Category Archive: 'Uncategorized'

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Amazon Tries to Cut Out Middle Man With New Kindle Terms

Date: February 29, 2012 Topic: Uncategorized Tags:

Good and bad news for digital publishers. Amazon just dropped approximately 4,500 Kindle titles published through the Independent Publishers Group (IPG), the country’s second-largest distributor of books. IPG President Mark Suchomel, in an email cited on the Publishers Lunch blog, said Amazon was pressuring publishers and distributors “to change their terms for electronic and print books to be more favorable toward Amazon.”

This is unfortunate since Amazon’s dominance in both the print and ebook markets is allowing the company to create something of a monopoly. There is also some speculation that Amazon is trying to get rid of publishers and distributors all together; according to the Bits blog from The New York Times, “The only two essential parties in the reading experience, Amazon executives are fond of saying, are the reader and the author.”

The good news is that subscription, membership and paywall sites may have a more favored relationship with Amazon Kindle — for now. Amazon’s penchant for decreasing profit margins incrementally may leave even independent sites with original Kindle content scratching their heads in a few years’ time. The best option? Diversify and make your content available on as many platforms as possible.

In fact, this week our sister site, Subscription Site Insider, will be publishing an article on the pros and cons of Google Books for membership and subscription sites. Check back here tomorrow for a tip that will save you time and money.

Posted by MinalB21
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Check Out the U.K.’s Publishing Expo for Multi-Platform Ideas

Date: February 20, 2012 Topic: Uncategorized Tags:

For our Paywall Times readers across the pond (or any Yankees visiting the Queen), we thought you might want to know about a great industry event taking place February 28-29 in London.

Publishing Expo is the U.K.’s “only mutli-platform publishing show” and has a variety of talks and seminars of interest to digital content creators and marketers, such as:

  • All you need to know about the Cloud (Mark Pratt, Vice President, Business Development, Metropublisher)
  • Social data - the tool to capture your audience: data acquisition with social and sharing (Reena Mistry, Marketing Director, Adestra Ltd)
  • Apple newsstand – how and why it has changed the game (Mike Goldsmith, Editor-in-Chief of iPad and Tablet Editions, Future)
  • Coming out on top of the Digital Marketing Ecosystem (Nicolle Pangis, President of Europe and Estelle Reale, Ecope Director of Marketing and Communication, 24.7 Real Network)
  • Thirty tips for niche publishers: digital media on a shoestring: Carolyn Morgan, MD Specialist Media Show, Rob Chambers, MD Total Telecom, Andy Marshall, MD Immediate Media Bristol

If you’re interested in attending, you can register here. And if you do attend, feel free to write us a note about how it went and what you got out of it.

Posted by MinalB21
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Book Review + Giveaway:
Sell Your Brain Power

Date: February 15, 2012 Topic: Uncategorized Tags: ,

FredGleeck_coverimageEver wish someone took the initiative to collate and organize all the valuable information on the Web about information marketing? If so, start writing your thank you notes to Fred Gleeck.

His new 152-page printed book, Sell Your Brain Power, offers readers a very sound action plan for creating and marketing information materials online. To his credit, Gleeck, doesn’t promise any “Get Rich Quick” schemes, but he does break things down into digestible chunks. In fact, unlike other DIY Digital books I’ve read, it was easy for me to put down the book and pick up where I left off.

Chapters include Getting Your Systems in Place, Seven Steps to Information Marketing Success, Selecting Your Niche, Writing Copy to Sell Your Products and Creating Your Product. Gleeck also includes helpful links to websites and SaaS sites — a really boon for people who don’t want to have to sift through reviews of a vendor services.

Gleeck has graciously given us five copies, which we’re giving away to the first five people who fill in the form below. But if you don’t win, don’t despair — you can come listen to Gleeck speak live and in-person at the Subscription Site Insider Summit in San Francisco April 24-25th.

Posted by MinalB21
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GigaOM Buys paidContent Parent Company From The Guardian

Date: February 10, 2012 Topic: Uncategorized Tags:

The technology media company GigaOM just announced that it has acquired ContentNext Media, the parent company of paidContent, from Guardian News and Media.

The move will likely benefit GigaOM, as technology and digital publishing go hand-in-hand. But it might hurt Guardian News and Media (GNM), who seems quixotically determined to make free, all-access content work — in the UK and US. GNM has formally stated that it’s selling paidContent and its sister sites — including contentSutra.com and mocoNews.net — so that it can focus on its The Guradian’s U.S. venture.

GigaOM, on the other hand, seems to be experimenting with premium content, while keeping the majority of their content free. It recently launched GigaOM Pro, a resource for professionals in the digital technology space. Whether paidContent stops being an ironic name is still uncertain, but GigaOM is likely the most logicall choice to breath life and geek-certified order into this confusing publication.

Posted by MinalB21
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Academic Journals Enter The Fray on ‘Fair Use’ & User-Generated Content

Date: February 8, 2012 Topic: B2B Subscription Sites, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

Unlike most online publications, academic journals have almost always been exclusively behind a pawall. Sometimes that paywall was propped up by universities and research institutions, making the content free to students and researchers (or bundled in your tuition plan, depending how you look at it). But they have been able to weather the “free ride” storm better than most print publications.

That may be changing as a number of notable academics are calling for an “Academic Spring.” Their gripes are many, but center on the current trend of publishers charging for user-generated content. As The Economist states:

Academics, who live in a culture which values the free and easy movement of information (and who edit and referee papers for nothing) have long been uncomfortable bedfellows with commercial publishing companies, which want to maximise profits by charging for access to that information, and who control many (although not all) of the most prestigious scientific journals.

I suspect the ethics of charging for user-generated content is only going to become a bigger debate, especially with Facebook’s recent IPO and YouTube’s flirtation with charging for subscription channels.

In what seems a poorly-planned defensive move, scientific journals now want to get paid for anytime an article is included in a patent application. While we usually applaud creative revenue streams, this one really does go against the idea of fair use — that is, to disseminate ideas to the public. More importantly, if it becomes  financially prohibitive for anyone to note the ideas in your publication, you will likely cease to be a publication of note. With an mean average of two readers per article (that’s a lifetime score!), academic publications should see citations and references as good word-of-mouth marketing, not a copyright infringement or potential revenue stream.

Posted by MinalB21
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