One book to rule them all . . . .

Life-changing books, eh? Well, my first thought was to write about a book that has helped to shape my philosophy. The Tao of Pooh is a big stand-out in that regard, as is Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality. At the same time, though, those are both a little too overtly philosophical. They helped me refine my points of view, but didn't really expose me to anything too new. They just helped put words to things.

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's illustrated Primer introduced me to more new ideas, and some that are particularly relevant to me now. I still go back to it often when I think of the possibilities for ebooks and ebook technology. Still, despite the new ideas it gave me, it didn't really change the way I think in any real way. It came along a little too late in my life for that.

When looking for a book that really shaped who I am today, a book that helped form my ideas of right and wrong and that helped me figure out the kind of life I wanted to lead and the sort of person I wanted to be; well, there was really only one possible book to write about: Frodo called it The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King, but we know it more simply as The Lord of the Rings. I first picked it up the summer between fourth and fifth grade, and I re-read it on at least a yearly basis; I know that by my junior year in high school I had read it ten times.

The discovery part was easy--my parents loved Tolkien. Not that they were horrendously geeky people, or obsessed, or anything (granted, their silver Volvo does still have the license plate SHDWFX, in tribute to Gandalf's horse--still, that was mostly my doing). They just really liked Tolkien's stories, and they passed that along to me.

The Lord of the Rings influenced my early life in so many ways; because I loved it, I read other fantasy, started playing role-playing games (yes, I was one of them), and regularly broke friends's fingers with broomstick swords. But those are the more superficial ways that it influenced my life, really.

From Aragorn, I learned to love the idea of travel, while Gandalf passed along a hunger to know the ancient roots of things. Frodo taught me the importance of trying your best, even in circumstances that are much, much bigger than you, while Sam showed me that all the complexities of life aren't really nearly as complex as we think they are. And from all the hobbits I learned that really, the important thing to remember most of the time is that life is good.

The lessons from The Lord of the Rings keep coming, on each re-read. I've learned the importance of honoring one's word, the value of mercy, and the sad truth that all things must change and nothing will ever again be as it was. The Lord of the Rings is the book that set me on the path that I'm on now; it shaped me. And I couldn't be happier about it.

Another reason for Ooligan to be excited

In thinking about the Ooligan website and what sort of redesign it's going to end up getting, it occurred to me that we might want to have a look at the websites of other publishing programs in the country. I knew that there was a publishing degree available at NYU; their flyers show up in the halls of PSU sometimes, and I actually got to chat with oneof their instructors at the conference I was at recently. I had a vague idea that there might be another one or two around, but exactly how many, I didn't really have any idea of.

Well, a bit of googling brought me seven US programs that at least claimed to be about publishing, and another two that claimed to be in the US despite addresses in Aberdeen, Scotland. In no particular order, those are:

• Columbia's Publishing Course. They bill themselves, apparently with pride, as being "the shortest graduate school in the country." It's six weeks long; you spend 3 on books, 2 on magazines, and one on "new media."
• NYU's MS in Publishing. This looks to be a more serious sort of program than Columbia's, though their list of courses makes me think the emphasis of the program is on publishing as a business--I would expect the people who come out of this program to want to be publishing executives in big companies, rather than the well-rounded publishing generalists that we tend to turn out at PSU.
  
• George Washington University's MPS in Publishing. This is a two-year program that, like NYU's program, has a very stron business emphasis; shockingly, they have no courses on editing on their curriculum, though at least they offer one on design.
• Emerson College's MA in Publishing and Writing. They claim to deliver "an overview of the publishing industry from writing and editing, through design, production, promotion, and distribution," and their course selection looks reasonable enough--they seem to offer most of the courses that we do here at Ooligan, with a fair few additional ones devoted to magazines.
• University of Denver must be having a competition with Columbia--they have a program called The Publishing Institute that beats out the Publishing Course by a third--that's right, their course is only four weeks long. 'Nuff said on that, I think.
• Pace University offers an MS in Publishing that also seems to have a fairly decent course selection--there are plenty of courses on editing and design, and like Emerson a fairly full selection of classes on magazine publishing. They also have a number of classes on technology in publishing.
• Harvard's Extension School offers a publishing certificate, but there don't seem to be too many classes offered that are publishing specific--in fact, it looks like there are two (Principles of Editing and Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext), and the rest of the courses are electives from various writing and journalism fields.

So, there are some other publishing programs out there, and some of them actually look like they're pretty decent. But none of them have what we have with Ooligan: A student-run press. Actually being able to work on books that are really going to be published in the real world is a huge thing. I can't say for sure, of course, but I would think that this gives those students who really take advantage of Ooligan a world of experience that students at other schools won't get.

So why should we be excited? Well, it seems to me that we're in a really good position. There is apparently a fair bit of interest in publishing--enough to support eight programs in the States, even if some of them last for weeks rather than years. And we have a lot of experience with teaching publishing by publishing; we're even going to be putting out a book about it soon. We have the chance to start a dialogue with all those other students and teachers of publishing, and we can use that conversation to expand our web of contacts, share a lot of information with the industry in general, and get ourselves some good name-recognition. There are lots of possibilities here, and I'm excited to try to grab some.

No, really, with lasers!

Well, I can't say that I've ever actually personally bought something because of an email campaign. I tend to not sign up for many mailings, and those mailings I do sign up for all go to my spam email address, so I look at them all at the same time, once every month or so. Usually I don't spend a lot of time going through stuff--I skim, seeing if there's anything of interest, and then I delete it all.

Well, except for this once. I had signed up some while previous for the ThinkGeek newsletter. For those not in the know, ThinkGeek is the home of the most awesomely amazing toys on the internet: You can get remote control helicopters, screaming monkey slingshots, T shirts that tell you when there's a wifi signal, and stuff designed exclusively to annoy your coworkers. It's a gadget geek's heaven.

So one late one winter, I was going through my spam email address, clearing stuff out, when I hit the ThinkGeek newsletter. I had just recently gotten off the phone with my parents, who were despairing of ever being able to find me a decent Christmas present, when lo and behold, what should I see but a really super-cool looking strategy board game. With lasers. I drooled for a while, read some reviews, saw what other people thought of the game. And I liked what I read. So, I sent a link off to my parents. A month and change later, and what should I discover under the tree but an Egyptian-themed laser-equipped board game?

And that's about the closest I've come to succumbing to email marketing.

Ebooks and DRM

One of the big topics at the TOC conference was Digital Rights Management (DRM) and how it should be applied to ebooks. DRM is technology that basically locks up a file to prevent unauthorized duplication. This sounds like it shouldn't be a big deal in theory--after all, most people out there would agree that unauthorized copying shouldn't be permitted--but when DRM is implemented, many problems become evident. One of the primary issues is that of transferability. Say you have a DRM program that prevents the file in question from being copied at all. This would certainly prevent unauthorized copies from being made, but it would also keep me from being able to move the file in question from my computer to a mobile device. Even more troubling, it would keep me from being able to transfer the file from my old mobile device to my new one, meaning that I would have to buy the file all over again on my new device.

Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote speech blasting DRM. He had a number of excellent points, but chief among them was the fact that using DRM takes the terms of the ebook out of the publisher's hands and puts them in the DRM providers hands. This can cause all sorts of problems, as it did when DRM provider Overdrive decided to pull its service from Fictionwise. While this did not mean that people lost all of their ebooks, as some have claimed, it did mean that purchasers could no longer download new copies of things they had already purchased--files could no longer be transferred, in effect. So if your old Sony Reader had been dropped in the swimming pool one time too many but you were holding off until the new version was available in your area, you lost the ability to access all the ebooks you had already bought.

The other problem with DRM is that users hate it. As Doctorow said many times, all it does is make people feel like it's okay to steal from you, because you're a jerk. This is the primary reason that the music industry has belatedly moved away from DRM. Publishing is moving more slowly, to a large degree because electronic formats are a new thing for us, but we seem as an industry to be following in the footsteps of the music industry, determined to repeat their mistakes.

The difficulty with moving away from DRM is that the distributors get involves. Amazon, for example, refuses to let ebooks be sold for the Kindle without DRM. Publishers are left with a bit of a dilemma, then: Hold fast to principles and be denied a major market, or throw up your hands and say "fine", and put DRM on your files?

On Email addresses

I went off to go backpacking around Ireland for what turned into a year or so in 1997, and I remember before I left having a conversation with my dad about how neat it would be if there was some sort of email service that you could access from anywhere on the internet, by just giving a user name and a password. I remember he said that he didn't think such a thing would work, because of the way that mail servers worked. Well, a month or two later, some Australians I ran into in a hostel told me about this great service called Hotmail. I still have that Hotmail address, and I'm proud to say that it doesn't have any numbers or opening and closing "xx"s (I've never understood that particular naming convention). Of course, over the years that address began to get more and more spam, and I've mostly retired it now. It's the email I use to sign up for things that require email addresses, but that's about all I use it for.

My primary email address today is a gmail one. I actually have two of them that I use reasonably frequently. One is my general purpose main email, and the other is one I use specifically for writing. It doesn't see a whole lot of use, but it gets some.

Coming to PSU has, of course, granted me another email, and then there's a Yahoo! one that I got just to sign up for a newsgroup, but I don't check either of those too often. The PSU email forwards to my main gmail account, while the Yahoo! one just gathers dust in the hall closet of the internet.

Forwarding of emails and gmail's excellent filtering and labeling system makes it quite easy to maintain multiple email addresses without the hassle of having to check them all all the time, though hotmail and some other web based email clients won't forward mail unless you have a paid account with them--a petty but probably fairly effective tactic to ensure that the people who get their email for free at least have to look at ads.

The (I would guess fairly common) phenomenon of having an email address specifically for signing up for things has interesting implications for online marketing: When we collect an email address, we have to ensure that we're going to provide content that is interesting enough to people that they will want to have it delivered to their primary email address, if possible. It's very likely that newsletters that get sent to the spam addresses just languish unread in the inbox until they are purged in a massive fit of "select all; delete." The hard part, of course, is generating that compelling content.

Publishers and online marketing

Only a few hours in, and already the last day of the 2009 TOC conference is proving quite thought-provoking. Two of the three keynote speeches this morning emphasized the role that publishers need to have in marketing books. Both Tim O'Reilly and Nick Bilton stressed that publishers need to have more to do with their authors' online marketing efforts--authors need to be helped. Increasingly, sales efforts are moving online, and that means that our marketing efforts need to as well. It is not fair or helpful to ourselves or our authors to ignore that side of marketing, or to leave it up to the authors.

The ramifications of that, of course, are that publishing needs people who know theind their way around the tech side of things, and can get things done. As O'Reilly said, you can't be satisfied with IT departments who will say "Well, I'll need a specification for that. . . ." Instead, you need the people who have the ability and the drive to build what's needed and to communicate with others to get things done.

O'Reilly also pointed out the profound importance of delving deeply into social networking. The long tail, he said, is a fact, but it's important to remember that there's a head as well. Every new meida develops a head, and it is a property of the head that those in it can drive traffic down the tail. If a publisher is to attract those who would otherwise just self-publish, one of the best ways to do so is to have a secure position in the head of many social networks. This enables the publisher to drive traffic to their authors.

That barely scratches the surface of what was said during the morning's keynotes of course, but there are more sessions coming up. More later.

XML, XML, and some XML

Whew, it was quite a day--a good one, but a long one, and I have to admit to a certain amount of brain overload. Lots of fascinating details about XML and how to use it in publishing. The idea of using geospatial tagging in ebooks to produce books that can give different content is a pretty cool one, and DAISY also seems like a really worthwhile sort of thing--I'm all in favor of putting content out there in formats that might make things easier for blind, dyslexic, or visually impaired people.

About time for me to turn in, though--going to be another long but good one tomorrow, and the next day.

Questions about giving it all away for free

Brian wrote up a pretty interesting post recently about how giving away your works for free can drive sales, and while I agree with that thesis for the most part, I do still have a doubt or two. Mostly, those doubts come from the fact that the people who you hear success stories from are generally already quite well known. Certainly, that was the case for Monty Python when they started giving away skits. It works quite well for Cory Doctorow as well, but he's fairly well known. I wonder how well it works, though, for those who don't have the luxury of preexisting fame.

The Monty Python case has another significant difference from publishers giving ebooks away, and that's that Monty Python was only posting individual skits, not whole episodes. Publishers could do something very similar by releasing only the first chapter or two of novels for free, a la Shortcovers (a site I've mentioned previously), but that may not drive sales the same way.

A final area of concern with giving away ebooks is that if Reader technology becomes so user-accepted that it becomes the dominant method for reading, won't releasing ebooks for free in order to drive print sales be fairly pointless? Granted, this will probably not happen in the near future, but it may happen sometime in the next 20 years or so. If it does, I think publishers will have some serious rethinking to do, and will essentially have to reinvent the industry. If I'm lucky, I'll get to be a part of that.

Possibilities for the Portland Red Guide

Ooligan Press published The Portland Red Guide almost two years ago, and it has proven to be a very popular book for us. In it, Michael Munk show takes readers on a tour of Portland's radical past. The book is organized like a travel guide book, with sites important to the leftist history of town clearly marked in well-designed maps that take readers on walking tours of Portland.

Books that give information are great to have in electronic format; in any reference work, the ability to search and find the information you need is paramount. Finding information, as Google can attest, is much easier when book are in electronic form. Imagine knowing that The Red Guide had an entry about the home of notable radical writer John Reed, but not being able to remember where the article was. The ability to search the book electronically makes finding this information much easier.

That is hardly the limits of the possibilities for ThePortland Red Guide, though. GPS technology is increasingly ubiquitous in handheld devices, including smart phones and ebook readers. Imagine a guidebook that knew where you were and could tell you what was nearby: "You are currently across the street from the site of Miss Caitlin's School for Girls." As ebooks become more and more popular, this sort of added electronic content will become more and more imporatnt. A revloution in reading is right around the corner. . . .

Anticipation!

So, I'm pretty excited about next week; I get to run off to New York to go to O'Reilly Media's Tools of Change for Publishing conference, which will run from February 9-11. I'm footing the bill myself, which is somewhat painful, but fortunately I have a good friend with a spare bedroom in Brooklyn (as hard as that is to believe), so at least I won't have to pay extortionate hotel rates. The conference looks like it should be a blast: some of my favorite authors/editors will be there giving talks, as will plenty of notables in the publishing community. There should be plenty of opportunity to try to figure out where our industry is going, and also to meet some neat people. Who knows, maybe I'll even be eble to get some leads on some post-graduation work!

There are a ton of courses available at the conference, and I still haven't entirely figured out what I'm going to be taking; some of them are no-brainers, but others--well, sometimes it's tough to figure out which is the one I most want. So far, it's looking like:

Introduction to XML for Publishers: Without a doubt. This one is key for me, since one of the things that I want to do in my time as Digital Content Manager is get Ooligan using XML.

XML in Practice: Formats, Tools, and Techniques: This is part two of the previous class.

The next morning, I'll be listening to Bob Stein, mostly just to pass some time. Don't tell him that though, okay?

Then comes Literature as a (Web) Service, which is right up my alley.

Cory Doctorow is next, and that should be great--he's a fantastic author and has some really interesting things to say about intellectual property.

The course on the Google book search program is pretty much mandatory for me, particularly as it's being given by a guy from Google who heads the Boston Book Search team.

After that, it's still more fun with Google, this time from a bit more of a publisher's perspective.

And then there's lunch.

For the next section, I'm a little torn between going to the course on The Rise of Ebooks or the one on Adobe's Digital Publishing tools. I'm leaning towards the former, as I'm worried the latter will mostly just be an infomercial, but we'll see.

There's a talk on how publishers can take advantage of mobile phones, then one that explores what the future will look like for publishers, and then the serious part of the day winds down with a reception. After that there are some informal roundtables and demos, and then it's back to bed in Brooklyn.

The final day starts with a selection of keynotes, and then faces me with another choice: a Survey of Current E-Readers or Unleashing the Power of the Unbound Book? I lean towards the latter, as the former seems more utilitarian than inspirational. Plus, I'm of the opinion that dedicated ebook readers will not be around for too long, anyway, which means the stuff I would learn would be more short-term than not.

Lessons from a Book's Simultaneous Publication in Print and on the Web is a hugely long title, but should still be a pretty interesting talk, so I'll be checking that out.

My next choice is between a talk about retaining traditional publishing values in ebooks and one about wikibooks that anyone can edit. This one is a bit of a stumper; maybe I'll flip a coin.

The final few classes are on success stories and failures in digital publishing, what you do with a site with massive readership, and a talk from the guy who started NaNoWriMo.

So yeah, that should be a pretty crazy few days. I'll post some updates from the conference about the awesome stuff I learn, so stay tuned!