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According to the New York Times article on August 12, 2009 entitled,  Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books, Sony plans to adopt the open standard e-book format called "e-pub" used by large publishing houses including Random House and HarperCollins. The move should create considerable competition for the Amazon Kindle over time. Amazon is the market leader right now for e-publishing, but operates a closed standard system. You can only read e-books from Amazon on the Kindle.

With the arrival of new e-book readers and a common format, the number of books available in electronic format should increase considerably. The quality of the books will likely be much better as well. I recently read an e-book in the Kindle format that must have been published without anyone proofreading it. The copy was filled with typographical errors. These are, however, the problems that early adopters of anything face. The e-book product is well worth the bumps in the road as far as I am concerned.

I am a huge fan of the Amazon Kindle. My wife and I both have Kindles, carry them everywhere and use them frequently. Despite the cost, I have started following several newspapers, magazines and blogs on my Kindle because of the ease of carrying, using and turning the Kindle "on and off" as opposed to the cumbersome process of booting up a notebook computer. I, of course, also read books received on the Kindle. Instead of hauling around a knapsack full of books, magazines and newspapers as I once did, I can now just carry the Kindle instead.

The e-book reader is also more private. While I am reading it, I am not advertising what I am reading. Sorry porn lovers, I am not talking about anything genuinely embarrassing like pornography. The Kindle is really not a good platform for photos. LOL. The Kindle is really only useful for text and the very lowest grade photographs from a newspaper. Instead, I can read the New York Times without having my often more conservative colleagues and acquaintances around me scoffing or rolling their eyes.

The Kindle and the Sony e-Book Reader are only two of a wave of such devices coming onto the market. As time passes, I also anticipate that more interactive books will be published. The readers will eventually be able to communicate with the author and the publisher directly from the e-Book reader. I also suspect that some books will also begin supplementing themselves with additional information provided after the book's original publication. This additional content might include information about other things such as movies, subsequent books in a series, or other derivative products. Effectively having a contact list of everyone that buys a publisher's book is a pretty valuable tool for the publisher. While paying an author or editor to "blog" more content to those e-book readers is an added and new cost for the publisher, but such a blog entry or "extra" content could blur the line between entertainment or extra reader valued content and advertising. As advertising, the low cost of such targeted communications would be small compared with the cost of traditional media advertising.

The e-publishing arena is yet another piece of the digital interactive world. Now, what do we have to do to get the publishers building future platforms for distribution of this content in Louisiana. Call us at LISTA if you need help working in Louisiana.

Erich P Rapp.

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As Louisiana becomes a hub in the next few years for the development of software, mobile applications and web platforms, I am wondering what value can Louisiana digital interactive media developers bring to the industry. One area that desperately needs to be addressed is the news media and journalism.

It is no secret to anyone that is conscious that the industry that delivers news to the public is struggling to find a profitable business model in the digital media age. Where is this industry heading and can developers in Louisiana add value to the evolution.

Perhaps, the Politico.com web site and the story behind it present a glimpse of the business techniques that will govern the future of journalism and news delivery.

The first and foremost Politico.com business concept that stands out to me is volume of content and extreme detail about a relatively narrow (at least for a newspaper) subject. It's hard to imagine any traditional media source providing as much detailed and essentially real time data about politics in Washington DC. While the Federal Register provides a great deal of detail about federal action, its not anything close to "real time" and it is completely devoid of the human component. Politico is the federal register of politics using a Twitter model without the 140 character limit and a huge mix of gossipy human stuff. No one but a reporter at Politico could possibly want to know this much about politics in Washington DC. 

And yet, I am told that Politico is profitable and widely read. That is more than the New York Times can say at least as to the profitable part. All of this suggests that no matter how much detail one provides about politics in Washington DC, there is at least some audience for it. It also suggests that if you can place an enormous amount of entertaining (at least to someone) political information in a digital setting at a low enough cost , the business can pay for itself with advertising. The delivery of news has a "long tail" component. 

The August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair magazine contains an article entitled, Politico's Washington Coup which describes the Politico story in some detail. If you want a sense of the future of journalism, this article is a good read.

This may hold some promise for local newspapers. The key to the future for local newspapers may be more information. Adding more stories in a digital format does not cost as much as adding more pages for more stories in a printed newspaper. The specialty for the local paper is local news. Local news is as to your local newspaper as Washington politics is as to Politico. It seems like the local newspapers need to go more local with everything, e.g., more local business news, more local society and social event news, and more local entertainment news. Change the emphasis from the AP news feed to everything local with the names of as many local people printed in the newspaper as possible.

Digital interactive media developers in Louisiana need to partner with traditional media organizations to build a better news delivery device using Louisiana's digital media tax credits incentive program.

Erich P Rapp.

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Digital Interactive Media including Twitter and YouTube are fueling and energizing a popular uprising in Iran. While traditional media operations face official steps attempting to thwart their reporting in Iran, the enormous number of informal social media "journalists" are shooting video of protests from their cell phones that is then posted on YouTube and Twitter and posting reports about protests in real time on Twitter. These activities seem to be energizing the uprising in Iran. Wow!!! Digital Interactive Media in the form of social media networks has come of age. 

Critics keep suggesting that Twitter may never make any money, but imagine how one would feel if their web platform was supporting a popular uprising against an illegitimate government that is part of a repressive regime. Money may not be everything. Congratulations to the owners of Twitter. Their web platform may facilitate the reform of the Iranian government that many years of United States government pressure has failed to do.

Some of the related stories can be found at Iran's Twitter Revolution on the Nation web site and also on the New York Times web site in the article entitled, In Iran, Iron Cleric, Now Blinking. These events in Iran are a huge step forward for the role and relevance of digital interactive media in the form of social media networks. It is a revolution - - - In this case, literally.

Erich P Rapp.

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Dell Computer reports it has earned $3 million in sales from people visiting their web site referred from their Twitter profile with 624,000 followers. Dell has paid Twitter $0.00 for its profile and promotion. This report is found in a New York Times story dated Friday June 12, 2009 entitled, Dell says it has earned $3 million from twitter. Amazing. Is there any doubt why old media outlets like newspapers, magazines, radio and television are suffering steep declines in their advertising revenue.

While Twitter cannot continue to give away commercial advertising for free, Twitter's costs for delivering that promotion are much lower than any traditional old media outlet. The old media outlets most evolve into a new model that focuses more on web based delivery and combines professional journalism and user/amateur provided journalism in order to reduce their cost base. The details of such a model are yet to be determined, but the path to uncovering that business model might become more clear in the months ahead.

Erich P Rapp.

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The future of journalism is online interactive and hyperlocal. Printed newspapers across the United States are under extraordinary financial pressure. Some industry experts expect that a large U.S. city will be without a major daily printed newspaper within the next few months.

This leaves the old news media industry wondering how online news outlets will profitably deliver the news to the public. Recent years have seen a rise in blogging, but this vehicle seems short of professional text based journalism that the public expects. In many instances, blogging is either a democratization of editorial writing or alternatively a filtering or re-posting of professional journalism found in the existing major news sources. Blogging alone does not seem to be a substitute for professional text based journalism. Instead, blogging seems more like an enhancement or extension of the reach of professional text based journalism.

The New York Times published an article by Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone on Sunday April 12, 2009 entitled, Hyperlocal web sites deliver news without newspapers. The article concerns a number of web sites focused on publishing content on events at the neighborhood level in an effort to access the solely local advertising dollar. Such sites have achieved limited success so far, but experimentation with variations on them continues. The hyperlocal news report delivered online at relatively low cost seems like the "Long Tail" of journalism, and this hyperlocal aspect of news delivery will likely be important in the evolution of any future text based online news delivery model.  

Regardless of the final direction of  text based news delivery in the future. It seems likely that an online model will eventually overtake the printed newspaper as the primary delivery mechanism for such professional journalism.

Erich P. Rapp.

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