I have been discussing the future of books and publishing for some time and we are launching a new venture in this space. In that context, interesting statistics which I agree with regarding changes to the publishing industry .. ebooks

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We estimate that the UK publishing market was worth £18.41bn in 2007, having grown by just 0.4% during the year. Three sectors are examined in this Market Review: newspapers, magazines and books.

Each of these three sectors is dominated by around a dozen companies. Hardly any companies are involved in more than one sector of the market, and only Pearson PLC has significant interests in all three sectors.

The book-publishing sector is experiencing greater change than any other sector of the publishing industry. Some of the large publishers are planning to digitise vast numbers of the books that they have published in the past (their so-called backlists).

They also planning to launch thousands of e-books in 2008 and 2009, and some publishers are starting to sell a proportion of their books online. The major academic publishers are increasingly investing in digitised content and are printing much less material.

For newspapers and magazines, the key concerns are maintaining their advertising revenues and winning new readers. This is especially crucial for newspapers. The main reason why newspapers have lost so much ground over the past 20 years is that the adults who grew up reading a daily newspaper with their cornflakes and toast in the 1930s and 1940s (and so made reading a newspaper a daily habit) are dying off, and they are not being replaced. The growth of radio and the Internet are other factors behind the decline in newspaper sales, as is the shortage of time for newspaper reading. To survive, newspapers will have to become as familiar online as they are in print.

Magazines appear to be in a stronger position, but they too will have to increase their multimedia activities. This has already begun, and the process will surely accelerate over the next few years. The magazine sector will also need to watch its prices. In 2006 or even 2007, cover prices could be increased without a significant loss of readers, but in 2009 publishers will need to think carefully before doing this. Our research indicates that the majority of consumers already believe that magazines are too expensive.

We forecast that the UK publishing market as a whole will grow by 5.1% between 2007 and 2012. Newspaper revenues are forecast to decline over the period, while book revenues will show the strongest growth.

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Carnival of the mobilists No 136 at Allaboutiphone blog .. and my entry get the post of the week many thanks for that. Its always nice to see that my detailed posts are appretiated

web 2.0

Mobile web 2.0

Congratulations to Abhinav Bindra for winning India’s first gold medal ..

Many thanks Chetan Chetan Sharma blogs about Mobile Web Megatrends

Martin Sauter blogs about Mobile Web Megatrends ..

I first heard about Martin from his excellent book Communication Systems for the Mobile Information Society (Hardcover) and then met him at our conference in Oxford.

So, its great to have an endorsement from his blog for Mobile Web Megatrends

C. Enrique Ortiz and Daniel Appelquist are organizing the Mobile Widget camp event in Austin. Knowing these guys for a long time, I know this will be a great event. If you are in Austin,then well worth a visit

I have blogged about the Mobile Web Megatrends conference before .. and a lot has happened since then.

Here’s where we are at! Please sign up ASAP if you are interested.

The event is on Sep 8 2008 at the pacific film archive theatre at the University of California Berkeley for only $195. Link is Mobile Web Megatrends

Speakers include companies who are doing some cutting edge work in the Mobile Web space including Nokia, Opera Mobile 9.5 , ESPN mobile , Oracle atomdb , Admob

Startups – Moblast, , skyfire, cellfire, mynumo

Thought leaders and bloggers – Ajit Jaokar, Michael Mace , Barbara Ballard , Mike Rowehl

Operator strategies – OMTP Bondi , Gemalto SCWS

Emerging markets – Brazil – Mobile trends and digital inclusion

Co-Created and Chaired by Ajit Jaokar, the simple idea behind Mobile Web Megatrends is to create a small, niche event focused on developments that are key to the Mobile Web, currently (2008/2009)

This means that the conference will be focused and granular and have much more interaction from attendees and speakers than is usually found at such events.

Topics to be covered include:

Browser evolution(Opera mobile 9.5, Nokia S40 6th edition, flashlight)

location based services including CellID databases

iPhone including iStore and iPhone applications

Android

Mobile web advertising,

Emerging markets(Brazil and Digital inclusion)

Network API’s (OMTP Bondi)

Widgets

Offline browsing

And much more.

The discussion will focus on the strategy, implementation, competitive advantages and the pitfalls of these trends with a unique opportunity to get unbiased opinions. You will clarify your thinking from the experience of others and keep the conversation going through an ongoing attendees only discussion forum.

For more information and registration, please visit Mobile Web Megatrends conference

Interesting article from TelecomTv. as below. I have highlighted sections I find very interesting

Here in the UK, Virign is the biggest culprit on net neutrality

(which makes a contrast from Richard Branson’s talk about fair pricing in the airline industry!) with Virgin advertisements which are misleading about broadband speed

I was also concerned about their new Fibre optic broadband advertisers .. but plenty of others have also complained against the Virgin fibre optic advertisements .. and Virgin have been censured again!

Source

TelecomTv

Comcast ruling begins to clarify neutrality argument – a little

07/08/2008 13:55:00 – by Ian Scales

The FCC (in a close, 3 to 2 decision) delivered a sharp rebuke to US cable giant Comcast last week for throttling its users’ traffic and thereby violating Internet principles regarding neutrality.

The ruling should influence thinking in Europe and the rest of the world around the boundaries between traffic management and user punishment – a live concern in Europe with theTelecom Package appearing to clear the way for national governments to allow traffic throttling to be used as a sanction against illegal file sharing.

The FCC judgement followed a long list of complaints from users claiming Comcast was interfering with their peer-to-peer traffic flows, especially BitTorrents and that they, er, shouldn’t do it. Could they stop? The FCC considered the matter and came up with a judgement.

The verbals are worth a quote or two. “We find that it was unreasonable for Comcast to discriminate against particular Internet applications, including BitTorrent,” said FCC chairman Kevin Martin. “While Comcast claimed its intent was to manage congestion, the evidence told a different story,” said Kev (we like him), who went on to unpack a new version of the post office analogy we’re quite fond of on the ‘Throttle the Package” campaign. He said it was like “the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn’t want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped ‘address unknown – return to sender.’”

Comcast was given 30 days to disclose the details of its “discriminatory network practises” to the Commission and to submit a compliance plan describing how it plans to stop the practises by year-end.

The decision came as a surprise to many in the US (and us) who had expected something more muted, or even a decision which went the other way and exoneratedComcast. To that end there will be noisy appeals after which many expect a second decision to modify or overturn the first.

But even if the fat lady is still in her dressing room doing vocal exercises, we think the decision as articulated by Kev has crystallised some important principles.

First, it teases apart the technical and the commercial and makes it clear that players need to be sure they can show they’re doing the former and not the latter – this is good. Secondly it highlights the importance of being clear about what you’re doing and then telling people.

For too long ISPs have been able to shelter in technical vagueness over a range of matters, such as how fast connections are, and how and under what circumstances traffic will be ‘engineered’. The ruling makes it clear that ISPs can’t hide behind a “we don’t need to trouble the customers too much with the detail, just trust us,” defence. This is becoming increasingly unacceptable.

What the judgement has made clearer, both for the US and the rest of the world, is the distinction between pure traffic engineering and using it to punish or dissuade users from some behaviour you don’t approve of.

Perhaps most importantly, it highlights ‘motivation’ and consequent ‘behaviour’ as a subject for examination. Those – unfortunately very often in our own industry – who rail against the judgement on the basis that it’s a bureaucratic intervention by people who aren’t technical enough to understand the principles of network management, miss the point. This is not about ‘regulating the Internet’ as is often claimed. That would clearly be a non-starter and, as one of the main motivations of those of us who want to keep the thing open and neutral is to protect the freedom to innovate, would be totally self-defeating.

But there is clearly a role for regulators to protect the essential principles of the Internet by sanctioning corporate ‘behaviour’ which undermines them. Martin’s judgement is the result of considering the ‘way’ Comcast went about doing what it did.

What, the Commission asked, was Comcast setting out to do by throttling traffic? Was this about traffic management? Or was it just as much about protecting its own services by stopping file sharing behaviour it felt undermined them? If it was to reduce traffic congestion, then why did it pick on a specific application, why didn’t it throttle back all heavy traffic flows… and so on.

This is ethical oversight, not detailed regulation, and it’s no different from the sort of approach applied to things like abuse of ‘insider information’ in the financial markets. We should expect similar developments in our field.

At least the US system in this case delivered a reasonably transparent down-to-earth decision-making process through the FCC, whereas the European Union’s hugely detailed and ultimately opaque steps and stages (as with the telecoms package) often create a process capable of confusing any electorate (in 12 languages) as the legislative process grinds along.

It’s too often like one of those process flow charts which codifies what is actually a simple interaction into a birds nest of arrows and shapes: faultlessly logical, but ultimately self-defeating.