somersault

The wonder, the art, the magic, the work of creating a printed book  — often forgotten in this digital age  — is demonstrated in the above video. Filmmaker Glen Milner (@glen_milner) visited Smith Settle bookbinders near Leeds, England, where the owners, Don Walters and Tracey Thorne, allowed him to film the making of the 17th Slightly Foxed (@FoxedQuarterly) book, Suzanne St Albans’ memoir Mango and Mimosa, from start to finish. The Telegraph (@Telegraph) reports:

Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the printing plates, the stitching of the “signatures” (folded sections), the pressing and gluing, the adding of the ribbon bookmark and head and tail bands, the making of the final hardcover in green linen cloth and the numbering of the copies. All of it done with great care, much of it by hand.

The video below on Kottke.org (@Kottke) shows that back before print on demand, laser printers, and the Internet, even machine printing and binding was a time-consuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book.

Just for fun, here’s a video of what the help desk would look like back in the day when print books overtook scrolls.

And, one artist looks at print books and sees a canvas from which to carve art.

See all the amazing photos.

Also see our previous blogposts “The Technology of Storytelling” and “Introducing the New Book.”

Whether pbook or ebook, contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you pursue publishing in this digital age.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s (@pewresearch) Internet & American Life Project (@pewinternet), 43% of Americans age 16 and older read long-form digital text such as ebooks and magazines, and many say they’re reading more because books and other long-form material are in a digital format.

One-fifth of American adults (21%) report they’ve read an ebook in the past year; this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and ebook reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks. In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an ebook in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

The average reader of ebooks says she’s read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-ebook consumer. For device owners, those who own ebook readers say they’ve read an average of 24 books in the previous year (vs. 16 books by those who don’t own that device). They report having read a median of 12 books (vs. 7 books by those who do not own the device.

·         30% of those who read e-content say they now spend more time reading, and owners of tablets and ebook readers particularly stand out as reading more now.

·         The prevalence of ebook reading is markedly growing, but pbooks still dominate the world of book readers.

·         People prefer ebooks to pbooks when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others.

·         Ebook reading happens across an array of devices, including smartphones.

·         Those who read ebooks are more likely to be under age 50, have some college education, and live in households earning more than $50,000.

·         11% of all Americans age 16 and older – or 14% of those who have read a book in the past year – consume audiobooks.

·         The majority of book readers prefer to buy rather than borrow.

·         61% of e-reading device owners said they purchased the most recent book they read, compared with 48% of all readers.

·         Owners of e-reading devices are more likely than all Americans 16 and older to get book recommendations from people they knew (81% vs. 64%) and bookstore staff (31% vs. 23%).

·         26% of those who had read a book in the past 12 months said that what they enjoyed most was learning, gaining knowledge, and discovering information.

Read this in full.

Also see Mike Shatzkin's (@MikeShatzkin) analysis in "A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

E-readers may soon be thinner, lighter, and supple. LG (@LGUS) has just announced it’s beginning mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

The new plastic display has a resolution of 1024x768 and is 6 inches across the diagonal, comparable to the Kindle and Nook.

The LG display is half the weight and 30% thinner (0.7mm) than a comparable, glass e-ink panel. Existing ebook readers need to be thick (and heavy) to protect the glass display, but LG says its display is more rugged. The press release says the plastic display survives repeated 1.5-meter drop tests and break/scratch tests with a small hammer, and that it's flexible up to 40 degrees from the midpoint.

Read this in full.

Also see USA TODAY's article, "Flexible displays bend what's possible for computers."

And see our previous blogposts, “Why Your Next Phone Might be Bendable” and “Revolutionary New Paper Computer Shows Flexible Future for Smartphones and Tablets.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for 21st century digital publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Pew Research Center’s (@pewresearch) Project for Excellence in Journalism (@PEJPew) summarizes its State of the News Media 2012 report in this Infographic.

TV is still a strong news source, but digital is the growth area, with tablets the fastest-growing platform. Social media is a fair source of news recommendations, though news consumers prefer to find stories themselves, and direct from sources like CNN.com, newspaper, and network sites. Among the findings:

·         23% of U.S. adults get news from two devices

·         44% own a smart phone, and 18% own a tablet computer

·         70% get their news from a desktop computer, and 56% from tablets

·         64% of those employed full time own a tablet computer

·         Twitter is more highly regarded than Facebook as a source of news story recommendations.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you understand the sea-changes occurring in media and publishing, and how they affect your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Computers: The New Consumers?.”

How does the Internet of Things—where not only is everyone connected to the Internet, but also everything—impact your publishing strategy and planning? Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you think it all through.

And bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Futurist News tab.

This article in The Economist (@TheEconomist) explains how Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon (@amazon), values innovation and risk-taking. It begins with the example of Bezos’ major investment in “a gargantuan clock” being built inside the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in Texas by The Long Now Foundation (@longnow). This 10,000-year clock, designed “to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking,” will tick once a year, its century hand will advance once every 100 years, and its cuckoo will come out on the millennium.

Mr. Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr. Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

...[Criticism does] nothing to sway Mr. Bezos, who is convinced that rapid technological change creates huge opportunities for companies bold enough to seize them. “There is room for many winners here,” he says. But he believes Amazon can be one of the biggest thanks to its unique culture and capacity for reinventing itself. Even in its original incarnation as an internet retailer, it pioneered features that have since become commonplace, such as allowing customers to leave reviews of books and other products (a move that shocked literary critics at the time), or using a customer’s past purchasing history to recommend other products, often with astonishing accuracy.

Read this in full.

Also see Bezos' long view approach in "Bezos team finds Apollo 11 rocket engines on Atlantic floor."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you set your leadership vision and take advantage of technology to advance your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Innovation and Leadership tabs.

Julie Bosman (@juliebosma) and Matthew Richtel (@mrichtel) write in this New York Times (@nytimesbusiness) article about the many ways tablets – by providing too many options – can distract people from concentrating on the books they’re reading; fragmenting their experience or stopping it altogether.

Email lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled ebooks on apps from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.

Read this in full.

The article focuses on apps and email being distractions, but we also ask the question, “When do you think the digital features and creative apps of an enhanced ebook cross the line from augmenting the book reading experience and become a distraction and interruption? Write your comments below.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute your ebook publishing and marketing strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

SXSW (@sxsw) (pronounced “south by southwest”), the annual Austin, Tex.-based festival of interactive ventures, music, and film, runs March 9-18, for another year’s presentations on innovation in technology, music, cinema, and new business platforms that will attract more than 20,000 attendees. SXSW Interactive runs March 9-13, focusing on books, publishing, and new media technology.

Panel presentations and discussions include “The Future of Lifestyle Media,” Making a Grand Entrance: How to Launch a Product,” and “The Present of Print: Paper’s Persistence.”

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) editors Rachel Deahl (@DeahlsDeals) and Calvin Reid (@calreid) are moderating two panel discussions:

Publishing Models Transforming The Book, will examine how conventional publishing industry business models are being rearranged and reinvented, and how books and book content are being offered to consumers in the digital age. The panel features content entrepreneurs like Brian Altounian (@BrianAltounian), CEO of Wowio.com (@WOWIO) (announcing the rebranding of itself as Studio W), and Swanna McNair (@swannamac), founder of Creative Conduit. Also on-hand will be Molly Barton (@MollyBBarton), director of digital publishing and business development at Penguin (@penguinusa) / Book Country (@Book_Country), and Jefferson Raab, creative director at The Atavist (@theatavist).

And Reid will moderate the panel Discoverability and the New World of Book PR, organized by Austin based book media relations veterans Barbara Cave Henricks, founder of Cave Henricks Communications (@CaveHenricks) and Rusty Shelton (@RustyShelton), owner of Shelton Interactive as well as Hollis Heimbouch (@heimbouch), vp and publisher at Harper Business (@HarperCollins). The panel will examine book marketing and promotion at a time when physical bookstore shelf space is declining and more books are being released.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost “Discoverability in the Digital Age: Personal Recommendations and Bookstores.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you identify blue ocean strategy for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

In this New York Times (@nytimestech) article, technology writer David Streitfeld spotlights a wooden warehouse in Richmond, CA, where copies of printed books are being stored in the hope of preserving literature in case of a digital catastrophe.

Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age....

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive (@internetarchive), a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too.

Read this in full.

If you’re a book lover like we (@smrsault) are, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Author, speaker, and futurist Leonard Sweet (@lensweet) scouted this article in the World Future Society’s (@WorldFutureSoc) magazine, The Futurist (@Theyear2030) (March-April 2012): A Future of Fewer Words?: 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Language by Lawrence Baines (in an earlier article, Baines offered 6 manifestations of the retreat of the written word:

     1. The power of image-based media to influence thought and behavior;

     2. The tendency of newer technologies to obliterate aspects of older technologies;

     3. The current emphasis on school reform;

     4. The influences of advertising and marketing;

     5. The current state of books as repositories of the language; and

     6. The reconceptualization of the library.)

Members may log in and read online. Nonmembers may order the issue.

Sweet says,

I tried to say the same thing in chapter 9 of my upcoming book Viral ("Turning a Tin Ear to Poetry"), but Baines is more comprehensive and scientifically compelling. “As the world recedes from the written word and becomes inundated with multisensory stimuli (images, sound, touch, taste, and smell), the part of the human brain associated with language will regress. While visually astute and more aurally discriminating, the areas of the brain associated with language are also associated with critical thinking and analysis. So, as the corpus of language shrinks, the human capacity for complex thinking may shrink with it.”

“Losing polysyllabic words will mean a corresponding loss of eloquence and precision. Today, many of the most widely read texts emanate from blogs and social networking sites. Authors of these sites may be non-readers who have little knowledge of effective writing and may have never developed an ear for language.”

Read The Futurist article in full (membership required).

Read Baines’ earlier article (pdf).

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the changing communication scene to most effectively reach your consumers.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Futurist News tab.