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Does the Medium Change the
Message?
-Andrew Grossman
May 20, 2009
No doubt in
the first years of the content for fee model, professional
online content will be dominated by properties that are well
known in the offline world. When people download fiction on
their e-reader they will favor such names as Stephen King,
John Grisham and J.K. Rowling. When they look to license a
cartoon they will gravitate toward Dilbert, Baby Blues and
other features at
CartoonResource.com. Well known columnists in the hard
copy newspaper world are, and will continue to be for some
time, the names that people seek to find in their Google and
ALOT searches.
The
internet will spawn its own properties and famous creators.
These creators will understand the specific characteristics
and aesthetics of the internet, and even more importantly
will understand in what ways the human brain, spirit and
attention span have been changed by search and surfing. Also
of prime importance to a creator is the main fact of the
internet, and perhaps the single biggest fact to be
considered in contemporary human society: the internet
offers the potential to reach every single human being in
the world right at this moment in time.
If every
one in the world, every member of every race, religion,
tribe, country, political belief and economic condition,
will eventually be on the internet, why not create
properties for them now? Internet creators have already
accepted one condition: faith. Ten years ago, if you
were spending precious work hours doing web development for
e-commerce sites, it was because you believed that the
potential of the internet would become a reality. Believe
that still for the vast tracts of the world that lack the
technology adaptation and political leadership to have
access. The barriers will fall. Consider the importance,
then, of creating an online novel, comic strip, music and
movie library, that will provide a welcoming appeal to those
who will soon meet us here.
Consider
also the following characteristics, their connection to
information and to the collective subconscious of humanity:
1. Hyperlinks
between all knowledge, emotion, human experience, between
all humans.
2. First hand
accounts of life in all parts of the world, therefore
avoiding a media filter.
3. Open space of
close communication, and within the openness created by
one-on-one communication,
the tantalizing chance at endless space provided by
one-with-and-among-four billion communication.
This is a new universe
we are creating.
Category:
Kindle, Blogging
Daily Content Comment is Copyrighted by Andrew
Grossman.
All rights reserved.
The material on this site
may not be reproduced,
distributed, transmitted, cached
or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission
of Andrew Grossman.
He can be contacted through the All Content Network at:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net |
|
Heart Shaped Kindle
-Andrew Grossman
May 6, 2009
Functionality
is the first priority of tech development. The immediate
future designs of the Kindle and other e-readers will answer
the needs of consumers to make reading text as easy on the
eyes and on the fingers as possible, by using high def
screen resolution, ez scroll bars and large format screens.
8.5 x 11 e-readers are planned. E-readers with wi-fi access
are planned. At a point in the not distant future, tech
designers and users will then have to ask some basic
questions about e-readers:
1.
how is this
device different than a laptop?
2.
how is this
device different than a netbook?
3.
will
consumers use this for all their computing needs, or simply
for reading?
4.
if consumers
will accept this device as their central computing device,
where do we put the keyboard?
5.
do I want to
be able to fold the screen for greater portability?
The history of
tech devices has one definitive pattern: when consumers get
turned onto using a device for one purpose-such as making
calls with a cellphone-they will eventually be willing to
use the same device for all purposes-see the smart phone-if
the interface is convenient enough. Will the e-reader follow
the same trajectory?
Size will be a
major factor, as will price. The current trend is to make
the screen bigger, but that is within the context of using
e-readers only for reading. If the decision is made to turn
e-readers into the next smart phone, the size will then
become smaller. It will never be as convenient to carry an
8.5 x 11 e-reader as it is to carry a smart phone. Does that
mean the e-reader cannot win the race for being everybody’s
everything?
The e-reader
may ultimately be running a different race: to mold the
future interface of the consumer with the internet. The
internet has two overarching characteristics that seem
self-contradicting: it is too large for one person to
comprehend; and it can be whittled down to as small a
sampling as the individual wants. Rather like the universe,
isn’t it? Google Search has aided both sides of the
equation. Type in a term, almost any term, and the number of
results are overwhelming. But as Google Search has
progressed, they have focused less on returning EVERYTHING,
and realized that what the consumer wants to achieve with
search is REACHING THE ONE RIGHT THING.
For genre
fiction fans, who make up the bulk of the fiction reading
public, the one right thing is to find a book which fits
into their preferred genre, which hits the high notes that
they seek in their genre reading. Ultimately, the market for
e-readers will be defined by the same niche product demands
that fuels all internet communities and product sales. The
e-reader’s design will be defined by the specific content
that the reading public wants. There will be e-readers
designed and sold specifically for mystery novel fans. There
will be e-readers designed and sold specifically for horror
novel fans. And there will certainly be e-readers designed
and sold specifically for romance novel fans.
The last may
come in the shape of a heart.
Category:
Kindle
Daily Content Comment is Copyrighted by Andrew
Grossman.
All rights reserved.
The material on this site
may not be reproduced,
distributed, transmitted, cached
or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission
of Andrew Grossman.
He can be contacted through the All Content Network at:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net |
|
Big Kindle & The League of
Extraordinary Creators
-Andrew Grossman
April 16, 2009
A new, larger version of
the Kindle electronic book reader is going to be released by
Amazon in 2009. The exact size
of the new Kindle has not been announced, but other
companies who are working on
e-reader hardware are planning on going much larger.
Plastic Logic Ltd. is
releasing an e-reader by early 2010 that will have an 8.5 by
11 screen.
Asian suppliers for several
e-readers have been producing screens with a diagonal
measurement of about 10
inches.
The
benefits of larger screen sizes are several:
1. easier display of
larger format content, such as newspapers and textbooks
2. more screen space for
advertisements, which are currently not used on the smaller
Kindle's
3. ease of home use with
the combination of scroll buttons and larger font size
The
continuing formula for assessing consumer wants is striking.
Hardware is manufactured
based on the determination of
the projectable market for the hardware, as opposed to the
projectable market for the
content that the hardware will access. This is analogous to
newspaper publishers trying to
draw more subscribers by making the ink brighter, instead
of focusing on increasing the
appeal of the content.
At
some point, consumers will stop buying devices merely
because they like how the
buttons are arrayed, and start
basing their buying decisions more on the accessible
content.
This process would be
accelerated if all devices did not provide access to all
content, which is
currently the case. When
e-readers offer more or less the same user features, and
they soon
will, manufacturers will
finally seek a differentiation based on unique content. For
instance,
a 'Get Fuzzy' comic lover will
buy the e-reader that allows access to 'Get Fuzzy' over one
that does not.
In
anticipation of that day, a league that brings together
content providers from all areas-
comics, fiction, articles,
music, film, etc.-would have great bargaining power. In
fact,
such a league would have the
economic and market power to actually COMMISSION
manufacturers to make the type
of electronic content delivery device that the league
decides
is best designed to deliver
their content brand.
This entry is part of a larger
article. To receive the full article, contact:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net
Category:
Cartoon Income,
Kindle, Newspaper Industry
Daily Content Comment is Copyrighted by Andrew
Grossman.
All rights reserved.
The material on this site
may not be reproduced,
distributed, transmitted, cached
or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission
of Andrew Grossman.
He can be contacted through the All Content Network at:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net |
|
The Kindle Pit
-Andrew Grossman
April 9, 2009
The popularity of Amazon's electronic-book device,
Kindle, has electrified the market. E-book readers have
been around for years, but none of them provided the
connectivity and the depth of content provided by
Kindle. Even Sony's own entry in the market, Reader, does not
provide wireless access. But it soon will. And many
other offerings will follow from additional tech companies coupled with
additional wireless services. Five companies have
already applied to Verizon, which provides wireless access, for new
e-book devices. AT&T will soon jump in with an
announcement of their first agreement with a device manufacturer. Nothing
succeeds like access.
The effect
of reading devices on the income of writers has not yet
become clear, but the fervent nature of consumer content demands is very well established. On April 8,
a group called The Reading Rights Coalition, which
represents disabled readers, staged a protest outside the
Authors Guild's New York offices. The reason for the
protest: the Guild,
when it negotiated a vast content sale on behalf of
its members last year, refused to allow a blanket
availability of content to the text-to-speech function, which is built into Kindle.
The reason for the refusal is that the Guild felt such
access would be a major threat to the billion dollar audio book
market.
One result
of the Guild's intent to protect the income and rights
of its member: limiting the rights of the
disabled. Is the Guild at fault? Only of wanting to slow down
content access in order to examine rather writers are
cannibalizing their sales in print without achieving equal dollars
from e-book download sales. The hesitancy is justified,
in order to study the implications of such access, and to conduct this
study without the warp speed of consumer device
advances. Devices demand enormous databases of content-the Kindle
offers more than 260,000 books, plus newspapers-and such
quantity cannot help but lessen the author's sense of the
integrity and the uniqueness of individual works.
What we
know, but only the first implications, are the
insatiable content demands of current devices. What
creatives fear even more are the heightened demands of future
e-book devices, and the likely expectation, from
manufacturers, from network providers and from the public, of ever more
access for ever less money.
This entry is part of a larger
article. To receive the full article, contact:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net
Category: Kindle,
Fiction Income,
Author's Guild
Daily Content Comment is Copyrighted by Andrew
Grossman.
All rights reserved.
The material on this site
may not be reproduced,
distributed, transmitted, cached
or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission
of Andrew Grossman.
He can be contacted through the All Content Network at:
andrew@andrewgrossman.net |
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