BACKSTRIP

The future of feed reading

It’s been a while since I used iGoogle. Initially, I liked the way it took my feeds into a single, multi-column display — separated into discrete blocks depending on their source, and then contextualised by tabs — and I was particularly impressed with its customisation options, which let me drag and drop elements, add applications and pull in my email. It wasn’t great, but it had a workmanlike vibe to it.

But after a while, my iGoogle page began to languish. It was certainly getting better in every way — faster, more applications — but I rarely had a good reason to visit it. The romance just kind of died, but not for any real reason I could articulate at the time. It’s like how I just decided to stop watching Lost a couple of years ago — superficially, it’s a show I should love, but it was conceptually wrong for me.

On reflection, though, it’s clear why I left iGoogle. First, I’m a voracious consumer of information and I need something far more powerful and reading-friendly (yet also browser-based) than iGoogle, and Google Reader is hands down the best tool for the job. Second, and more importantly, I only wanted to subscribe to feeds and give them a minimal structure, rather than think about how all those elements were presented. iGoogle forced me to think about the presentation by having me indicate precisely where an element should go — and consequently, where everything else should sit in relation to it — for every item.

Essentially, you could say it was a high maintenance relationship — it required more work than I cared to put in — but it’s worth thinking about what that actually means for ‘feed reading’ in general, and where things might be headed.

What feed reading is

From the reader’s point of view, the process of reading (or interacting with) feeds can be broken down into three steps:

1. Selecting a feed (“I want to read more of this”)

2. Structuring the content (“I will tag this feed as X/put it in folder Y/prioritise it as Z/share with person A”)

3. Presenting the content (“And here’s how I want to view this content”)

The problem is, I’m only interested in 1 and 2. I am interested in 3, but, as mentioned, not all the damn time. Furthermore, the structure should influence the presentation, and to the extent that the presentation can be done automatically, then that’s how I’d prefer it.

Not everyone is the same. Some like end-to-end control and will constantly curate the structure and presentation. Others couldn’t care less — they’ve probably never heard of a ‘feed’ and they’re happy to outsource that job to an editorial authority, such as a mainstream newspaper, community aggregation service or even just a printed magazine.

So, coming back to me. Google Reader is far and away the best at 1 and 2, but it doesn’t do 3. Although I’m not overly fussed about it, I’d like to have the option to present that content effectively and situationally, but that also leverages off Google Reader.

And this is where Feedly comes in.

Structure to presentation

I stumbled on Feedly by way of a Chrome browser extension and it’s fair to say I was blown away by it. Not by its design or layout, or by its magazineness (using terms like ‘cover’ for the front page doesn’t do anything for me) but by how it took all the work I’d already done in Google Reader and arranged it according to basic design principles.

If you’ve not used Google Reader, it might sound like Feedly just takes a bunch of feeds and rearranges them on another webpage. That’s true, but it uses the structure and behavioural data (e.g., sharing and starring) gleaned from Google Reader as the engine, which in turn drives how Feedly presents the information. If you don’t like the page layout, you can swap between different styles of magazinelike grids, newspaper columns, summaries, and so on. Plus, it’ll also reconfigure its presentation based on the device you’re using.

In other words, it’s not asking me to do more work, or overriding the work I enjoy doing (i.e. steps 1 and 2). Rather, it’s only interested in step 3, which means it complements my reading style and habits. It may not be the first to do so (it’s been around for a while), but this is clearly the start of something much bigger. And with the iPad and web-friendly tablets on the way, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this stuff soon.

So who's going to buy an iPad?

Research group YouGov has released some interesting stats [PDF] relating to iPad awareness and interest:

When shown a picture of the product and asked if they had heard about it 70% of British respondents said they had, compared to 64% in USA, 63% in Germany, 60% in Denmark and 53% in the Middle East.

Middle East respondents were most likely to buy the iPad, with 58% of respondents stating they would definitely or probably buy the iPad [NB: the survey also shows a high proportion of Middle Easterners grossly overestimated its features and would only be willing to pay a third of the RRP], compared to 17% in Germany,13% in the USA and only 7% in Denmark and the UK.

Make of that what you will. I don’t have a point of reference, so I’m not sure if this is high or low. I’m actually more interested in how many people have heard of it — 64% of Americans may sound reasonable, but that sounds a bit low for an online-only survey.

(via The Bookseller.)

What could the Macmillazon affair mean for authors?

Now that Amazon has started putting buy links back on Macmillan books, there’s no shortage of opinions on what it might mean for the future of publishing, retail, distribution, and so on.

But here’s a question that I don’t think is being asked: how will the the relationship between publishers and authors change, and more importantly, how can authors exploit the situation?

Here’s Andrew Zack on the subject:

But can we take this one step further? Could publishers just become “agents” of authors, where the author gets a bigger piece of net?

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So, could Macmillan’s face-off with Amazon benefit us all? Perhaps. But it could also come back to bite Macmillan in a tender place. Because if it makes sense for Macmillan to change the way books are sold and priced, why shouldn’t authors try to change the way they are selling books to publishers?

(I’m not sure on the some of the maths in the article, though.)

Some vague stats on e-reader usage

NPD has released some interesting, though infuriatingly vague, tidbits on usage patterns for e-reader owners. Buried inside this press release (which seems to hang off the sloppily-worded “95 percent of e-readers owners are happy with their devices”) is something enormously interesting:

[It] seems that e-Reader owners aren’t married to their e-Readers to do their reading. About three-in-ten owners say they use at least one another device for reading e-books, such as a PC or a smartphone.

This suggests that format- and device-shifting will be important to at least a third of the potential market, which means things like DRM and device lock-ins would likely cause some dissatisfaction.

Of course, we could probably get more insight into this if the study had looked at attitudes toward DRM, but that doesn’t appear to be the case (I asked but haven’t received a reply, and the full report is behind a paywall), because If it had looked at these issues, the statement probably wouldn’t have ended with this strange quote:

“As the recent introduction of Apple’s iPad demonstrates, applications now on smartphones benefit from larger screens, and industry leaders are recognizing the importance of supporting multiple platforms by supporting multiple clients and open standards.”

I’m not sure what this means — it’s either naive about these issues, or is intentionally ignoring it. Kindle books, for example, can only be read on Kindles (or approved devices), iPad books will presumably have similar DRM and licences. Open standards? ePub is an open standard, but that doesn’t mean it’s DRM-free.

Now’s the time for some good, solid research into e-reading, and although I haven’t seen the full report, NPD’s statement of ‘highlights’ doesn’t bode well.

(If anyone with access to the report can tell me whether the study looks at DRM or EULAs, please let me know.)

What Amazon and Macmillan Aren't Fighting About

I don’t want to dwell on this, but after seeing the responses of bloggers, Twitterers and commentators to the Amazon and Macmillan spat, I think it’s worth pointing out what the argument is about — and more importantly, what it’s not about.

First, here are two concise points lifted from my Twitter stream that, incredibly, seem to sum up about 40 billion words of reader frustration.

From Denis Klotz:

Dear Macmillan writers, I understand that you are not pleased about the Macmillan/Amazon disaster, but telling me that $16 is a fair price … for an ebook that I can’t lend or sell won’t make it so.

From Doug Bolden:

ebooks are being treated as competition by their own publishers, and their ownership is still impossibly murky.

Consumers have to wade through various and changing EULAs. And the “seller” but also “agent” model only adds to it.

These two comments echo readers’ sentiments on the fight. Namely that the real issue — the thing readers most want fixed — isn’t being discussed. It isn’t even being hinted at. It’s like bandaging someone’s foot when you should really be giving them CPR.

But that’s because there are two different (though related) issues here, and this fight is only about one of them — how the e-book production and distribution chain is going to work together. More specifically, it’s about how much control Amazon can exert over publishers. Doug’s comment above notes this, but only as something that adds to the problem.

For readers, this fight doesn’t mean much, but for me, and others involved in the chain, this is huge. Monumental. EULAs, DRM, First Sale, all that stuff belongs to another fight — and one worth having — but another fight nonetheless. That’s why, for example, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan penned a reassuring missive the other day to Macmillan Authors and Illustrators (and CC’ed to Literary Agents), but not addressed to readers. Because this isn’t about readers.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not important or that it doesn’t affect them. It’s easy to say readers are everything, and you’d be right. But it’s also easy, and equally correct, to say that the readers are ultimately best served by a functional industry and a competitive market — both of which are crucial for any discussion about DRM or customer rights.

And that’s what this is about, and that’s why I think it’s important.

Google Book Search Settlement Still Rubbish

Quick update on the Google Book Search (GBS) Settlement. At the end of last year, Google proposed a revised Settlement which was supposed to satisfy the demands made by the US Department of Justice.

Here’s what Judge Chin had to say:

“[The] amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation.”

…

“[It] still confers significant and possibly anticompetitive advantages on Google as a single entity, thereby enabling the company to be the only competitor in the digital marketplace with the rights to distribute and otherwise exploit a vast array of works in multiple formats.”

Check out full details on the settlement here, and the response by Open Book Alliance here.

(Via Publishers Weekly)

Google's cultural asphyxiation

My views on the Google Book Settlement are straightforward: solve the antitrust problem. Google will gain automatic access to your work via the Book Rights Registry on an involuntary basis, and that’s utterly insane. Squabbles over copyrights, fair use, privacy, author compensation, etc, are only meaningful in a marketplace — if the GBS goes ahead as is, then we won’t have that, and everything else won’t matter a jot. Consequently, I see them as secondary to antitrust, and the more we focus on them, the more we get distracted.

After reading Lawrence Lessig’s essay on The New Republic, it’s clear that he thinks there’s an even greater concern, and that antitrust is probably a distraction.

For the problem here is not just antitrust; it is not just privacy; it is not even the power that this (enormously burdensome) free library will give this already dominant Internet company. Indeed, the problem with the Google settlement is not the settlement. It is the environment for culture that the settlement will cement. For it practically guarantees that we will repeat the cultural-environmental errors of our past…

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Before we continue any further down this culturally asphyxiating road, can we think about it a little more? Before we release a gaggle of lawyers to police every quotation appearing in any book, can we stop for a moment to consider whether this way of organizing access to culture makes sense? Does this complexity get us something we would not get under the older system? Does this innovation in obsessive control produce any new understanding? Is it really progress?

It’s a long, but thoughtful piece that looks at the function of cultural artifacts and examines how the GBS will take us down a path that essentially makes them dysfunctional. I recommend it, even if you’re not a fan of Lessig. It also puts some context to the GBS issue, and unravels some of the complexity of the case.

What the iPad looks like...

… without Flash.