ARTS & FARCES internet

Medium, the unfortunately siloed publishing platform from Biz Stone and Ev Williams, recently added a collaborative writing tool. The new feature allows authors to privately solicit (and subsequently incorporate) feedback from others in their work. Changes that are incorporated into an author’s work on Medium are automatically added and credited in an acknowledgements section of the work. Authors and collaborators can remove acknowledgements section credits.

Williams, in his “Don’t Write Alone” piece for the About Medium section of Medium, refers to the new feature as “pre-publish collaboration.” When an author initially saves a draft of her work, she’ll see a “Invite Collaborators” button in the top right area of her browser. Clicking it reveals a private link to the article which the author can then email to would-be collaborators. Invited collaborators are then able to provide feedback using Medium’s notes feature.

This is an important step forward for Medium as a publishing platform. Too bad that many authors—including me—remain hesitant to use it until it’s un-siloed, decentralized, and we’re able to run our own instances of Medium on our own servers.

In another interesting development, Medium has acquired Matter, a Kickstarter-backed science and technology journalism startup focused on long-form reporting. Matter raised just over US$140,000 and publishes one 5,000+ word article each month, selling them for US$0.99 apiece.

In the wake of the death of Aaron Swartz, the open access movement has received a much-needed kick in the pants. Nowhere is that more evident than the mass resignation of the Journal of Library Administration‘s entire editorial board over an incalcitrant publisher’s refusal to loosen an overly-restrictive author agreement.

Many of the authors wanted some form of a Creative Commons license; the publisher, Taylor & Francis, insisted on an exclusive license on the authoritative version. The authors were required to give up nearly total ownership of their own work.

For most of February and March 2013, the Journal of Library Administration‘s editorial board had been negotiating a less-restrictive license with Taylor & Francis, according to Jake New, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education. New reports that Taylor & Francis was amenable to the less-restrictive license terms with the condition that authors pay a fee of US$2,995 for an article to be published.

In response, the publication’s editorial board resigned en masse.

While Marco Arment launched The Magazine in the fall of 2012, it’s taken until now for someone to publish a functional analysis of the publication’s unique business model. Jacob Goldstein, writing for National Public Radio’s “Planet Money,” reports The Magazine costs just a smidge over US$10,000 per bi-weekly issue to produce. Writers get US$800 per article, there’s no advertising, 25,000 subscribers pay US$1.99 per month, and the publication is already profitable.

Goldstein notes that even with Apple’s 30 percent cut for distribution through the iTunes Store, Arment clears about US$35,000 in gross revenue per month. More than enough to pay for copy editors, illustrators, executive editor Glenn Fleishman, and a reasonable profit.

The key to Arment’s success is that he’s publishing “a magazine he wanted to read” combined what he sees as a “fluke” in Apple’s iTunes Store pricing model. “If you have an app, you can charge, realistically, about US$3 these days,” he tells Goldstein. But a magazine can repeatedly bill that same user a couple of bucks every single month.

Arment acknowledges that he didn’t know if The Magazine would fly. So, instead of going all-in, he “launched a minimum viable product: Just the iOS app with a barebones CMS [content management system] behind the scenes.” The function of the publication’s website would be solely to drive traffic to Apple’s iTunes Store for subscriptions. “I figured there was no reason to show full article text on the site—it could only lose money and dilute the value of subscribing,” writes Arment. “That was the biggest mistake I’ve made with The Magazine to date.”

Arment realized his mistake when one of the publication’s articles gained huge traction only after the author published the piece on his own website (The Magazine licenses only nonexclusive rights in perpetuity from authors, reverting ownership rights after 30 days, allowing them to republish anywhere after the initial 30 days). All of the article’s hard-won traction, influence, and information authority accrued to the author (as it should) but not the original publisher (at least some of which should). Worst of all, The Magazine wasn’t a part of the substantial discussion that revolved around the original work. It was, for all practical purposes, invisible.

Accordingly readers can now subscribe to The Magazine on the web as well as within the iOS app, and subscriptions are automatically synchronized between the two—one subscription gets a reader content on both the website and the iOS app. For first-generation iPad users, this is especially good news; The Magazine requires iOS 6.0 or later which is unsupported on the first generation iPad. Best of all, shared links now link to the full-text of articles; “they’re now free trials for a porous paywall,” as Arment puts it. Freeloaders can read one free article each month.

Getting paid for one’s work is a good thing. On the other hand, Dave Winer makes a compelling case for unfettered writing and publishing out in the open: I don’t want to waste time reading it if I can’t share it.

Three independent bookstores have filed a lawsuit against Amazon and the big-six trade publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster—alleging the use of a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology to create a monopoly on ebooks. Publisher contracts generally call for the use of DRM to prevent customers from copying or using ebooks on unauthorized devices.

The booksellers’ complaint demands a jury trial.

The lawsuit estimates Amazon controls more than 60 percent of the ebook market with its Kindle, with about 25 percent going to Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and less than 10 percent to Apple’s iOS devices.

The bookstores do not want to be able to sell DRM-free ebooks. Rather, they want to be able to sell books using a DRM scheme that is interoperable across ereader platforms. The issue is somewhat confusing because the bookstores failed to understand the basic concepts of DRM and mistakenly refer to “open source” DRM in their complaint.

This lawsuit comes on the wake of the US Department of Justice lawsuit against Apple and five of the big-six publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster—over allegations of ebook price-fixing.

Honda disrupted the automobile industry in the US by taking everything it knew about transportation and the individual automobile and distilling it to its simplest set of components that meet a minimal need. Intentionally small publishers and their publications are similarly disrupting the US publishing industry. Best of all, (or worst, depending on your perspective) the US corporate publishing industry hasn’t a clue. Yet.

This is the shockingly obvious revelation of Craig Mod’s excellent “Subcompact Publishing.” Using Marco Arment’s the Magazine as a case study, Mod makes a strong case for producing what makers—including some of the best software developers—refer to as a minimum viable product. As the Honda N360 was the minimum viable individual automobile, Arment’s the Magazine is the minimum viable digital publication.

Instead of thinking what other gee-gaws they can add to their publications, publishers in the digital realm need to think critically about everything they can remove. And that’s just what Arment is doing. Mod calls the former “business skeuomorphism:”

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium—no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

As an example of business skeuomorphism, Mod calls out how publishers are using Apple’s Newsstand for its iOS devices. Covers aren’t even readable and the publications carry all of the baggage associated with print—most notably content well format, heft, and publication cycle—to the digital realm. Publishers fail to realize that digital titles are not subject to the familiar distribution and production constraints.

Mod maintains that Apple’s Newsstand is vastly underutilized as “the only place in iOS that allows third party applications to download content in the background.” Mod sees this as a huge oversight on the part of most publishers who fail to observe or understand how their audiences actually use publications. With Newsstand, the user doesn’t have to remember to download content—it’s on the device almost immediately upon publication. Because Newsstand manages the subscription back-end complexity and trust processes, major barriers are lifted from smaller publishers:

“Newsstand also mitigates all complexity and trust issues connected with payments—you’re paying Apple, not Marco. The infrastructure allows you to give readers a free starter subscription, and then later—seamlessly—convert them into a recurring, monthly, payments.”