Month: December 2010

Google today launched its long-awaited electronic book store, called simply Google eBooks, with more than 3 million titles and 4,000 publishers participating as partners, including most of the major industry names. Independent booksellers will also be able to offer Google eBooks through a relationship with the American Booksellers’ Association, and the company is launching an affiliate network as well. The web giant’s offering — which it said is based on a “buy anywhere, read anywhere” philosophy — is likely to ramp up competition in the electronic book market, which until now has been dominated by Amazon and Apple.

James Crawford, director of engineering for the Google Books team, said the company has scanned in over 15 million books through its massive book-scanning project, which “makes us one of the largest libraries in the world.” In the Google eBook store there will be 2.8 million books available to download free of charge, since they are in the public domain, and the rest will have a “buy” button next to them that takes readers directly to the eBook store. Google’s publishing partners include major names such as Random House, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, but also a range of smaller publishers and scholarly houses such as the Oxford University Press and Reed Elsevier.

Google will pay the publisher 52 percent of the list price if sold through Google’s store, or 45 percent if it is sold through the company’s retail partners. The web giant said it did not take a stand on whether to accept the relatively new “agency model” for selling e-books (which was introduced when Apple joined the market with the iPad), in which the publisher gets to set the price in the e-book store, rather than letting the retailer choose. Less than 10 percent of the company’s publishing partners asked for an agency deal, but they represent over half of the best-sellers in the store, the company said.

In addition to the publisher partnerships, Google is also launching an affiliate network — although Amanda Edmonds, director of strategic partnerships for the Google Books team, said the company so far only has one affiliate signed up, a site called Goodreads, which is devoted to books and discussion about books. Anyone reading a discussion forum or thread about a book that is available in the Google eBooks store will be able to click “buy” from within the discussion and go directly to the checkout at Google’s store, Edmonds said.

As part of today’s launch, Google is releasing a dedicated eBook-reading app for Android devices, and Crawford said the company also is “working on getting an app into the iTunes store” for the iPhone and iPad. Google e-books will also be compatible with the Sony Reader and the Nook reader from Barnes & Noble — but only titles without digital-rights management controls will be available for reading on the Kindle, he said, because the Kindle has a closed content-protection system for its books. And most books will also be available in the open source ePub format.

“We’re not peddling devices here –we want to focus on selling books,” Crawford said. Google e-books will be readable in any modern web browser, and for books that the company has scanned in, readers will also be able to toggle between standard view and image format, which will show the actual scans of the physical book’s pages and any photos or illustrations from the original book.

The Google e-book manager said that the company is focused on what he called a “cloud-based model of consumption,” in which “you never have to worry about where your book is, what page you were on, or where you bought it,” because it is always available in your browser or app. “We think ultimately e-books should be like physical books,” Crawford said. “Most people don’t have bookshelves sorted by which retailer they bought it from.” In the longer term, the Google manager said, “maybe the industry can come together and agree on a standard for e-books so they can be shared” across devices.

The past week has seen plenty of ink spilled — virtual and otherwise — about WikiLeaks and its mercurial front-man, Julian Assange, and the pressure they have come under from the U.S. government and companies such as Amazon and PayPal, both of which have blocked WikiLeaks from using their services. Why should we care about any of this? Because more than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.

Not everyone agrees with this point of view, of course. Some argue that there is nothing journalistic about the organization whatsoever, and that it is simply a lawless group of misfits spreading information around that it doesn’t have the right to distribute, without caring for the effects of its actions. That may be true — but it’s also true that the same description fits more than one allegedly journalistic entity in the traditional media sphere, and they are all protected by the First Amendment and its principles regarding freedom of the press. So why is WikiLeaks not worthy of the same protection?

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, is the one who put pressure on Amazon to remove support for WikiLeaks (although the company claims it removed the organization’s site from its servers because Wikileaks did not own the rights to the content, not because of political pressure). Senator Lieberman has proposed legislation called the SHIELD law — short for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination — which would make it a crime to publish information that might harm U.S. agents or informants, or would otherwise be contrary to the national interest.

This might as well be called the WikiLeaks law, since it is clearly targeted at the organization — which did not actually leak the documents (something that is already a crime under the Espionage Act) but is clearly publishing them. But the heavy hand of this law would not just fall on WikiLeaks; it would also potentially cover anyone who has published the cables, such as the New York Times. Just as sources used to leak secret documents to newspapers, which often published them regardless of whether the government disapproved, now those sources can go to WikiLeaks and accomplish the same thing.

So what makes WikiLeaks different from the New York Times? There are the obvious things, of course — the latter publishes a print newspaper, is a member of a variety of self-regulatory bodies involving the media, and is a venerable institution with a long history of journalistic integrity. WikiLeaks, meanwhile, is a shadowy organization with an uncertain history, opaque motivations and publishes only online. That said, why are we so eager to protect one and not the other? WikiLeaks’ stated intention is to bring transparency to the political process and expose wrongdoing. Isn’t that the same thing the Times does? And yet one is being hounded by government agents, forced to remove its documents from Amazon’s servers and blocked from using PayPal, while the other is free to publish whatever it wants. What if the Times were to store some of its content on Amazon’s EC2 servers or use PayPal for transactions — would it be subject to the same treatment? And if not, why is WikiLeaks?

Some would argue that we don’t need entities like WikiLeaks, because traditional publishers like the New York Times are good enough. And it’s true that leakers took their information to newspapers before WikiLeaks came along — but it’s also true that many of them refused to publish it. And in some cases, information that should not have been published actually took the spotlight away from the truth, as in the case of the Times’ reporting leading up to the Iraq War. An independent source of documents like WikiLeaks (which journalism professor Jay Rosen has called the world’s “first stateless news organization”) would have been a very valuable thing to have during that time.

The fact is that freedom of the press, like freedom of speech in general, is a crucial part of the fabric of a free society. Every action that impinges on those freedoms is a loss for society, and a step down a slippery slope — and that applies to everything that falls under the term “press,” regardless of whether we agree with its methods or its leaders. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary. Any action that the government or its representatives take against a publisher like WikiLeaks should have to meet a very high bar indeed — and as Dan Gillmor argues, everyone working at the New York Times or any other media outlet should feel a shiver when they see Joe Lieberman attacking WikiLeaks, because it could just as easily be them in the spotlight instead of Julian Assange.

The international cat-and-mouse game continues between WikiLeaks and various governments over the diplomatic cables the organization recently published: in just the past few days, the site has been kicked off Amazon’s cloud-hosting platform and had its domain-name service cancelled by a second company — and even a data visualization project based on the WikiLeaks cables has been shut down. All of which raises a number of questions, including: Does the world need a stateless, independent data haven to protect the kind of freedom of information that WikiLeaks represents?

Just to recap, Amazon removed WikiLeaks’ website from its EC2 cloud on Thursday, after Senator Joe Lieberman — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — complained about U.S. companies helping to distribute what he called illegal documents. The web company released a statement late on Thursday saying that it was not pressured into removing the WikiLeaks data, but did so because the organization breached its terms of service, which require those uploading data to have the rights to publish that information, and to refrain from uploading data that could lead to personal injury (some have argued that the leaked cables could jeopardize the lives of human-rights workers and U.S. informants).

WikiLeaks moved its site back to another hosting provider — one which apparently uses a server farm deep within a Swedish mountain, similar to the fictional data warehouse in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon. But within hours of making that move, the organization’s website was again taken offline, this time by its DNS provider, EveryDNS.com. According to the company, WikiLeaks’ website was being besieged by hackers using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which risked affecting other customers (WikiLeaks originally moved its site to Amazon’s servers for the same reason). After moving its data to a server host in Switzerland, the site was back up again on Friday.

Although both Amazon and EasyDNS had what seemed to be valid reasons for removing support for WikiLeaks, both companies were undoubtedly also painfully aware of the mounting political pressure from the U.S. government — both from Senator Lieberman and others — to disassociate themselves from WikiLeaks or face potential legal action. And while many critics accused Amazon of bowing to pressure and failing to uphold freedom of speech, the reality is that private companies are entitled to do whatever they wish in the interests of their business and shareholders (within certain limits), as Derrick pointed out in his recent post.

So where does that leave WikiLeaks? Switzerland’s Pirate Party is hosting the site for now, but it could easily decide that it doesn’t want to risk the ire of the U.S., just as France apparently has. The organization has been working with Iceland to develop what it calls an “information haven” that would be protected by new laws designed to shield whistleblowers, but it’s not clear where that effort stands, or how it has been affected by the latest political uproar. Some have wondered why WikiLeaks hasn’t already turned its data into BitTorrent files, which can be hosted in multiple locations and are therefore virtually impossible to remove.

More than anything, what WikiLeaks needs is a stable place to host its data — and potentially a separate DNS system — that is not susceptible to government interference or the kind of pressure that Amazon came under for dealing with the site (although Assange said in a Q&A Friday at The Guardian that the most recent data has been distributed to 100,000 people in encrypted form). The pictures of the mountain bunker where WikiLeaks’ data is stored, and the comparisons to the data warehouse in the novel Cryptonomicon, reminded a number of observers of an early attempt to create such a data haven: the idea was to store servers in a former military platform in the North Sea known as Sealand — whose owner claims that it is an independent country — but the effort never got off the ground.

With millions of servers in locations around the world, Google seems like a natural partner for WikiLeaks — and the company has refused in the past to remove controversial content from its sites, despite requests from the government, defending its actions based on the principle of freedom of speech. But even Google likely doesn’t want to take on Homeland Security and face potential prosecution. And so WikiLeaks will no doubt continue having to roam from from hosting country to hosting country, like the 21st century equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the digital oceans forever.

As newspapers everywhere struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many continue to debate how much emphasis they should put on digital versus their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over: newspapers need to be digital first in everything they do, he says, and more than that, they need to take the same approach to media and their content business that many web-based startups have, and that means being transparent, crowdsourced, collaborative and flat.

In a speech he delivered Thursday at the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass. (put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association or INMA), Paton said that the Journal Register — which he took over in February — has been living and breathing these principles for the past year, and that they have paid off in terms of revenue and profit growth for the company, which was effectively bankrupt last year.

In effect, Paton says, the Journal Register — which publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Philadelphia, Michigan, Connecticut and New Jersey — is already a digital-first company whether it wants to be or not, because its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. “We are already a Digital company,” he said in his presentation, “with small sales in the area of growth and a burdensome cost structure on the declining business – Print.” The newspaper CEO said the company has dealt with that cost structure problem by outsourcing everything that it can to others who can do it cheaper or better.

We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Get rid of the bricks and iron [and] focus on core competencies — meaning, get rid of those things that don’t add value to the business. Reduce it or stop it. Outsource it or sell it.

What’s most interesting about the Journal Register’s approach is that it doesn’t rely on putting up paywalls, the way that media mogul Rupert Murdoch has done at his newspapers in Britain — which led to a decline in online readership of more than 90 percent — and the way some other media outlets such as the New York Times are planning. Instead, Paton is focused on expanding the relationship that his newspapers have with both readers and advertisers in their local communities, and taking that online. And he says it is working even better than expected.

Digital Ad growth is 2 times better than the industry. More importantly the Company’s digital revenue has grown from negligible to 11 % of ad revenue in November – in less than a year. The Company will write about 1,000 digital ad orders this month and has expanded its revenue streams from about 13 basic revenue streams to about 60. And all of that with less costs.

In addition to the advertising growth, Paton says that his papers are reaching out to the communities they serve, to make them part of what he calls the “new news ecosystem.” For one paper, the Register Citizen in Connecticut, that means creating a new community newsroom, which the newspaper is moving into later this month — the new offices have no walls, Paton says, and feature “a newsroom café with free public wifi, a community media lab and a community journalism school.”

The Journal Register CEO has also been taking the same approach to his own company: earlier this year, Paton launched a project called ideaLab, in which employees from across the company were chosen from an open application process that generated almost 200 comments on Paton’s blog (his post about the lab is here). Armed with their choice of mobile phone, a Netbook and iPad, members of the ideaLab get 10 hours of paid time per week to experiment and innovate — and only one rule, Paton said: there are no rules, and no sacred cows. Paton also had strong words in his presentation about why most newspapers are not changing:

The reasons… are simple: Fear, lack of knowledge and an aging managerial cadre that is cynically calculating how much they DON’T have to change before they get across the early retirement goal line. Look at the grey heads in any newspaper and you will see what I am talking about.

The solution, according to Paton?

Stop listening to newspaper people. We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the Web and as an industry we newspaper people are no good at it. No good at it at all. Want to get good at it? Then stop listening to the newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world. And, I would point out, as we have done at JRC – put the Digital people in charge – of everything.

Whether anyone decides to take the Journal Register Co. CEO’s advice, it seems clear that the approach is working for Paton’s chain — he says in the year to date, the company outperformed the newspaper industry, with ad revenue growth that was three times better than the industry average and classified ad performance that was six times better.

the Journal Register Co., which . Journal Register’s new CEO, John Paton, has been aggressively launching new-media related ventures at the company, including a community journalism lab aimed at training local bloggers.

Amazon has removed WikiLeaks’ website and related files from its servers, a move that appears to be a result of pressure from the U.S. government not to support the document-leaking organization. According to several news reports, Senator Joseph Lieberman — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — had asked the web company to remove its support for WikiLeaks, which moved some or all of its website and related files to Amazon’s servers after it suffered a “distributed denial of service” attack by unknown parties.

It’s not clear whether Senator Lieberman’s actions led to Amazon’s decision, but the senator said in a statement that the company had informed his staff Wednesday morning it was no longer hosting the website, and that he wished Amazon “had taken this action earlier.” The senator added that the release of classified diplomatic cables was illegal and outrageous, and that this had “compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.” Lieberman said he was going to ask Amazon about “the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks,” and what the company planned to do in the future to prevent being used in a similar way to host illegal material.

On Wednesday afternoon, WikiLeaks posted a comment on Twitter saying that its servers at Amazon had been “ousted,” and that its money would now be spent “to employ people in Europe,” suggesting that its website had been moved back to a hosting service outside the U.S. The organization, which has come under fire for hosting classified documents belonging to the American government — including videotapes related to attacks on civilians in Iraq — later posted a message saying that “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told Reuters that he was unaware of the latest situation on servers, but that the organization had “ways and means to bypass any closure of our services.” A number of prominent members of the technology industry criticized the move by Amazon, including SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha — who called the decision “disappointing” in a Twitter message — and Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, who said the decision showed a “lack of spine.”

It’s worth noting that the U.S. State Department reached out to Twitter during the Iran protests last year, and asked the micro-blogging network to postpone some work that would have taken the network down, since it was such an important way of getting information out about the military action in that country. But when it comes to information about political matters involving the U.S. itself, the government seems more than happy to do whatever it takes to get certain things offline.