New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren’t. Fight back.
via WSJ.com, thanks Bobby T.
I saw this piece several months back (here) about how authors and publishers have taken to creating movie trailers for their book in hopes or reaching the web-addicted demographics and thought it seemed like a cool idea. I think the key is to have content available that can travel around the internet and snag potential readers. That means commissioning videos, author pictures and making excerpts available.
Will a trailer like this actually sell more books?
I’m not so sure, but if someone is a fan of the book and they want to write something online, it gives them more content to use and overall I think that’s a powerful thing.
So, when Andrew posted this video (here) of Dan Winters new book I immediately thought of the book trailer story and how this kind of thing really could sell more photo books. I think magazines could benefit from this kind of preview as well. Flipping through the book or magazine is exactly what you would do if you were standing in a bookstore or at a newsstand contemplating a purchase, so if you’re going to buy something online why not recreate the experience for the consumer. The added benefit is that it’s portable and can be passed along to reach even more people. I think ideally the book publishers are serving up these videos so when you click on them you’re taken some place where you have a buying opportunity. I think we will see more of this in the near future because I didn’t even know Dan had a new book coming out until I saw the video and now he sold one more book.
Bonus: Here’s an interview with Dan about the new book and a slideshow with high quality pictures (here) that someone left in the comments of Andrew’s post.
Photographer Jonathan Saunders found out like most people (I know we’ve covered this ground before) that Blurb Books are completely hit-or-miss in the quality of the final product. Much of this can be chalked up to blurb trying to find the point where acceptable cost meets acceptable quality. I had an interesting conversation last week with the Modern Postcard dudes where they said that the business started because they couldn’t find any reliable printers for their high end photo heavy real estate brochures, so they built their own printing facility and suddenly discovered the immense challenge of gang printing photographs and working with photographers who have an eye for detail and color. They told me the majority of their employees work in customer service.
So apparently after he saw some extremely high quality books at the Photography Book Now party in the fall of 2008 Jonathan decided to give Blurb another shot even though he had tried their service previously and been disappointed with the results. Then “Blurb banned me when I pointed out to Blurb the books at the Photography Book Now party in the fall of 2008 are of a higher quality then I was able to receive when placing an actual order with Blurb. So instead of helping me achieve that quality, Blurb “disabled” my account for me without my permission since Blurb could not achieve the quality Blurb advertises or actually support the B3 system I paid for.”
You can read the full story (here), but it looks like Jonathan did everything within his power to get a book that matched his expectations including paying for a higher quality product, contacting customer service and complaining and submitting frequent lengthy emails. I was thinking that I might say to him “too bad buddy” you got advertised to. It happens all the time where the marketing pushes your expectations beyond what the product can deliver but I think in this case it’s blurb that’s making the mistake by pushing very hard to be a print on demand book company for professional photographers and failing to meet the bare minimum of consistency and quality. A photo book that’s printed right is only as good as the photography on the pages and if Blurb would like to use professional photographers as their marketing vehicle they need to step up to the plate and meet their expectations. Banning someone from ever using your service again is headed the wrong direction.
Good to put some faces with names (here). I think David Curcurito is a genius magazine designer.
I’ve just heard from a photographer that bluehost.com is lying about the unlimited hosting and bandwidth they advertise on the front page and “they have placed a limit of 50,000 files” which mostly effects photographers using it for proofing.
“Bluehost is shutting down everything….website, blog, email until the owners remove enough of the files to be under their new limits.”
You can read reviews of the downhill slide in service (here).
It looks like CBS is realizing that people can’t navigate all that gray and they’ve decided to add more pictures in their latest redesign. It may be baby steps but at least we know they’re headed in the right direction. Let’s see if this becomes the redesign trend of the summer. I’m hopeful.
“We had a few key goals with this CBSNews.com redesign — make the site easier to navigate, more visual, faster and highlight our unique content.”
via i can read.
NYPH’09 kicks off today and I’m stoked to see that Andrew Hetherington will be blogging about all the happenings from What’sTheJackanory?.com. The potent cocktail of exhibits, parties, lectures and famous photographer spotting that seems to make up the photo festival (I’ve never been but read coverage from last year) is what I always love to read on his blog and it can’t be found anywhere else. I’m going to put an rss feed from his coverage on the sidebar so if you’re like me and not attending we don’t miss anything interesting.
Freelens, the largest group of photo journalists in Germany issued a notice a few weeks back that Jahreszeiten Publishing was forcing all photographers to sign a contract without the possibility for negotiation that would grant them ownership rights to all photographs taken in the course of an assignment.
“Should photographers sign the agreement, they will be left with absolutely nothing – not even the possibility of marketing their works later in the form of archive photographs. This is because the contractual clauses are intended to secure free-of-charge use in all print and online objects of the publishing house. This would make untold publications possible for many years, in return for only a modest work fee that merely covers single, non-recurring use.”
You can read more on their blog (here).
Or better yet sign the petition (here).
I like Will Steacy’s work but after reading this interview on BombLog (here) I have a new appreciation for the pictures.
To say that my jaw hit the floor when I received an email from Paula Tognarelli, Executive Director of the Griffin Museum of Photography announcing that I would be getting an award is an understatement but the level of shock I felt then could only be called mild compared to the near catatonic state I was in as I stood on stage at the 4th annual Focus awards after they had just honored industry titans Modern Postcard and handed out thick glass award trophies to Russell Hart, Executive Editor of American Photo Magazine a man who might have ended this sentence long ago and then Rosalind Smith a local writer who received a standing ovation. I had just spotted DOP Kathy Ryan in the Second row who was here along with Director and Founder of Visa Pour l’Image Jean-François Leroy to honor the next recipient, Eliane Laffont, editorial director Hachette Filapacchi Magazines and founder of Sygma Photo New Agency, with a lifetime achievement award.
Eliane, by the way, gave a moving acceptance speech on the power of photography and photojournalism in particular where she recounted a poignant moment in her career and really it probably relates to a turning point in the business of photography when Corbis bought Sygma and the new contracts came back and they had changed “photography” to “content” and “photographers” to “content providers.” She concluded by saying although things are looking bad now there is so much great work being made in the world and as long as photojournalists believe, photojournalism will exist.
I wanted to say how cool and original it is that they built an award around the idea that they “honor the work of those who are not photographers but who have been instrumental in building greater awareness of the photographic arts in the general public.” The museum itself is very cozy and from what I understand they have excellent programming. If this award is any indication of the type of out of the box thinking they’re going to continue with in the future then they will become, if they haven’t already a strong voice in the photography world. Actually, the fact that Jean-François would fly in from Europe and Kathy would come up from New York for this one night is a pretty good indicator that they are already a strong voice.
From what I understand Lou Jones our MC for the evening came up with the idea for the award and I’m told by other photographers in the community he really works hard to educate himself and those around him about the future of photography. I was also told there was intense debate around my nomination (and others as well) but nearly everyone I met said they don’t read blogs so I’m guessing there’s handful of young photographers who work with the museum who nominated me and I want to say thanks.
I’m not so much an advocate for blogging as I am for simply doing things online where I strongly believe a great portion of the business of photography will end up. I think blogs are a great way to strengthen the community, to debate new ideas, to stomp out old bad ideas and to find a new path for photography but it’s more important that people working with photography are putting work online and trying new things out to help us all figure out what’s next. I did manage to say in my speech that I believe in the future of photography and that I would like to convince those that have the power to make decisions over the use of photography that there is no greater medium for communication online and once they finally realize this there will be a big bright future awaiting all of us.
The Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston has their Focus Awards tonight and they’re giving APE the Rising Star award. I’m incredibly honored that they would recognize this blog and just want to say thanks to all the readers, especially the people who take the time to leave a thoughtful comment on a post. It’s been an education for me and it’s really what makes this blog great. Thanks.
But there’s only so much that “New Media” can do. At the end of the day, good art is still an expensive, labor-intensive, pain-in-the-ass thing to make. Technology may remove a specific barrier to entry – the way photography did to portraiture over oil paint, for example – but the good stuff, the stuff people are willing to pay BIG MONEY for, still remains really, really hard.
via An Interview with Hugh MacLeod, Cartoonist | Lateral Action.
UPDATE: 3 days and Joerg is still down. He’s got a temp site up (here).
Joerg Colberg’s weblog Conscientious has been down for over a day now and I wanted to let any of his regular visitors know that he’s down but not out. Apparently his webhost is MediaTemple which kind of surprises me because they have a good reputation and charge you more than most for the ability to handle traffic spikes. Still, things do happen and even a 99.9% uptime guarantee means you could be off the air for at least 9 hours a year
My experience with the cheaper hosting has always been that you will see outages from 15 minutes to an hour now and again but never anything like a day unless they have a fire or flood or some “act of god.” The bigger problem with cheap hosting has always been that they can’t handle the traffic spikes when you get mentioned on one of the big aggregator sites like slashdot, boingboing or digg. And, it’s not just your site that’s susceptible either, because you’re in a server with hundreds of other websites so if someone in your box gets “slashdotted” you’re going down too. Incidentally they way to prevent a server crash from too much traffic is to make an html page of whatever it is that people are linking too and serve that up instead of the usual pages which probably have 10 or 20 elements that need to be delivered for each visitor.
If anyone has suggestions for good cheap hosting I can make a list. I’ve used bluehost.com and know people using godaddy.com and both seem decent.
BlueHost $7/month
GoDaddy $5 – $15/month
Oditech $10/month
Yahoo Small Business $10/month
DreamHost $10/month
Tiger Tech $7/month
Site 5 $8/month
NearlyFreeSpeech Pay as you go
HostSite $10/month
ICD Soft $6-10/month
Certified Hosting $5/month
Host Papa $5/month
PowWeb $8/month
HostGator $15/month
WebHero $7/month
LaughingSquid $8 – $14/month
Pair $10 – $30/month
SurpassHosting $4 – $15/month
Eleven2 $6 – $21/month — Maybe not good. A commenter is having serious problems.
LiquidWeb $15 – $25/month
Free is not a business model. Free is how you smash old crappy monopolies and how you force businesses who don’t give a rats ass what their consumers want to pay attention. Free is how you get some momentum so you can prove there really are better more efficient ways of doing some things. Thanks to YouTube I can now watch TV on my computer (Hulu) and a premium video streaming service exists (Vimeo).
Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review delivers a brilliant manifesto with a plan to save media (here).
“For many decades, publications were overdistributed to readers who didn’t really want them, because publishers were former ad salesmen who hoped to profit by charging advertisers the highest possible rates.”
[…]”Editors can charge readers for content that is uniquely intelligent; that relies on proprietary data, investigation, or analysis; that helps readers with their jobs, investments, or personal consumption; or that is very expensively designed. Everything else should be available free…”
Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired has been working on a book about free that’s set to launch this summer (here), but I suspect he’s going to take a real thrashing on this one since it seems the tide has turned on free. All anyone is talking about these days is subscriptions, premium upgrades and advertising. All have free components to them it’s just not a big deal anymore. We know that if someone charges money for a product and you offer that same product for free you will attract more people. If you don’t have a way to make it profitable it’s called a trust fund not a business.
Here’s what the red hot Economist has to say on the matter:
“Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch.” More (here).
And finally if you want read a fantastic analysis on the situation facing three largest business magazines all founded at the beginning of the modern era of magazines read 24/7 Wall Street’s: The Sun Sets On BusinessWeek, Forbes, And Fortune.
The problem with a lot of men’s magazines is that they worry too much about who they’re addressing, when they should be worrying more about the quality of their content.
Dylan Jones, Editor of British GQ
via FT.com
