Archives for April 2012

Social Media Narcissism

April 28, 2012 By Mark 2 Comments

From Klouchebag.com developer Tom Scott:

“Klout annoys me for the same reason that search engine optimization annoys me,” Scott said. “It’s an enormous amount of effort designed to game an arbitrary and often-changing system. Imagine if all that time went into actually making interesting things, or caring about the people around you.”

Better yet, skip the imagining and get to work. Or skip the work and express interest in the people around you.

Either way I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the return on your investment.

Update: Nicholas Thompson at The New Yorker chimes in on social media and Klout here.

— Mark Barrett

I took a stroll through my blogroll today and pruned sites that are no longer updating or relevant to my evolving interests. It’s been a while since I surveyed the self-publishing ditch to see what may have sprouted, so my plan is to do more site seeing and replace sites that have gone to seed with sites that are sprouting or in full bloom.

— Mark Barrett

Where Were We?

April 11, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two years ago, when the major publishing houses got together with Apple and conspired to fix e-book prices, they did so not because Apple was sexy and Steve Jobs was a benevolent god and the iPad was about to launch, but because Amazon was the devil.

Somehow, in the intervening era of Apple-mania, that narrative has been skewed. But that skewing is about to snap back with a vengeance:

The government’s decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon in a powerful position: the nation’s largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over the potential consequences.

This is, in fact, exactly what drove the publishing industry en-mass into Apple’s price-fixing arms two years ago. Because if Amazon can sell e-books at prices below what the publishing industry sets — as a loss leader for the Kindle, or simply as a way to stab the publishing industry in the heart until it begs for mercy — the publishing industry effectively loses control of its product. And that’s the last thing quarterly shareholders want to hear.

— Mark Barrett

Publishing is for Professionals

April 11, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Despite public acceptance of self-publishing as a viable means of expression, the traditional publishing industry continues to claim that it is the final arbiter of what’s good and right and culturally relevant. Today the U.S. Justice Department agreed that self-publishing authors pale in comparison with their industrial counterparts:

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple and several book publishers Wednesday morning, claiming they worked together to artificially prop up prices for e-books. .

The publishers sued were Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster. The suit was filed in a district court in New York.

“Apple facilitated the publisher defendants’ collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers,” according to the complaint.

Real publishers illegally conspire with giant, anti-competitive, ruthless, monopolistic media companies like Apple to fix prices and screw their own customers in pursuit of profits. Self-publishing authors don’t do any of that, and probably never will.

— Mark Barrett

Demystifying Authorship

April 7, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

I grew up with a reverence for authors. If you made a movie, or wrote a play or directed a play or starred in a play, that was cool, but if you wrote a book (fiction, and to a lesser extent non-fiction, but to a greater extent philosophy) you were somebody. Authors weren’t just artists using the medium of words, they were culture.

As the internet has devalued writing it has also demystified authorship in ways that I think are unique to the times. From the dawn of the first printed book until the public began expressing itself en mass I think a reverence for authors has been the norm. To be published was to be validated in ways that most people could only aspire to.

This does not mean, however, that any cultural stewardship claimed by the publishing industry was real. Far from it. Publishers have engaged in gatekeeping for no end of duplicitous purposes, and the people populating those power centers have never shown the slightest hesitation in abusing whatever trust the public placed in them. Where power, money and desire meet you can scoop cockroaches by the pound and never see the bottom of the barrel.

So complete was publishing’s power over the concept of authorship that anyone who attempted to publish outside the industry was deemed by all to have admitted failure. A painter could work in solitude, a musician could compose for an audience of one, a filmmaker could go independent, but to be a real author — to be a part of the culture — you had to sign a contract with someone else and give them editorial control. [ Read more ]