Eoin Purcell's Blog

Eoin Purcell

I’m quite pleased with how this came out in the end.

The Irish blook

29.01.08

Blogging has been brewing up a media storm in the Irish media. Two weeks ago, well known commentator, John Waters, attacked the entire blogosphere on Newstalk, one of Ireland’s talk radio stations.

Following the lead of Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, John Waters said that blogs were “stupid”, “entirely cynical”, “entirely negative” and equivalent to the “wall of a toilet”. He also attacked the lack of authority and suggested that much of the internet was given over to pornography and self-gratification (of which he believes blogging to be an extension).

Unsurprisingly he was rebutted and lampooned by the blogging fraternity. Eventually he came head to head with one of Ireland’s more erudite bloggers Feargal Crehan (a barrister) and the results can be heard here.

Whatever about the merits of Waters’ arguments, they do raise the question of blogging’s role in Irish publishing. There are more than a few success stories in the field.

For more go Here

(Links are a bit tricksy for some reason though!

Enjoying P&Ls (is that odd?)
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Irish Blog Awards
Very surprised and very pleased to have been nominated and to have made the Leaked Long List for the Irish Blog Awards* in the Specialist Category!

Smile on my face today,
Eoin

*Speaking of which the process of authoritative leaks of many of the long lists has been a very clever ruse for building attention. I’m impressed.

Eoin Purcell

James Bridle always has interesting stuff to say and today’s point is as well made as ever.
Here

When we are on the topic it would be a shame not to mention today’s excellent post about e-book pricing on The Digitalist.
Here

Oh and on the blogger and books Damien Mulley has an interview with controversial blogger Twenty Major (the first Irish Blogger with a book deal if not the first to be released).
Here

And finally Laurence Orbach [CEO of Quarto) has a nicely considered post that recalls somehting that was said to me at a strategy meeting;
“Survival is not guaranteed!”
Here

All in all a fine mix today!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

So I spilled the cash for The Friday Project’s tasty looking special edition of The Equivoque Principle and boy does it look sweet. I cobbled together a few pictures into a little video:

Sorry about the naff music, I’m still learning with these slideshows and what not!
Next time I’ll get it right!

I’ll have to hold off reading it for a bit. It is not just the huge TBR Pile:

But also as Penguin have kindly reminded me that I was sent The Waves SIX MONTHS AGO and need to get my skates on! Opps!

Worried and sorry, is it really six months already!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Mike Shatzkin* is clever
If you doubt that, read some of this article [hat tip: Joe Wikert's Kindleville]. There are so many great ideas there that I almost don’t know where to start.

But I have to because it is so interesting
And two do stand out as being very interesting because one is a trend that seems to be emerging in Ireland and the other is relevant to news heard just a few days ago:

4. Publishers will start acquiring specialized Web sites to get content for their books and to target niche audiences. By year-end, every major publisher will need to have an understanding of how to put a value on Web sites, because the old measures—namely, sales and profits—won’t necessarily be relevant and because the acquisitions will be smaller than what the companies would normally consider. The process will be similar to acquiring books, requiring a bit of imagination to see how the deals will pay off.

5. Christmas 2008 will be the first one in which sales of customized books, enabled by the Internet and print-on-demand, will become substantial. Make-your-own books have been creeping into public consciousness for a couple of years: Apple has made it easy to produce one-off picture books and author-services sites like lulu.com have enabled author-generated books for some time. Travel book publishers have played with the concept. What is new is that technologies like SharedBook are moving make-your-own and assemble-your-own into consumer areas like food and sports. So far, this is outside the mainstream of the book business, but consumers will buy enough of these to create interest among publishers and online booksellers.

4. Is an interesting one
And clearly true. In Ireland alone: Overheard in Dublin, Ice Cream Ireland, Twenty Major and Head Rambles have been tapped for content.

I have good reason to believe there are a few more to come over the next few months. Some I am interested in and hope to put under contract and others that I am sure rival publishers will contract. Although this isn’t exactly the same notion, it does I think touch on it.

I wonder though will G&M actually acquire OverheardinDublin eventually? Should they? It has already generated retail sales of €473,556.37. Even allowing a 60% discount that means the books have earned G&M around €190,000.00 Assume a decent royalty rate of between 10% and 15% Net Receipts and the pay-out is Between €19,000.00 and €28,500.00.

Would it have been worth €50,000 to buy the site and hire its authors, financing the roll out of new products based on each of Ireland’s major cities (and perhaps a few county based ones too: Overheard in Kerry anyone?). I don’t know. If I was them I think I would risk it but that’s me. It would be a fascinating experiment though!

5. has worried me for a while
And I have written about it before too. I suspect there will not be a huge call on this in Ireland but I know that several friends and relatives have already had photo-books printed and I have also used Moo.com though it is less about publishing (not that the validation it provides for other self publishing forms is not important).

I cannot add much to the debate except to say that there is no reason why Irish Publishers cannot hit this area hard. After all, we could sign agreements with Blurb.com or Lulu.com or even Moo.com (or any POD Publisher) for access to their efficient and cheap single unit printing and deliver individually tailored books at higher prices to customers at will. Maybe someone will this year.

UPDATE: Random House have done a deal with SharedBook!

I’d like to see some experiments
Eoin

* Or read this which I linked to before.

Walmart hits magazine publishers with a bit of a whammy.
Here

Nice post from Lessig on ideas and the future.
Here

Blurb seems to be rocking the self publishing boat pretty impressively.
Here

How cool are Flickr and the Library of Congress? I wish our own museums and libraries had such an approach.
Here

I’m testing out how well Google Docs works for posting to WordPress. So if this is a little dodgy pray allow some leeway!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

The video is relevant but more on that below:

I don’t know how I missed this but The Editor’s Corner at The Book Depository has a wonderful interview with one of my favourite History writer: Ian Mortimer. Pick of the words (though I’d like to write more later on some of the great lines to do with keeping non-fiction relevant for 40 years):

How could I not grow to like a man who was trilingual, literate, who read history, was the greatest jousting champion the royal family ever produced, travelled further than any other English monarch before the twentieth century, who was politically tolerant (for the middle ages) and who was faithful and dutiful to both his wives. Who used cotton for toilet paper, who had the first known chamber stool and perhaps the first portable clock, who was a ‘sparkling’ musician, and designed his own cannon.

Here

If their recent video hadn’t taught you some respect for Snowbooks then go and read their application for the IPA innovation of the year prize. It’s in a natty PDF download and would be worth reading for the style even if the contents were pants which, I stress, they are not.

Here

Oh no, here we go again. If The Australian is to be believed Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone might be a long tall tale! I wonder if it matters for this one? Seems like a terribly worthy book one way or the other but let’s see what comes of it! [Thanks to PND for linking to this one]

Here

Eoin Purcell

Some great words from a site the provides some of the best resources out there on the web for the current US Presidential scramble, Electoral-Vote.com:

The Republican side is tomorrow and too close to call. However, if Fred Thompson comes in 4th, it’s curtains for Fred. He’ll probably drop out immediately, saying some variant of “I didn’t really want the job anyway.” It’s not sour grapes. He never acted like somebody who wanted the job. Romney has poured tens of millions of dollars of his own money into the race. McCain, Huckabee, and Giuliani have all been campaigning like crazy, albeit in different ways. Fred’s been invisible. Lesson: Don’t run for President unless you really want to be President.

Oh and Balleybofey sticks its head into the race: For McCain

Amused
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

*UPDATED TO REPAIR LINKS: NOTE TO SELF: VOODOO PAD HAS SOME LIMITS*
From Consciousness to publishers survival
Yesterday I wrote about consciousness and how the “new” consciousness we see rising is an illusion in my view. It was all kicked off by this article and so it makes sense to go back to the elements in there that I really agree with . For instance:

I foresee a time coming soon when the main edition of most books will be the download, and bookshops will then be the equivalent of vinyl record shops. New and exciting writing, the stuff that changes the world, will be published via the internet. Will the young share their reading matter as today they share music and films?

A book is a book is a book
So lets look at that. Some time ago I wrote a three part series on the future of books. In A book is a book is a book I wrote:

If an e-reader appears that quickly changes the market and shifts content online and into digital form as rapidly as music sales have shifted, traditional publishers will be faced with enormous difficulties. Their print runs will need to slide, their high costs need to be removed and eventually some books will simply no longer be printed in books and will remain exclusively as eBooks.

Which of course is no major deal. Why on earth should publishers worry? Does it really matter if a book is sold as a paper product, as an audio CD, as a downloadable eBook or as part of a subscription based updatable online book, or indeed some combination of these?

And I still believe that. Publishers should be platform neutral and content orientated. We should be book publishers, website publishers, subscription sellers and database managers. we should nugget-ise and sell content as granularly as we can in as many formats and for as many platforms as we can.

What about the authors
Nothing in that presents a problem for our current discussion but it does mean that publishers and authors need to change and Mark hits that point quite nicely here:

For a commissioning editor, the pressing question is this: when most books are sold on the net as downloads, how will this change their content?

But Mark thinks that this will spell the end of the Novel. I’m not so sure about that, as I said yesterday. But, as I wrote in the second part of the series I mentioned above, the move towards digital liberates writers and will definitely lead to changes:

we now operate in a world where sales do not have to be of the traditional type (bricks and mortar stores). Authors can sell books themselves on Amazon or EBay or Lulu.com or in fact their own website if they like. They can use POD and self publishing just like Skint Writer is and capture the best part of the value that traditionally went to a publisher. Or you can post it to a blog and build audience like Lee on Mortal Ghost is here.

What’s more you can package your content in any variety of ways. Make a podcast or your poetry and push it on iTunes. Act out your play and upload it to YouTube or your preferred location. It is easy to do it all now and to do it well. Maybe the cost of a decent designer or video editor will take a summer to save for or a winter of being cold avoiding buying new jumpers but the costs are so achievable it is exceptional.

The point is that publishing is no longer just about books and even more it is no longer about waiting for a publisher to decide your work is good enough for print. Options abound and as more and more writers realise that they will take advantage of it.

That could be very important and it brings to mind something Blathnaid Healy wrote in an as yet unpublished piece on music and patrons:

Internet digital downloads reduces the role of the record companies who have essentially become the modern-day ‘patrons’ of music.

Music like other arts, because of the cost to produce it, has always needed a backer or a patron. For years record companies have fronted the cash for bands to record and distribute their music and for this patronage bands have surrendered some artistic control. But all that is changing because of readily available recording software and distribution platforms on the Internet.

If major bands like Radiohead continue to release full-length digital copies of their albums online we can predict the effect it might have on the record companies, but what about the music. Will it change?

In high art or ‘classical’ music when the role of the patron was reduced it had a big impact on the type of music being created: structure, melody and rhythm were all experimented with.

Authors and publishers will change
So where will it all go? We know I disagree with Mark’s vision:

The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery. But it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.

Because we are all plugging ourselves into one great electronic mind, we will gradually lose the sense of each being shut off in a private mental space, as esoteric philosophy has long predicted. Our mental space will be out there and, as with Facebook, everyone else will have access to it. I don’t know what this new literary form will be, but I suspect it will be co-operative and as slinkily responsive to whoever is looking at it as Schroedinger’s cat. I can’t wait.

Is there another option? The Editor’s Corner at the Book Depository (always on the ball), Mark Thwaite points us at Martyn Daniels’ post about the future of books on the Bookseller Association blog that talks about where the industry is going:

The paper book will not disappear but the current economic publishing model and value chain will change. The only certainty is that there will still be authors and there still will be readers but everything in between is up for grabs.

I think Martyn is right
Everything is up for grabs. Our consciousness is not changing like Mark suggests but there is something big happening publishers have no god given right to survive.

I kinda hope we do though because I really love what I do!
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

Homework
Emma over at Snowblog set some homework. She asked people to read this piece by Mark Booth over at The Independent online and to discuss it. I’ve much to say on it but for today I’d like to hit on CONSCIOUSNESS. To give you a good idea of what it’s about here’s a quote:

The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery. But it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.

There really is much more to the piece, a lot of which I agree with. For instance Booth talks about the impact the internet is having on reading and the nature of our leisure time. There is truth in that. We are spending more time reading online and that is changing the form. But how far does that go?

Let’s ask Stephen Fry
A man who up until two months ago I’d have thought as unknowledgeable about these things as most but how wrong has he proved me and anyone else who thought like me (just read this post to confirm his wonderful geekery).

Commenting on the strange beast that is Facebook (which I like for status updates, Warbook and the odd photo but otherwise use it very little) he wrote the other day a most apt line:

But let the rise of social networking alert you to the possibility that, even in the futuristic world of the net, the next big thing might just be a return to a made-over old thing.

And therein lies the rub
The assumption that Mark Booth makes is that when there was no way of recording it, there was no internal narrative in peoples’ minds, that they were somehow not at the same level of consciousness or at least that that narrative was different:

In the esoteric view, consciousness has changed in a much more radical way than historians generally allow, and the importance of the great novels of the 18th and 19th centuries is the role they played in forging the sense we all have – and take for granted – that we have an interior narrative. If people experienced this before the novel, if they earlier saw their lives as micro-histories with turning points, dilemmas and meaningful structures, they left no record of it, and, according to the esoteric account, they had no inkling of it except in sermons.

I’d suggest strongly that this is not the case
Just think it through with me. For that to be true we have to assume that people in the past were not like us. That their consciousness was somehow of a different nature. And that situation was caused by their lack of access to the written word, and specifically the novel.

You’d have to accept too that the epics of Homer didn’t build an internal narrative for those who heard them or the folk tales that have gone unrecorded had no role to play in building consciousness and the oral histories or the plays, or even Beowulf with its powerful messages and its heroic themes offered no grist for an internal narrative mill.

Funnily enough Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some excellent stuff about exactly this type of situation in The Black Swan, he calls it Silent Evidence and offers the Phoenicians as a great example of it. It was long believed that they were commercially obsessed and did not use the alphabet they invented for creative purposes. Of course it now appears that they simply used perishable materials to record their creative impulses.

if we can mistake destroyed art for no art, then I suspect we cannot be sure about the hidden consciousness of oral cultures and pre-text cultures. I suspect that the internal narratives we take for granted now existed in those cultures. Perhaps the priorities were framed by different horizons and paradigms, perhaps experiences were more important than knowledge in building that consciousness. There is simply no way to know how they formed, how different they were or indeed how similar.

So you see, I don’t think Mark Booth’s new consciousness is anything other than an old consciousness ‘made-over’ as a new thing*.

I’ll think this through again but I’m pretty sure I won’t change my mind.
Eoin

*That’s not to invalidate any of his thinking on the direction of publishing technology! But more on that tomorrow.