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone."

That doesn't get me too far. It sounds more like an overly-potted history than a mission statement, it is also somewhat out of date, since it doesn't even mention the latest revolutionary step: the iPad. I subscribe to the view that Apple has incredibly ambitious goals which it probably does not even articulate to itself. It is determined to invent and own the high end of consumer computing, which is going to be the only safe place for a computer manufacturer to be in five years time (see Charlie Stross on "The Real Reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash", or as John Gruber has it 'The iPad really is The Big One: Apple's reconception of personal computing' from "This is how Apple rolls").

So Apple's mission may be so audacious that it would be unwise to articulate it fully. But it may also have crafted its trajectory in such a way that it does not become too obviously monopolistic. Apple wants to revolutionize the world of personal computing (that is what Jobs and Wozniack did first time around in the 1970s) and yet the company does not obviously want to monopolize the market. Carving out the high-end, deluxe end, of the consumer market should be enough. Is that the way that publishing will work in the future? There will be a high-end platform for those who like to buy into Apple standards, and a more chaotic, Android, world of confused standards where stuff is cheaper, where there is more stuff and wilder stuff (including Flash and porn) but perhaps also less reliability and consistency?

New Models for Digital Advertising

In the last couple of weeks we have seen two new models for digital advertising proposed. First Steve Jobs announced iAds as part of the introduction for iPhone O/S 4.0. Second, Twitter announced their new concept of Promoted Tweets which have begun to be rolled out from major brands such as Starbucks, Red Bull and Virgin America. The Apple ads will be 'rich media' ads, using HTML5 (of course not Flash) but they will not be web-based, they will be app-based, and their announcement keyed in with the development that will allow apps to be nested within each other in the O/S 4.0. They also look as though they may be require quite complex and high-end design and animation skills. In his presentation Steve Jobs estimates that Apple could be generating 1 Billion iAd slots per day in six months time. That is a big opportunity.

What interests me about these new proposals for streams of digital advertising is that they promise to be quite distinct and different models for digital advertising. Sure they will be competing with Google in the advertising space but they will be competing by offering a completely different form of digital advertising. They are quintessentially forms of advertising which piggy-back on the environment of their hosts: Apple and Twitter. Apple have proposed an app-based form of advertising, and perhaps to no one's surprise Twitter have proposed a form of Tweet-based advertising. Whereas Google of course has its strongest suite in search-based advertising. Apple and Twitter are both, in their different ways, targeting the type of brand-based advertising which is where Google is least effective and dominant. They are targeting the big-budget, high impact advertising which has been the strong point of magazine and TV advertising for decades. Use of the Twitter and Apple eco-systems may be helpful to digital magazine publishers in the medium term. All publishers and advertisers will hope for more competition for Google in the distribution of digital ad-spending, but the print and TV publishers are losing control. There will be significant cuts for Apple and Twitter.

Notice also, that the Apple system is significantly less web-based than we have come to expect. The ads that are delivered are not web pages. Although the ads are built with HTML5 (big chuckle from the audience when Steve Jobs said that, sensing another jab at Flash) the advertisements are entirely based on inApp deployment. They are seen on the iPhone, the iPad etc within applications. Not on web pages. It would be no big deal to deliver these HTML5 also on the open web, but Apple have not yet said whether they will do that (nor have Apple said whether or not they will deliver iBooks on open web pages. My guess is that they will not). Apple is clearly building an Apple-only, Apple-closed system for advertising (see Frédéric Filoux and Peter Kafka). There is no point in blaming Apple for this closed approach. Google also is pretty closed when it comes to the workings of its advertising system. But the choice of 'digital advertising' as the topic headline for this blog is deliberate. Digital advertising systems are increasingly using the web and open web standards only to the extent that it really helps the technology platform to gain acceptance. We will see more proprietary advertising systems developed in the years to come (watch out for Facebook).

Could the same thing happen to books, magazines and newspapers that is now happening to advertising? Could we be moving towards a world in which there are multiple versions of mostly incompatible digital books, targeted or delivered at different types of digital distribution: ebooks for Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Sony, appbooks for Apple, slightly different Flash appbooks for Android, Google Books for Google Editions, Hulu-magazines for digital TV, Nintendo books and comics for game consols? Or will publishers, authors and readers be looking for a distribution model in which the same book, magazines and newspapers can be offered through all these platforms? Fragmentation and differentiation look to be the stronger tendency at the moment, but a move towards interoperability would be good. That should come if delivery via the web remains at the core of the service provided.

Making Life Difficult for Android

I am sure you noticed that Steve Jobs was reported as really going at Google, and particularly targeting Android. There has also been a good deal of discussion on the Apple:Adobe kerfuffle over Flash. Some of the best points are being made by John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Here’s what I mean about Flash Player’s performance being a distraction from the underlying story: Even if Adobe solves Flash’s performance problems, I still doubt Apple will want to include it in iPhone OS.

It boils down to control. I’ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There’s no bug Apple can’t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can’t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That’s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.
........
I say what Apple cares about controlling is the implementation. That’s why they started the WebKit project. That’s why Apple employees from the WebKit team are leaders and major contributors of the HTML5 standards drive. The bottom line for Apple, at the executive level, is selling devices. It may well be true that Steve Jobs doesn’t really give a shit about the web in and of itself. It’s just good business for Apple to control a best-of-breed web rendering engine. If Apple controls its own implementation, then no matter how popular the web gets as a platform, Apple will prosper so long as its implementation is superior. (Yet More on the Unfolding Future-of-Flash-and-the-Web Saga)

Its all about control. And you could say much the same thing about the recent row over Apple throwing out various dubious bad taste, vaguely ridiculous and smutty apps. Again this is really Apple asserting its ability to control not only the implementation of its hardware, but also the environment in its e-commerce operation. Its all about controlling the environment and the implementation. Of course, iPhone users and iPad owners will still be able to access and play bikini-shaking apps on their iPhone. It is just that they will have to be web apps. There is lots of wicked, I mean really bad stuff on the web and it will run in the browser but it doesn't go in the catalogue. Users will still be able to access any kind of pornography or worse, but Apple are saying loud and clear that they are not going to have them in their iTunes listings or in their e-commerce mall. It is pretty much the same issue of control as when a shopping centre landlord says: "No massage parlours and no abatoirs in this 5 acre park. Sorry, no boiling of bones here."

Why does control of this sort, both of the operating system and the environment, matter so much to Apple? It matters because the quality of the consumer experience is affected by these issues and Apple is trying, succeeding, in mapping out a high-end and smarter consumer experience. That is it.

But it isn't quite all. Have you noticed, how by asserting these standards and insisting on control Apple is parenthetically giving Android a tough hand to play? Android looks like being the number 2 (maybe it will be number 1, but it is starting at number 5 or 6) mobile platform. Apple is giving them some nice assets to start building their consumer experience: here you can have Flash. And a lot of the early Android phones will make much of the fact that they can run Flash. Here: you can have all the developers who produce Apps in lousy taste. Clever developers, ticked off with Apple who have a tendency to produce wobbly boob apps. These are what chess players call 'poisoned pawns'. There is no way that Android will not be able to welcome these gifts with, gritted teeth, open arms. But could it be that Android's playing field is being subtly polluted? Google really doesn't much like Flash either, and I suspect Eric Schmidt is not a great fan of iBoob, still less of BabyShaker. Is Android going to be the environment in which Flash stuff runs not too well? How are Google/Android going to navigate the smut field? Part of the point (a large part of the point) of Android is that it is a much more open environment than the traditional smart phone O/S. A large part of the point of the Android e-commerce system is that it will not have those 'ridiculous' Apple controls. Steve Jobs is totally and absolutely delighted that Android will suck up this stuff that he is throwing out of his shopping trolley. Couldn't be pleased-er when the Android e-commerce mall gets the reputation of having dubious apps.

Fast Flip: How Google Reads Newspapers and Magazines

Google yesterday launched Fast Flip at Google Labs. From the announcement:

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. See Googleblog.

This is a highly revealing way of characterising our on-line reading experience. It is as though Google thinks there are only two ways of reading. Search, of course. First, and foremost, search in which you know more or less what you want and use a search engine to find it. And then 'flipping through content very fast until you find something interesting.' Publishers and educators know that this is not the way that most serious and most recreational readers read. Although much reading is exploratory, the reputation of a title, an author or a publisher is and will remain important to readers of newspapers, magazines and books. Metadata matters. Titles, editions, dates, authors, correspondents, replies, corrections, editorials ....

Google makes this 'fast flipping' possible by hosting images from the newspaper and magazine web sites. Incidentally, they only use the newspaper websites. I did not see any pages which actually used the Print Image. They are building on the look and feel of the publishers web sites, not their magazines and newspapers as printed. The service is clearly aimed at attracting publishers through a revenue split, but the activity is hosted and managed by Google and one wonders whether the collateral advertising which appears in the margin of the page images can generate significant revenues. Paul Bradshaw thinks not:

Of course, by hosting screenshots Google are eating into one of the key metrics that publishers use to sell advertising: the time a user spends on your site. And given that many readers don’t read beyond the first few pars, there’s a good chance it will eat into the numbers clicking through to the actual page at all. So unless Google’s ad rates are significantly higher, what reason at all would a commercial publisher have to sign up to a scheme that devalues their own ad inventory in exchange for some pennies from Google? Blind panic in the midst of a crisis, that’s all. Google's Fast Flip -- A Cruel Joke on the News Industry

The commercial proposition is highly dubious. But Google is being completely sincere and genuine in offering its helping hand . Google is convinced that this Fast Flipping is the way that consumers want to read news on the internet.

"We have tried to build platforms and tools that build a healthy, rich eco-system online that is supportive of content. This is a new way of looking at content." Marissa Mayer quoted by BBC News.

Having seen the success of Google News, and keeping in mind the atomisation of music, and the considerable success of the iPod Shuffle, Google appears to consider that a rapid flipping (navigation) between atomised stories is the way to read news. The point has been clearly stated by their spokespersons.

...... the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format. But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.... Marissa Mayer Testimony to the US Senate on the Future of Journalism (PDF)

The Internet has changed the unit of consumption. The unit of consumption for news is now the article, not the newspaper. I still love reading the newspaper. But I use the Internet to look at a lot of news stories, too, and on the Internet there's a different way of consuming things. No one is saying that newspapers shouldn't make money...
William Patry, Google copyright expert, Interview with Publishers Weekly

Google News and Google Fast Flip embody the view that the context of publication in which a story is published is unimportant. News therefore works best on the web if it is atomised and decontextualised. Newspapers and magazines have to an extent prepared the ground for this. Their own web sites make it increasingly difficult to locate the story in the context in which it was published. Magazines are careless about the value to subscribers of the contents of their current and forthcoming issues. Newspapers and Magazines need to recover the confidence that reading the magazine or the newspaper is an experience that can be enjoyed on the web as much as it can be in print. The newspaper and the magazine as a digital experience have to offer sufficient value that a readers is prepared to become a subscriber to the magazine or newspaper. Subscription services -- especially of the digital edition and its archive will generate much more for most publishers, than a Fast Flip of streamed content which will catch a trickle of Ad-sense revenues. Of course, there are changes and more will be needed. Search within a publication is very important. Internal navigation is very important. The possibility of citation and book-marking is essential. External navigation is especially important when it is relevant to the reading experience. But, Fast Flipping? That may be about as much use as Shuffling the news.

The Race for Digital Books and Apple's Lack of Strategy

The three biggest players in the digital editions or eBooks space may have already announced their presence in the market: Amazon, Google and Apple. Apple did it this week and I am not sure that onlookers have yet understood the Apple position. There has been a persistent view that Apple may be planning to develop an eBook or a digital books strategy. I think it is now clear that their very clever strategy is based on the insight that they don't really need one.

Amazon and Google have been shaping up for a tussle for a while, and seem to be pulling the book market from opposite ends like a giant Christmas cracker waiting for it to come apart in their hands. With a bang. Apple, on the other hand, has been sitting coyly on the sidelines, with Steve Jobs publicly and sceptically wondering whether there is going to be a market for digital books.

The announcement earlier this week about Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 made it at last pretty clear how Apple is going to become a player and the strategy is so simple and solid that I am surprised that more of us did not see it coming. Apple has taken the very sensible position that it doesn't need to be a big player in the digital books or the ebooks market to win the game hands down. Apple is going to let authors, publishers and developers get on with their business and work out how the digital books market is going to work and Apple is just going to collect the market-maker's fee for letting it happen, on and in the iPhone arena. Apple is being quietly agnostic about the way that digital books should work, it is just inserting itself in the situation with the proposition, that if they are to be sold on the iPhone platform, Apple will take a 30% commission.

To get back to the Christmas cracker that Amazon and Google have been pulling at: Google thinks that the future of books is a future of digital editions in a global digital library (managed of course by Google). This is a world in which books are in a database in the cloud. Amazon thinks that the future of digital books is a future in which we all have, Kindle-shaped eBook readers in our pockets in which we store the books that we own. From the Google end of the cracker we are talking about massive databases where most usage is surely going to be free. From the Amazon end of the cracker we are looking at file formats where a lot of books, certainly new books, will be downloaded and probably sold, mostly by Amazon. Google has recently been showing some mild indecision about its own vision, first in producing a new type of re-flowable file format for its GBS Mobile offering, and then by offering half a million 19th century eBooks to the world via Sony. I dont think Google is really going down the eBooks road but it does look a bit like backtracking. Amazon has also shown some mild indecision by producing a virtual Kindle a Kindle 'environment' for the Apple iPhone which means that you do not need to have the actual bit of Amazon kit to read the proprietary file format. Amazon may have wobbled, but Amazon seems to be sticking to the view that it is in the bookselling business rather than the library business. Interestingly enough both these bouts of indecision took place on the iPhone platform. What is this telling us?

The position that Apple have announced for themselves is stylish, decisive and agnostic. Apple doesn't mind whether books are based in the cloud as web resources, or shipped around the internet as book-specific file formats. Web-based books, digital editions and ebook file formats can all run easily on the iPhone if that is what is needed: "Open house, come over here and play". That is the message from Cupertino. But Apple is also saying that if you want to trade these new booky gizmos on the Apple platform and sell them through the Apple e-commerce system, you will be expected to pay 30% of the gross to Apple. While you are at it you might as well call them Apps. In consideration for this courteous invitation, Apple will handle the transaction and any strictly necessary hosting fees.

Since Amazon have a track record of obtaining 55-65% discounts from book publishers, and since Google's terms have trade for the Settlement have been announced at 38% (plus a bit more), the Apple share does not look too greedy. But for the daily expense in running the Store it is a fat margin. Apple will thus appear to most publishers and authors as a reasonable partner, a less monopolistic partner, than either of the other West coast web giants, and since Steve Jobs is quite agnostic about the way in which the books will work Apple has a good chance of coming up with the prize hidden inside that cracker. If this is a race, I am tempted to call it for Apple. But there are quite a few laps to go yet.

Google Books on Sony eBook Reader

Sony has done a deal with Google to make 500,000 public domain books available to users of the Reader device. This suddenly jumps Sony ahead of Amazon in terms of the race to get the bighest number of titles accessible from the Kindle or the Sony Reader. The Kindle owner has about 250,000 to choose from.The books on their way to Sony will be the 500,000 titles with cleaned up ASCII from the recently announced Google Books Search mobile operation. 500K titles are public domain worldwide, (about another million are available to US users of Google Book Search but they would not figure in the deal because the Sony reader has an international reach). The Google Books implementation will still be superior, because it will offer both the ASCII text and the backup page images, which are presumably not in the Sony versions.

Believe me, a lot of the books are very, very boring. Hardly of interest to anyone, in amongst the cobwebs there is a lot of wonderful 19th century literature, and we will see how Sony can tidy up a way of selecting relevant titles (Austen, Dickens, Twain) from this vast stockpile and then present them to readers who can only carry around 1.000 or so downloaded titles on the Reader device.

This is clearly an alliance between Google and Sony. That much is apparent. But who is competing with whom? Is it a matter of Google against Amazon (Google trying to slow up the advance of the Kindle, so that the concept of books as dataservices can get time to gell)? Or of Sony against Amazon (capture the mind-share for the worldwide eBook reader market, since Kindle seems to have won that match already in the USA). Or of Google against Apple (by showing that the iPhone is not the only mobile device which can carry a lot of good books)? Or is it really a matter of Google competing with Sony and the publishers (by showing that there are so many good books out there for free, that the market for paid for downloadable books is going to be a tough proposition to sell to consumers). On the face of it, giving away free access to half a million books when your device can only hold a very few of them is a trifle strange. Google ends up being the winner in that comparison.

Perhaps the way in which Sony delivers on this announcement will make it clearer who is competing with who. Come to think of it, since the Kindle can only be sold in the US and Google has another million books which can only be treated as public domain within the USA, should we be expecting the Kindle to emerge with access to these 1 million restricted titles? According to the NYT article Google is willing to make its catalog of digitised books available to "any other e-book distributor that shares its goals of making books more accessible." I will be surprised if that happens, but we live in strange times, and certainly Amazon shares with Google the goal of making books more accessible.

One to Watch?

Outsell, the respected, opinionated and energetic, information industry consultancy and reference resource, reckons that Exact Editions is one of the 30 industry innovators to watch in 2009. They published the press release in December, but Google Alerts has only just alerted me to it (wake up Google!). Well, for sure they are right, but we get in there with some pretty impressive and distinguished company: the British Medical Journal, Thomson/Reuters, The Guardian, Nature, PLoS (Outsell are covering all the angles!) not to mention Google and Safari (is that Safari Books or the browser? Could be either: maybe they know that Apple are going to launch an eBooks tablet with a souped-up Safari, but probably they mean Safari Books). There are some other relative unknowns in their list: so keep your eyes skinned for Brown Book and Flat World Knowledge -- mind you I have heard of that lot. They are aiming to open source the college text book market. Bold and timely. Bold oxymoronic title too, when you think about it.

Good luck to all the other innovators. Look forward to comparing notes in 2010!

Apple and Google will there be a Tussle?

Are these two great companies on a collision course? They may be united in their disdain for Microsoft, but they are going to be knocking into each other in the coming year.

Google has its Android mobile platform, and Chrome which is looking increasingly like a lunge towards an operating system (Google seem to be embarassed that Chrome does not yet run on Macs, but do Apple really want another operating system pushing into their terrain?). Not to mention Google Docs which is a growing threat to Microsoft's Office. Steve Ballmer is blowing smoke when he pretends not to see how Google will make money out of this.

But Android will be a strong competitor for the iPhone, and it looks as though Google has taken a leaf out of Apple's book with its App Store for Android. The iPhone App store is already a huge success, but it the Android works and the App Store is as free-wheeling as is projected, Apple may find they face very strong competition with developers flocking to the less restrictive environment.

I am sure that these App Store developments are going to work, and they will be important to publishers and developers. But they are not the guts of the business, when you get down to it, its still really the web and the browser that matters. Perhaps the real story in all these exciting development is that the next generation of browsers will all be WebKit (Safari, iPhone, Chrome, Android, Blackberry, Nokia all using it) and that commonality is what is going to hold the web together.....

Naming of Parts

We now have a flexible system of web access management that allows a publisher to select areas of a book which can be assessed and sampled in full view before a purchase. For example here are some full size pages from the Time Out City Guide to London.

From the book's home page, there are some named links which allow the user to grasp the context of sample pages that might be of interest. Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia is a better handle in a city guide to London than pages 106-113.

So now we need a good methodology for encouraging publishers to name and open relevant parts of their books for sample access. The obvious solution, the one we have adopted, is probably the right one: Chapter 1, or Chapter 1's title, Bibliography or Table of Illustrations etc.... Is there a way of extending this nomenclature to readers and users? Is a vocabulary for chunked reference in books something that they will want? When every print page is a web page its a simple enough matter to provide names to groups of pages. Will each web-published book aquire its own patina of user-generated tags in the way that Flickr and Del.icio.us now have clouds of very helpful handles? Its an intriguing possibility, especially sine the handles would be used by other programs and resources.

Henry Reed's Naming of Parts

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts......

Google Street View Car getting lost in Florence

Yesterday, after playing with the new iPhone and blogging about Android, I set out on my usual walk to the bread shop. For the first time with an iPhone in my pocket (tempting to walk along playing with it). I had gone barely 50 metres when I noticed a black car moving up the street, rather uncertainly, with a large tripod on top. Could it be? Is it really? Yes, as it turned left towards Via Dante Castiglione, I noticed that the large tripod superstructure was certainly a bunch of cameras, and there was a prominent Google logo stuck on the inside of the rear window. A Google Camera car on its rounds, canning street views of our leafy suburb, which almost surely means that I will now be fixed and smudged as the indistinct figure in a sloppy jumper, when the Google Street view shows the rest of the world this part of Florence in 2 months time (wonder what the delay is in processing street views?). I was too slow with my iPhone to take a shot but there are plenty at Flickr:

Google Car in Bristol



And here is a close up of the camera: there is something almost comic about the Heath Robinson quality of the Google survey cars, which look somewhat experimental. But the whole process will surely be completely automated once the digital video gets into the Google workflow. I can not believe that they employ 'street view editors'. If they did, there is just a chance that one of them might intervene in my interests: "We can't have our view of Florence messed up by that tramp in sloppy jumper at 0.016181,0.038409&z=15. Can someone erase him?".

Nope, its bound to be completely automated and I am afraid that I am now immortalised as a smudge in Google Street View. It is quite extraordinary the way in which the web now touches us in the most specific and exact detail throughout our lives, and so many web systems are now ingesting mundane information from all corners of the earth.

Why Today is a Really Important Day for the iPhone

Well before I get to that.....Today is a really important day for me because I bought my iPhone yesterday and it has been charged up during the night, while fresh firmware and a new operating system were installed etc, etc. [ Fresh firmware, a new O/S, and a new version of iTunes on my Mac...Why dont they just ship a virgin device and get all the bits installed over the internet? ]. Its now all lickety spit, charged up, and ready to go. And it is wonderfully impressive. I have been slow to get an iPhone because it has been slow to make itself available in Italy (where I mostly live). Of course, it was launched here three months ago, and Italy is the most telefonino-dominated culture in the world (maybe after Korea) but it has been impossible to get hold of them till this week.

It would seem that I have finally gotten on board the iPhone bandwagon just as it faces its most important challenge: Android, aka the Gphone will be launched today by T-Mobile. Android is Google's 'open' platform, operating system for mobile telephony and mobile computing. Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand has some good facts and figures explaining why the web will become predominantly mobile. As Greg explains the iPhone and the soon to be revealed Android have an important competitive but collaborative interdependence:

The iPhone is like the "proof of concept device" for the mobile internet. And it is the device to which the first Android phone will inevitably be compared by everyone. Google has seen its mobile fortunes rise with the iPhone. But the iPhone has tiny market share ......

Android is, in some respects, the anti-iPhone. Like the iPhone it seeks to provide a better user experience but also features a totally open platform unlike the highly controlled Apple device. At a conference last week, I had a mobile company executive tell me, "Steve Jobs re-wrote our press release." That can be seen as a metaphor for the tight controls that Apple imposes on developers and the entire process of launching iPhone applications.

The Android software ecosystem promises to be more freewheeling and more uneven as a result.

Google is going to have its hands full competing in the mobile space. Although Android has been a bit slow to come on stream, I like the idea of a freewheeling ecosystem. Competition is good for Google, as it certainly will be for Apple. It will also be interesting to see how the Google 'marketplace' compares with the evolving Apple AppStore.

Google's Newspaper Project

Barbara Quint (always worth reading), in Information Today, has some interesting comments as she reports on the massive Google Newspaper archiving project.

Google's efforts in this space are undoubtedly impressive. But the readable quality of old newspapers is inevitably poor. Take a look at this 1944 issue of the St Petersburg Times. Google can break the newspaper up into articles and can find the headline "Russians Nearing Minsk" -- this is not easy and totally cool -- but the readability of a facsimile of a 1944 newspaper is going to be poor. I also find it a trifle intriguing that searching on the phrase "Russians Nearing Minsk" in the Google archive, or indeed on the complete Google web index finds no results at all. How can that be? Did I misread the headline?

There is a real question in my mind why Google is doing this. And I take it that their process is entirely (ok 99.99%) automated. There would be no justification for doing it if it cost them significant man hours. And I also take it that they are in principle willing to digitise every newspaper. Google does not usually bother to 'negotiate' about what content should be put into its system, anything that can be scanned and that comes from one of their partners goes in the maw. Google does not do things by halves: see the correspondingly outlandish projection from Chad Hurley, that Google's YouTube appetite will lead to exponential growth of video on the web and in the cloud.

It is highly intriguing the way in which Google's confidence that every newspaper edition is worth digitising contrasts with the widespread gloom in the mainstream newspaper business that they fundamentally have no basis for a profitable future, especially the local papers. It is very puzzling that very few newspapers have made proper efforts to sell digital editions to their current subscribers. Deeply puzzling given Google's appreciation of the value of archival databases.

Maybe the Launch was too Soft

We have recently 'stealth' launched some digital books that seems to me so good that I am a trifle frustrated that hardly anyone has yet noticed that books now have live phone numbers and post codes. With the iPhone, such digital books give a whole new resonance to the phrase "Let your fingers do the talking." I blogged the Time Out City Guide to London a couple of weeks ago here. But you can now buy it for £4.95 from our Time Out shop. The same subscription will run on any computer, but the iPhone potential is the killer.

Of course, the iPhone is still a small market segment. There are barely 12 million users in the world, and the digital travel guides work in pretty much the same way on desktops and notebooks. But it is the application of digital travel guides in a phone that really intrigues me, and currently few PCs have direct phone connectivity. Also, the iPhone knows where it is, and the Google Maps implementation on that platform is very well thought out. So the live post codes in the Time Out book also work very well as a direction finder. Google and the iPhone can take the credit for that very cool resource.

This sense of mild impotence and excitement about a new mobile interactivity for books, has encouraged me recently to follow blog links to stuff about PR. Aaron Swartz's thoughts seemed bang on. Especially apt is the note of one commenter who points out that successful web PR is a bit like 'Restaurant PR'.

This is exactly what we are doing "Basically, you open your doors to the public without advertising, to serve those folks that stumble by and see you are open." But we are still in stealth mode and we have not yet seen a review...... BTW where does stuff like this get reviewed? Reviewing the new and unexpected functions of a digital book is not a trivial matter.

Restaurants get reviewed in Restaurant Guides, of course. So maybe its time we digitised a Restaurant guide, but who will review that? Who reviews the digital reviewers?

On Being Positive in August

Vint Cerf, who is one of the internet's founding fathers had a nice positive piece in last Sunday's Observer If you thought the internet was cool, wait until it goes space age

It's amazing how quickly those of us with internet access have come to take for granted the remarkable amounts of information we have at our disposal, but we're only seeing the beginnings. The bulk of human knowledge remains offline. As more of us get access to the internet, more of the world's information will find its way online.

Cerf is right. We havent seen the middle of the beginning, merely the beginning of the beginning. There is a lot of knowledge to be shifted in the next ten years. Virtualised. Objective Knowledge, which has been printed in books is now being dumped in the cloud.

The publishing industry too often has a depressing air of worry about digital technologies. Sometimes Amazon fear. Sometimes Google gloom. Too many possibilities. New technology can, after all, be a bit challenging to an established industry.

But, who can doubt that digital publishing will be a golden age for publishers and authors? Even staid old Television (which relies on mid-2oth Century technology, not on our Renaissance invention of moveable type) can, according to Mark Cuban, be rejuvenated by the application of a new technology. Boring 73", High Definition, flat panel TVs which have led to audience surges for the Olympics.

I dont have a flat panel TV. If I did, since its a digital device, I would want it to bring me the daily newspaper (all of them), magazines and books by the truckload. And why not?

Publishers need to consider the possibility that anything that can be published, will certainly be published digitally, and will, in principle, be available anywhere from many devices. That does not mean that it all will be free (why should it mean that?). But it does mean that it will either be available for free (sponsored by advertising) or because someone wants to buy, give, or rent it. That is a medium term horizon. Cerf should live long enough to see the end of the beginning.