ARTS & FARCES internet

Before my Internet Tour Guide became a best-seller, but after the acquisitions editor pulled my proposal out of the publisher’s trash bin, the book almost didn’t get published. Writing books and magazine articles had become a full-time gig for me from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s and I saw a way to expand. My idea was simple: Merge the best parts of magazine publishing with book publishing. And try it on someone else’s dime. In the back of the book would be a tear-out card for two free quarterly electronic updates to the book, along with an offer to subscribe for a year’s worth of updates. Get it?

This was 1993—the dawn of the commercial internet—and the only interaction I had with my readers was through email and speaking engagements. I wanted to know more about what they were interested in because I suspected it was the same folks buying each work.

Having written for a lot of magazines I was always curious about why the business side—especially the circulation director—was paranoiacally protective of and disturbingly enamored with “The List” (of subscribers). It didn’t take me long to figure it out. Here was a list of hundreds of thousands of people who were willing to pay for what you produced. In addition to name, address, phone, and the like, it had a good bit of demographic information about each individual, as well.

My publisher for that book, skunk that he was, was not stupid. He understood the value of “The List” as well as I did. Probably better. He argued that readers should send their cards to him, not me. I was having none of that, and it took us several days to negotiate an arrangement: The publisher would receive the cards from the readers, have an employee enter the data in a database, and send me the files. It was pitched as saving me the trouble of data entry. I stupidly, stupidly took the deal. Stupid because the skunk publisher never sent the complete database.

That’s the frame of reference for what Time, Inc. is currently going through with Apple. Time, Inc. wants to sell iPad subscriptions to its publications through Apple’s iTunes Store. Not being stupid, it’s not about to let Apple control it’s list. But Apple, not being stupid either, won’t have it any other way.

Dave Winer is at it again, and if you’re an online author or publisher you’d better pay close attention. Winer has completely reworked his writing environment (when you’re a programmer you can do that) and, most interestingly, he’s exposing parts of it on the web. His writing has source code, Winer notes. “It’s always been this way, but I’ve accepted the limits of other blogging tools, and the limits of RSS, and not exposed the richer writing environment behind scripting.com. That is changing, gradually, with the new software.”

The most visible addition to Winer’s output are little plus signs, signifying a link to contextual information—something Winer calls sub-text. Click on the plus sign and contextual—or, more likely at this early date, conversational—content is revealed. Winer refers to this as an “internet-age footnote” and says it’s related to Nick Carr’s misguided article about it being time to get hypertext links out of our way.

Carr says hypertext links are a distraction. “Sometimes, they’re big distractions—we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” Carr writes. Uh, that’s what browser tabs are for, Nick. Carr goes on to state (without citation), “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.” Without a citation, statements like that are of little use. From the abstract of “Reading Strategies and Hypertext Comprehension” from the November 2005 issue of Discourse Processes: “The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results.” (In a prior life, in the pre-web world, I wrote three books on hypermedia; I tend to follow this area with some interest).

Just after Apple announced its iPhone 4 and iOS 4 at its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company quietly released Safari 5. Instead of focusing on useless cosmetics (I’m looking at you Safari 4), this release pays close attention to things that matter: Speed increases, standards compliance, a walled-garden extensions system, and Safari Reader. This last item, Safari Reader, is sure to garner the attention of online publishers.

At least Apple is straight up about the purpose of Safari Reader: “Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.” As a reader, I love it; as a publisher, well, there goes the CPM ad model.

That’s not much of a problem for ARTS & FARCES but more traditional publishers may have a problem. Those articles spread unnecessarily over 11 pages only to garner 11 pageviews and 11 pages full of ads? They’re gone for good. Publishers of advertising-supported long-form content (articles spread necessarily over 11 pages) have reason for worry.

Although Clint Ecker, writing for Ars Technica reports, “it does a full, real request on every single page. The publication sees all the pageviews on every page and even ad frames get downloaded for each pageview, which could quell some publisher worries.” Doubtful. Advertisers aren’t going to pay for ads that they know are downloaded but not displayed.

The likely outcome—almost certainly highly choreographed by Apple—is to attempt to migrate publishers from the open web to closed apps. Contrary to what Eliot Van Buskirk reports for Wired, in my experience all ads are automatically stripped in Safari Reader; no user intervention required.

Two Stanford graduate students created the Pulse News Reader, an app for Apple’s iPad, to fulfill a course requirement. It became something of an overnight sensation and was mentioned by both the New York Times and Steve Jobs within a week.

Pulse is little more than a fancy US$3.99 RSS reader limited to 20 news sources. According to Brad Stone, writing for the New York Times, “The students estimate that about 15,000 people have downloaded the app, which translates into more than US$40,000 in revenue, taking into account Apple’s 30 percent cut.”

One week later, New York Times lawyer Richard Samson sent a takedown notice to Apple, claiming infringement of rights. Apple promptly removed the Pulse app from its iTunes Store. Kara Swisher, writing for All Things Digital, broke the takedown story, wondered out loud about the beef after the students told her they intended to contact Apple and remove the Times content. “It is not immediately clear why they need to, since Pulse draws from publicly available Times RSS feeds, as do many other apps, and does no scraping,” wrote Swisher who also published the Times’ takedown notice and Apple’s email to the students.

First, the Times’ content in Pulse’s web view (using Swisher’s screen dumps as reference; I don’t have an iPad and haven’t used Pulse) appears to be at least partially framed. There’s precedent for this as a clear violation. In 1997, a group of news organizations including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters brought legal action against TotalNews for embedding the former’s content within a frame on the latter’s website. The dispute never reached court; TotalNews agreed to stop framing content from other publishers, opting for straight hypertext links instead. The settlement also included disturbing language that allowed the plaintiffs to revoke permission to link at any time.

The New York Times is ready to announce its second attempt at a paywall, charging for access to its website. So reports Gabriel Sherman writing for New York magazine.

The US paper of record’s first attempt at erecting a paywall around its online content, Times Select, was an abysmal failure. Readership for the content behind the paywall fell dramatically and columnists including Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd publicly verbalized their frustration.

This time around, the Times will try a metered system similar to the one pioneered by the Financial Times. Online readers will be able to read a set number of articles at no charge before being required to subscribe. The key will be how many free article reads will be allowed per day. Set the number too low and all of your Googlejuice and a good bit of your advertising revenue immediately evaporate. Set the number too high and it’s probably not a sustainable business model.

Sherman opines that Times chair Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may make an official announcement in a few weeks, citing unnamed source speculation that “Sulzberger will strike a content partnership” for Apple’s forthcoming iSlate tablet computing device, rumored to be announced on January 27.

The New York Times is a special case. On one hand it’s the undisputed US newspaper of record. On the other, its an exemplar of everything that’s wrong with corporate media. Web content professionals everywhere will be watching this closely, as the struggle for a sustainable business model for online publishing continues.