Let’s go back to what people were writing as Kindle reviews when it first came out in 2007:

The Believers

1. Steven Levy wrote a Newsweek cover story. He won a journalism award for his article:
   

   We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. “Do you really believe that we’ll be doing that in 50 years?” he asks.

   The answer is probably not, and that’s why the Kindle matters. “This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” says Jeff Bezos.

2. Etan Horowitz at Hartford Courant:
   

   In the six months I’ve been writing a personal-technology column, only two devices I’ve brought into the office have caused colleagues to crowd around my desk in excitement: the iPhone and the product I reviewed this week, the Kindle, an electronic book reader from Amazon.com

3. Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld:
   

   This week, I set out to deflate the hype about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader and to tell you why it will fail. But while researching this column, I became convinced of the opposite: Kindle is revolutionary and will succeed in the market.

Well, there weren’t really that many people who thought it would succeed.

The Doubting Thomas:

1. Alexander Grundner of eHomeUpgrade:
   

   I believe the only way eBooks are ever going to take off, and replace physical books, is if they adopt an open format that’s interoperable on a variety of devices and can be shared with friends and passed down to family.

2. Jeremy Toeman of LIVEdigitally:
   

   Seth Godin writes “The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he’s really really lucky, he’ll sell a million of these things in a year.” I think he’s missing about 5+ “really”s here. If he’s lucky he’ll sell 50,000 in a year, really lucky is 100,000, and really really lucky is about 200K. Moving 7 figures worth of hardware per year is VERY VERY hard! VERY hard. And that’s in an established category, let alone a speculative one.

3. Martin Lynch of the Inquirer:
   

   Instead, we got the Kindle, quite possibly the ugliest piece of consumer technology launched in recent years. I actually spat my tea at my defenseless PC monitor when I read one story that heralded it as the ‘iPod of ebook Readers’. I mean, who would have thought that an ugly calculator from the 1970s could be the Messiah for ebooks?

4. Nicholas Carr explained Why Kindle is no iPod:
   

   There is no big, readymade supply of content for the Kindle. It arrives in your hands naked and empty …
   So the Kindle, unlike the iPod, has a huge mountain to climb. Amazon has to create demand not only for the device but for the content that fills the device …

   For the Kindle to be the “iPod of reading,” it would have had to have been preceded by a “Napster of reading.” And, of course, it wasn’t.

As you can see, perhaps 70% of articles, if not higher, were highly skeptical of the Kindle and its chances.

Kindle 2007 – Notable Thoughts Then:

1. Mark Pilgrim quotes from 1984 and predicts the 1984 incident in his Future of Reading in 6 Acts.
2. Andy Greenberg at Forbes:
   

   As such electronic books hit the mainstream, will they transform the publishing industry the way that the iPod has transformed the music business? Wait for Kindle 2.0, or for Apple to invent something far more fun.

3. Peter Glaskowsky at CNet:
   

   I wasn’t surprised to see that Amazon is suddenly the world’s best place to buy e-books. Most New York Times bestsellers and other new releases are $9.99 or less.

Just some notes on how content is treated on the Internet that newspapers and bloggers will find useful. 

The Default Attitude towards Content on the Internet

1. Content is considered free to read, and free to re-use on other sites.  
2. Content is considered cheap/free to produce.
3. Even when people consider content has some costs they assume advertising pays for it.
4. Any news item will be copied/replicated instantly, half the time (if you’re lucky) with a link back to the original source. If you’re not the original source you’ll not usually be linked to.
5. There’s an overwhelming amount of content so its not valued much at all. Exceptions are discussed later.
6. Any content on a sharing site like youtube loses its value very, very quickly.

 The Importance of Links

1. Links get treated as votes and search engines rank based on these (and other factors). 
2. Links bring new visitors from the sites that link to you.
3. Links also flow trust i.e. a link from a user trusted site increases that user’s trust in your site.   

Content creators have a huge dilemma – Links are the main and cheapest way to grow. And yet, to get links you have to give away content –  

1. Paid content hardly ever gets links.
2. The higher the quality of content the more links you’ll probably get.
3. The more content you produce the more links you’ll probably get (provided quality is maintained).
4. There is a randomness factor in quality – see Jakob Nielsen’s post (the second chart).  

Basically, you have to be giving away content or providing some utility to get links.

Content Strategies - Paid, Niche, Advertising Supported, Expertise, Freemium, Content as the Loss Leader. 

We’re ruling out the case of people who are creating content without expecting to get ANY reward for it.

In the case of people who are trying to benefit from content they create, the content strategies include -

1. Advertising Supported – This does not really work. Especially not if you’re actually producing quality content. Think about it -
   

   Even huge companies that have millions of people producing content for them for free i.e. YouTube and FaceBook are having problems hitting profitability.
   It might be worth re-considering pinning your hopes on advertising.

2. Paid – Close to Ideal.  
3. Niche – This is where you cater to a particular niche. This is one of the smartest content strategies – even more so than paid. Will discuss this later.
4. Expertise – You become one of the authorities in a field.
5. Freemium – A Free Version and a ‘Premium’ Paid version. This is actually what most newspapers are migrating towards.  
6. Content as the Loss Leader – This is the case where you’re giving away content to sell something else i.e. consulting, products, etc.  

Do note that search engines and aggregators take a certain portion of your content’s value (Jakob Nielsen thinks its 98%, me 25%). For newspapers and free content and content that does not cater to traffic of good intent it probably is higher than 50%.

Because good, new content is difficult to discover, search engines and aggregators have a ton of power. Its in their interest to promote the concept that content is not really that valuable.

You’ll see similar trends in facebook apps and iphone apps where the platform and the discovery element are treated as more important than the actual content.

Niche Content

This deserves an entire post. However, will note down a few important points -

1. Niche content is extremely valuable.
2. You become the gate-keeper for the niche.
3. The more niche you go, the less strong competition you have.
4. The more niche you go, the more valuable the customers.
5. Niches are most useful when they are emerging niches.
6. People are usually starving for niche content.

 The Types of Content that Work

1. Breaking a story as it’ll get you a ton of links. Covering a news story 2nd, in comparison, has extremely low value.
2. Niche Content – content that caters to a niche has a ton of value.
3. Expertise Content – Like niche, expertise content is very highly valued. It’s worth nothing that the difference between #1 and #2 is usually a factor of 10. So if you go for the ‘expertise’ strategy make sure you’re the clear #1.
4. Intelligence and Content that helps people make decisions. 
5. High quality content – articles that are well thought out, well researched.
6. Contentious Content - Anything that gets people riled up. It’s a risky strategy – however, when it works it gets a ton of attention.

There are a lot more types of content that work decently. However, the top 5 listed above are some of the very best. 

Closing Thoughts on Content

As things currently stand, Content is Still King.  

1. We are over-run by content. Yet, there is very little high quality content, even less expertise content, and even less niche expertise content.  
2. Content consumers and Content middle-men are constantly pushing to devalue content. However, they are completely dependent on content.
3. Even search engines like Google are rushing to acquire content sources like YouTube and out of print books.

The Internet is full of the siren songs of ‘altruistic donations of content’ and ‘giving away content for something you might get tomorrow’.

Don’t listen.

You can be sure that any content you create and share online, provided it’s good quality content, is making money for someone.

Why should it be anyone other than you making the money?

Posted in publishing, thoughts

Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, a high-flying, around-the-world adventure novel set in 1914, is due out in just a couple of months. It’s one of the books I’m most looking forward to this fall (especially after learning about these German dirigibles).

Westerfeld talks about his early ideas for Leviathan in this Extras video:

As if we weren’t excited enough already, Westerfeld is offering free downloads of Uglies.

YA Memoir that Breaks the Mold

Salon interviewed Hannah Friedman this week about her new book Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool. The book sounds fantastic, and to make it sound more fantastic (i.e., not your usual YA) the reviewer takes a few jabs at the whole YA genre:

Not only is Friedman’s writing striking for its blunt, unromantic realism; her prose also displays a self-aware wit that is all too rare in the genre.

Also:

Her refusal to moralize or provide an easy resolution sets “Everything Sucks” apart from YA literature’s preponderance of breezy, formulaic narratives.

I expected YA bloggers to be all over these sweeping generalizations, but haven’t even seen a link.

Quick links…

As briefly reported in yesterday’s Omni Daily News, Stephenie Meyer will join the likes of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Princess Di to star in her own Female Force comic. Female Force: Stephenie Meyer will debut in October. (Cynopsis: Kids!)

The Daily Beast reviews Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery, calling the essays “a mix of nostalgia, analysis, memoir, and feminist revision that can make even the guiltiest read feel like it held a vital role in our coming of age.”

A non-YA book about a predominantly YA topic: The Book Bench interviews Miriam Forman-Brunell, author of Babysitter: An American History.

Simon Pulse is publishing The Secret to Teen Power, the teen version of the international best seller and its “laws of attraction.” (via Book Ninja)

We’re in the middle of The Book Smugglers’ Young Adult Appreciation Month, which I just found out about this week. (Thanks, Presenting Lenore!) They have a bunch of great reviews and guest posts for your perusal.

Happy reading.–Heidi