The Reading Edge Podcast

Bill Jensen, Director of New Media at Village Voice Media Holdings, was a panelist today at South By Southwest.  The topic of the session, “iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators,” drew an overflow crowd to the Radisson Hotel 21 days before the iPad will be available in Apple stores and for delivery of pre-orders.

Jensen gave a fairly confident assessment of the digital future for his company’s string of 17 alternative weekly publications, including the mothership, The Village Voice, as well as Denver’s own Westword.

He described why the iPad is generating such interest among publishers like himself.  I left the session convinced that the hype about this device is not a mirage.  Time will tell, and pretty soon. Meanwhile, geeks at SXSW aren’t the only ones suffering from iPad Distortion Syndrome. Click here for video of Stephen Colbert’s Grammy’s gambit that got one into his hands, briefly.

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Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life, Inc.: How the World Became A Corporation And How To Take It Back (Hardcover, Kindle), was a featured speaker today at South by Southwest Interactive. His topic was “Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age.”

After signing his books (including the staged “signing” of the copy I’d downloaded to my Kindle, in photo at right), Doug agreed to do an interview for the podcast while I drove him to the airport for his flight home to New York. This gave me a chance to hear his views about the role of eBooks in the long sweep of history that he is considering these days in his critique of Internet culture and the corporatization of life in general.

Despite his weighty obsessions and somber views, Douglas Rushkoff in person is full of life and wit.  He described his preparation for an appearance in July, 2009, on the Colbert Report interview hot seat, and I’ve included the audio of that encounter at the end of the podcast. Click here for the video.

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I spoke with Eric Hellman on March 9, 2010, about the Google Book Settlement, which he has been following as an independent blogger with a keen interest and long experience with libraries. He was an eyewitness at two key hearings before Judge Chin at the federal courthouse in Manhattan.  Eric also has analyzed the pricing chess game over eBooks, and at the end of the interview we turned briefly to that topic.

In July, 2009, I had a chance to attend a fascinating luncheon presentation on the Google Book Settlement by Alexander Macgillivray. It took place at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. At the time, Alex was Deputy General counsel for Products and Intellectual Property at Google, and he was intimately involved in the settlement talks.  Not so much any more, since he left Google shortly thereafter to become general counsel at Twitter. Click on the following for:

Video for computer or portable device.

MP3 Audio file.

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I interviewed Seth Godin this morning via Skype.  He is the author of Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, published last month for Kindle, nook, Sony Reader, and hardcover.  It’s a great read, and if you purchase it on Kindle by about March 1 you’ll receive a free personal addendum, Insubordinate, in which Seth describes several people who qualify as linchpins.  What’s a linchpin?  That’s someone who has found his or her true work, as an artist does, and is overcoming the resistance of the lizard brain to actually ship stuff that matters, because it’s original and given freely.

In the early going, my own lizard brain resisted with a couple of clever arguments (noted in this blog post) to Seth’s exhortation, which will come as no surprise to him.  Lizard-like resistance is what a linchpin always faces and overcomes.

In addition to his new book, we talked about Seth’s critique of the traditional publishing industry and his vision of how Amazon, or someone, could remake the eBook platform into something much more compelling as a way for authors and readers to connect.

I prepared for our conversation by watching videos of Seth’s TED talk in May, 2009, and his presentation at last year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change conference.

Here is a complete list of Seth’s previous books.

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On February 17, 2010, I visited in person with Andrew Savikas, vice president for digital initiatives at O’Reilly Media.  Andrew is based at O’Reilly’s office in Cambridge, Mass., where Tim O’Reilly started the business in 1978.

We spoke of many things, including the ePub format (Andrew recently ran for and was elected to the Board of the International Digital Publishing Forum), how O’Reilly’s eBook publishing business is thriving without using Digital Rights Management, and why the Kindle and other e Ink-based readers do not represent disruptive technology in relation to the book since Gutenberg.  What does?  The answer is probably closer than you think – at this very moment.  Andrew mentioned The Strategy Paradox as a way to gain insight into Amazon’s eBooks strategy.  To learn more about Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive and sustaining technologies, you might want to check out his The Strategy Paradox. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

Andrew also runs O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference Feb. 22-24 in New York City, which just reached sold-out status.  More than 1,000 attendees will have a chance to explore the changing world of publishing, and much of the content will be available online soon. If you can’t wait, you can check out some of the presentations made at the 2009 TOC conference.

NOTE: Andrew just emailed me to say the keynotes for the 2010 Tools of Change conference will be live-streamed.  Check here for details.

Click here for Tim O’Reilly’s seminal 2002 essay titled “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution,” which Andrew mentions in the interview.

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My review of the BookGem eBook holder, which I purchased for $14.95 from BookGem.com . In the video I demonstrate how it works with a Kindle, a nook, a Sony Reader Daily Edition, and a Kindle DX. The only one I tried that did not work well with this useful holder was my original Kindle, because the spring-loaded clamps landed on the keyboard.

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James McQuivey of Forrester Research

On the Monday after the weekend when Amazon and Macmillan faced off in a dramatic battle over eBook pricing, I turned to James McQuivey, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, for his perspective on who won, what the stakes are, and what might lie ahead.

James says his contacts at other publishers are disappointed that this turned into a mud fight, but he suggests there will be benefits from having the issue finally out in the open.  He also shares his thoughts on how Apple’s new iPad figures in to all this.

I’ll have the second half of this interview on The Kindle Chronicles episode 81, which will be uploaded as usual on Friday, February 5.  In that portion, James will discuss what he and his teammates at Forrester are calling “The Kindle Flame,” by which they mean the next generation of Kindle that might, if it gets certain things right, set the eBook market fully ablaze as opposed to merely kindled.

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This is the conclusion of my January 27, 2010, interview with New York Times technology reporter Brad Stone.  For the first part of the interview, please check out Episode 80 of my other podcast, The Kindle Chronicles.  We spoke the evening after Brad had attended Apple’s unveiling of the iPad.

In this segment, Brad looks ahead at Amazon’s next moves and comments.  He’s found 46 new jobs posted at Amazon’s Lab126, the group that makes and advances the Kindle. Brad says at one point, “The Kindle tablet may be right around the corner.”

Following the interview, I’ve included a fair-use excerpt of audio from Steve Jobs’s comments about the Kindle and the new iBooks app which will come on the iPad, setting up a high-stakes strategic battle between Apple and Amazon.  Does Steve sound as if he’s got his heart in this fight?  Listen, and decide.

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Regina Sergiyenko of Pocketbook USA

This episode contains three more interviews from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month.

First up is Laura Wu, a product manager for Netronix, Inc., the Taiwan-based maker of eReaders for Interead, Bookeen, and Pocketbook USA, among others.  Laura confirmed reports that Netronix plans to sell a million eReaders in 2010.

Phil Wood, marketing director at Interead, said the U.K.-based company relies on Netronix for some of its products, but not all of them.

Regina Sergiyenko, regional director in the US for the Ukraine-based Pocketbook, emphasized the fact that her company’s product is available in many languages.

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Paul Miller, Senior Associate Editor at Engadget and a regular on the weekly Engadget podcast, had a chance to see something at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that we missed – the very enticing Mirasol screen by Qualcomm.  Rumor had it that this will be the screen on the next Kindle, perhaps later this year.

In a Skype-to-Skype call on January 19, 2010, we talked about eReaders, screens, and the nearly and mercifully to-be-ended speculation leading up to the unveiling of Apple’s “latest creation” in San Francisco on January 27.  Paul and the rest of the Engadget gang will be liveblogging the spectacle, and they’re whom I’ll be following for every last “one more thing.”

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